Time played: 16.5 hours
RECOMMEND: ABSOLUTELY

They'll make a roguelite out of anything these days, and we arrive now at poker. Collect run-modifying Jokers (or Balatros, if you will) to boost your hands. Buy Tarot decks to spam Hermit until your bank account overflows. Try not to run a Full House build literally every single time you play this because the Full House build is completely broken.

I have apparently lost sixteen hours of my life to Balatro since the last demo came out. I am refusing to play the version of the demo that's currently up because I feel that getting anything more out of this game before I've paid for it is actual theft. It launches properly in about two weeks and I will be there no matter what.

Time played: 24 minutes
RECOMMEND: ABSOLUTELY

God, I was starting to worry that I wasn't going to find anything else in this entire Next Fest that I was going to be legitimately excited for. Gradient Flow is a fun, fast, and deceptively challenging racing game where you control a weird ball going 300 km/h down a variety of twisting, turning tracks. There are a variety of track materials that affect your handling, your gravity, and your speed, and the few sample levels available make excellent use of all of them at once after you've found your initial footing.

This is going to be a lot of fun once it properly launches and a full list of tracks drops.

Time played: 19 minutes
RECOMMEND: YES

For as much hype as I'd heard about the Pepper Grinder demo, I walked away from it feeling a little underwhelmed. Still, though, it's hardly a bad thing to just be "good" rather than "the best thing I've ever played". I've noticed that we're largely trending towards a smaller-scale in the indie space (at least, within this Next Fest), and I think that scaling back of scope is something I can get behind. Again, much like Bore Blasters, this just feels like a really solid Flash game. Sometimes simple is all you need.

Time played: 26 minutes
RECOMMEND: YES

Very neat so far. The act of ricocheting and curving bullets around in video games is hardly anything new, but Children of the Sun filters it through a stark and noisy revenge plot in the vein of splatter films of old.

Navigating the bullet mid-flight can be a bit of a headache, and the "weak-point-refire" mechanic mostly just seemed to work when it felt like it, not when I wanted it to. The game could use a little ironing out, but what's here is still interesting enough to justify taking a look.

Time played: 24 minutes
RECOMMEND: YES

Motherlode meets Deep Rock Galactic is the kind of pitch that makes people like me interested, and it works. It reminds me a lot of those old Nitrome games; this would have absolutely torn up the computer lab while I was still in middle school. It's a little thin right now, but it's also a small demo; I imagine there'll be a bit more bulk to this come the full release.

Time played: 15 minutes
RECOMMEND: KIND OF

Beat Slayer is so close to getting it right that it almost hurts that it can't quite close the gap. I realize I've been calling a lot of games on this list "X meets Y", and not without cause; a lot of them are pretty blatant in their inspirations, and that's not a bad thing to be. Beat Slayer, then, is Hades meets Hi-Fi Rush, which is a phenomenal combination...conceptually.

The biggest problem with Beat Slayer is that there's virtually no cue for when the enemies are going to attack. They hit on beat, obviously, but there's no telegraphing when the attack is actually going to come out. Coupled with the fact that your basic attack doesn't deal any hitstun whatsoever, you end up dying early from incredibly high damage attacks that you couldn't possibly see coming because YOU also need to be hitting the enemies on beat. It just feels really bad to play, which is a shame; there's not much that needs to be tweaked to take this from not good to pretty solid.

Time played: 10 minutes
RECOMMEND: KIND OF

Red Empress Devil is largely fine, but there's nothing about it that really grabs me outside of the Touhou coat of paint over everything. As it stands, it's mostly just a middling, room-based, twinstick shooter that you could just as easily confuse for anything else if not for the fact that Reimu is floating around the screen.

If you give the player character's projectiles a short range instead of letting them go from one end of the screen to another in a twinstick shooter, I'm stealing something out of your house.

Time played: 24 minutes
RECOMMEND: KIND OF

It's fine. Have we come up with a "so retro!" for anime yet? I'm not sure why they're leaning in so hard to the faux-Japanese style when this looks almost nothing like any anime I've ever seen. Did Blood Dragon make it too embarrassing for anyone else to openly associate with Western cartoons?

Time played: 6 minutes
RECOMMEND: KIND OF

Tensei definitely isn't bad, but I'd hesitate to call it good. It's an infinite jumping game in the vein of something like a 3D Doodle Jump but with Japanese inkbrush aesthetics. You don't do much besides jump onto platforms and bounce off of volcanoes, and I'm not sure how long those two alone will be able to hold anyone's attention. It's a decent time for the five minutes it takes to beat the demo, but I can't see myself ever wanting to return for more.

Time played: 1.7 hours
RECOMMEND: KIND OF

It's trash. Cyber Manhunt: New World aspires to a lot of very tense, very stomach-churning moments that it really doesn't have the skill to pull off. Setting aside a fairly clunky translation and terrible voice acting, it plays for way too many absurd twists that it cannot possibly handle all at once; the first chapter alone concerns a massive false sexual assault allegation conspiracy that reveals an actual sexual assault conspiracy involving a child who ends up dead after trying to bully a different child who kills her and then herself, leading her brother -- the guy who was falsely accused of sexual assault -- to strap a bomb to his chest and blow up the lobby of workplace after being goaded into it by an escaped terrorist who was fired from the company for being afraid of the AI they were developing.

But it's this exact kind of poorly-handled melodrama that I actually kind of like. Don't get me wrong, it's abjectly bad, but there's something about it that reminds me of old mobile apps like Cause of Death, or Surviving High School; people who aren't good enough writers to handle topics well above their ability committing to trying as hard as they possibly can without any tact nor shame. It's kind of endearing, in a way.

Orwell and Hacknet do this exact concept far better and with better narrative hooks throughout, but this is a great ride if you're interested in some pure and unfiltered garbage.

Time played: 25 minutes
RECOMMEND: YES, IF YOU AREN'T ME

One of the most obviously "not for me" games I've played in a long time. Hauntii is an extraordinarily pretty game, and it seems to offer a lot for players interested in a collect-a-thon where they go out in search of hidden objects and challenge puzzles to open up new areas and eventually go to heaven to hang out with their Biblically-accurate angel girlfriend.

I don't care for collect-a-thon games, and this is shamelessly one of them. Good for Hauntii. Bad for me. This is going to be one of the best games some of you have ever played.

Time played: 26 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

It's certainly not bad by any means, but I really don't think I understand what people like about the idea of a single-player extraction shooter. I know Tarkov has a massive cheating problem that the devs are completely uninterested in fixing, but I don't think the solution is replacing all of the humans with squads of bots. I suppose it could be more interesting with smarter AI, but this just feels like a poor man's STALKER.

Time played: 54 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

Normal Fishing is a game out of time, and by that, I mean it feels like an indie game that should have come out in the year 2014 rather than 2024. It's got the faux-retro aesthetics, the terrible wink-nudge writing, the confused mashing of far too many gameplay elements that don't work together. It's even complete with gratuitous Engrish, plastering the screen with terms like "LET'S FISHING!" and "FISH GET!" and "LET'S FAILED!". I've been saying that games have been lacking in oblique, anti-Japanese racism lately, so I'm glad that there are games like Normal Fishing to help set matters straight.

The actual act of catching fish is a terrible STG minigame where your bullets ("bait pellets") are the same thickness as the fish you're trying to shoot, meaning that you need to be practically aligned with them on a pixel-perfect level to land a single shot. Coupled with the fact that the fish are constantly weaving up and down, actually getting a fish on the line can take nearly two minutes per catch if you get unlucky with the cycles. The game eventually adds boss fights to the end of the days, where you need to move your boat from side-to-side to dodge attacks while shooting back with a shotgun. You start off fighting giant crabs and krakens, and then you finish on a ghost ship full of long-dead pirates, in perhaps what is the most obvious act of giving up creatively I've seen in a while.

Normal Fishing is bad, and it's a unique kind of bad that doesn't really get made anymore. You could have told me that this released between DLC Quest and Two Brothers and I would have uncritically believed you. Who's still looking for games like this in 2024?

Time played: 19 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

A trivially easy and fairly boring run and gun game. Getting progressively stronger and stronger guns that flood the screen with bullets is a visual treat, but there's really nothing here to sink your teeth into. I have no idea how this qualifies as a demo, because I don't see what about this could possibly end up different in the final release.

Time played: 12 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

Has anyone ever played Geometry Wars and thought to themselves that it would be a better game if you couldn't aim your weapons? This stinks.

Time played: 8 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

Just a bad physics puzzler where you need to use blocks to guide colored balls into their respective colored zones. While the intent is for you to set up channels for the balls to flow through, there's nothing stopping you from picking up one of the blocks and manually pushing the balls into the proper slots. I did this all the way until the last level, at which point trying to calculate all of the balls colliding against one another overloaded the engine and crashed me to desktop.

Time played: 22 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

Expect "bodycam games" to become something of an indie subgenre for the next year or so after the trailer for Unrecord pulled as many eyes as it did. Chasmal Fear is largely just one of another game; an awkward, clunky mashing-together of bits and pieces from a bunch of inspirations that don't fit neatly together. Turning around 180 degrees requires you to move your mouse literal feet across the desk. Aiming down sights is more of a gentle suggestion than a command. The final setpiece just locks you in a room with infinitely-spawning enemies and an infinite supply of ammo, which seems to me as much of a throwing up your hands and saying "fuck it, that'll work" as anything.

If a game proudly advertises that it's made with Unreal Engine 5, I think you should be suspicious. At least for a few more years, until "made with Unreal Engine 5" stops being a novel concept.

Time played: 20 minutes
RECOMMEND: NO

According to what little information the game gave me, this is a game based around "Turtle Soup puzzles" (or "lateral thinking puzzles"), which are apparently pretty popular in China. They basically consist of asking you a question with no obvious answer, and then having you go "oh, of course" when the answer is revealed to you. You can see some examples here. I think these puzzles kind of suck. You have to basically write your own ending to the story to make it make sense, and considering that there's only one right answer, it largely just feels like bullshit.

This is that, but you guess individual words through a Wordle minigame. There's also a chatbot you can ask questions to, and it will helpfully respond to anything you ask by telling you "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error".

Time played: 19 minutes
RECOMMEND: ABSOLUTELY NOT

Oh, this is DOGSHIT dogshit. I knew I was going to be in for a treat when the game advertised that it was inspired by Disco Elysium, and then in the same breath told me that I could play as mental disorders. True to what was promised, you can choose to level up your OCD, your paranoia, or your narcissism, and you swap between them in battle to deal mental damage to your opponents by saying shit like "It's your fault!" and "Leave me alone!".

Set aside how moronic of a fucking idea it is to decouple any sort of artistic flair from the Disco Elysium skills by slotting them into DSM-V diagnoses and instead let yourself sink deep into the Google Translate-tier writing that's probably as bad in the original language as it is in English. I think whoever wrote this is kind of a dumbass. I don't like to make judgment calls on developers too often, but these seems remarkably like it was written by someone who was as confident as they are stupid, which is to say "very".

The battle system itself is complete nonsense that only makes sense to the creator and nobody else. All I managed to glean from it was that comboing three of the same skill together hurts you, and any disorder besides OCD is worthless; Narcissism deals too much self-damage to be viable, and Paranoia is literally random. Each skill increases or decreases the mood meter, and your enemies can also increase or decrease the mood meter, and certain skills gain bonus effects if they're used within a certain mood range. There's far too much to keep track of all at once, and none of it makes sense. It's one of the worst battle systems I've seen in a game, bar none.

Contrary to what my recommendation suggests, I think you actually should play this one for yourself just to see how bad it really is. It's good to humble yourself with something terrible every now and then. It's like sitting under a cold waterfall and meditating. This shit will cleanse you.