Orbyss — 3D puzzles with spheresA glowing ball rolls around. The level is made of cubes floating in the void, surrounding a large pulsing energy ball.Thoughts before playing: Pretty, abstract 3D puzzle game. But what’s the killer feature? Like the portal gun from Portal or the camera from Viewfinder? This is what it would be like to play the PlayStation 2 boot sequence as a puzzle game, with floating cubes and coloured sparks whizzing around in an abstract void. You get to control some balls, rolling them around the level to press buttons and zoom through pipes. This demo shows some early levels, featuring some fairly stimulating puzzles, but it failed to really grab me. The slow pacing and pure abstractness of the game’s setting aren’t getting me excited to play more. I just never got to that “aha” point where I realized what made the game special. In comparison, another puzzle game demo I played in a past Next Fest, The Art of Reflection, didn’t waste any time showing off its key feature of jumping through mirrors. I’m going to pass on this game, but I know someone is going to like it.
Panta Rhei — Atmospheric top-down adventure with time manipulationAt a cracked monument surrounded by fogThe game produced an error when launching it, which I fixed by forcing Steam to run it with Proton Experimental. 2D animated cutscenes? Hell yeah, I love that kind of effort. The in-game 3D art also does a good job capturing that illustrative feel of the cutscenes. Atmospheric top-down adventure with cool art and light RPG elements? I liked Bastion and Tunic, so maybe this could be up my alley, too. The game’s premise and worldbuilding interest me. You play as a young guardian of time and use your time powers to fight the monsters ravaging the world. But gameplay-wise, this demo is rough. I found the melee combat to be unsatisfyingly sluggish. There’s a bug where falling off the world makes you permanently faster when you respawn, and I was definitely running way too fast by the end of the demo. The game is tagged as a roguelike (aka “choose some randomly drawn upgrades”) on its store page, but there wasn’t much time in the demo to really appreciate any of those upgrades in action. I’ll pass. It’s really unfortunate that this demo disappointed me, since this game still might grab me if it gets in better shape.
The key selling points for Wander Stars are its loud inspiration by anime and its word-slinging combat mechanic, the latter of which got me to try this demo. I thought it was an interesting take on turn-based combat to line up words that customize an attack, and that old anime style presentation is indeed charming.
Wander Stars is also very heavy on the visual novel-style dialogue and cinematics, which is probably necessary to evoke that anime feel. It felt more like a visual novel in disguise than the more mechanically involved turn-based RPG that I was hoping for. I’m just lacking the patience to read so much between active gameplay, though the gameplay near the end of the demo does show potential for depth in the turn-based combat.
I spent a good long time browsing through the piles of thumbnails to make myself a tall list. It’s a mix of games I’m excited for, games that look interesting to me, and weird games. Since I spent so much time today browsing for games, I haven’t actually played much today on day 1.
Bits & Bops has already had a demo for months now, but for Next Fest, there’s a new minigame to play. Also, I backed this game on Kickstarter, so I’m obviously interested in seeing this game be good. And I think it is.
SourceWorld is a Half-Life 2 mod participating in Next Fest! It’s an FPS dungeon crawler! The Source engine isn’t dying anytime soon.
Oddcore has a really flashy trailer. I actually first heard of it from seeing it get front page attention on Newgrounds. It could be the first game set in “liminal spaces” that isn’t utterly boring or crap.
Funi Raccoon Game is on this list because the trailer is stupid and I want to see more of it. I have high hopes.
Why, yes, those are three games featuring a black cat as playable character.
I’m glad someone knocked some sense into these guys and convinced them to add a little bit to the name to make it searchable. Just “Mouse” would have just doomed them lol
Cassette Beasts is a creature collector with a substantial single-player campaign and a permadeath difficulty option.
You could also have permadeath as a house rule, which would let you play singleplayer games with traditional campaigns. For example, you could play Elden Ring or Borderlands 2 and commit to deleting the character upon death.
A weird suggestion: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a co-op puzzle game about defusing a bomb. The player who’s streaming will have the bomb but stream only audio, not video, and everyone else will have to use the defusal manual to guide them to safely disarm the bomb. You’ll have to advance level by level.
I clicked on this post because of the jazz in jazzstronauts.
There actually is something that could be called jazz, but you’ll have to finish the entire story for that.
How did you get all the images at once, upload beforehand (whether to Lemmy or somewhere else offsite) and that is how you have a link? Repeated editing so Lemmy accepts each new image upload?
I actually published a mini-site on yay.boo containing this post and all of the media. The pictures in this Lemmy post are hotlinked from yay.boo. The video is hotlinked from Imgur because yay.boo did not like it when I did that. In my previous posts, I did directly upload everything to sh.itjust.works, but I wanted to try a different way this time.
For my previous posts, like this one on Gunfire Reborn, I went to the “Create a post” form and used the “upload picture” button on the toolbar of the main body text field.
I have actually been playing multiple cat-themed games in recent months but have been too lazy/busy to bother writing about them.
I’d say it’s a step more “serious racing” than Kart. Transformed had more complex drifting and boosting mechanics to emphasize good racing skills. There are still powerups, but they’re relatively weak. The closest blue shell equivalent is the swarm, which summons a swarm of giant wasps to sit in front of the race leader, but it’s always dodgeable with good steering. The medium-level pickups require good aim or awareness of who’s near you. The Kart strategy of only caring about the last lap is still possible in Transformed, but trying to get ahead as far as possible is also a doable strategy.