Is Steam’s Next Fest the future of gaming? Yes, literally, as it’s a grouping of demos for games releasing in the near future, but out side of Capcom or Devolver you won’t see any of the real heavy hitters setting up shop. Next Fest is for the little guy, the small teams and the indie souls who haven’t let success go to their head. They’re weird, abrasive, and ambitious and these are the ones that have left us desperate for more.
SPRAWL Zero
The sequel/prequel to 2023’s Sprawl, Sprawl Zero was bold enough to warrant a dedicated preview. We won’t rehash too much, but Sprawl Zero is to shooters of the 2000s what Expedition 33 was to classic RPGs, a grab bag of the best mechanics working in concert to make a creamy gumbo of guns and guts. In a year with unique and novel shooters like PRAGMATA and 007: First Light, Sprawl Zero managed to eek out a few hours of my time with nothing but a gravity gimmick and a bullet time button.
Normal Golf Game
Having struck it big with titles like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, Luke Muscat probably doesn’t need to do anything, but here he is providing the most elaborate golf system ever devised. Normal Golf Game has an absurdist bent similar to The Stanley Parable as our poorly greenscreened hero wakes up on the golf course.
While occasionally called a psychological horror online, Normal Golf Game doesn’t achieved this status by switching up on you and revealing a secret evil hidden within, that would be too easy. It achieves this by taking the golf game to it’s most intense end point. A game that’s hard to understand unti you see it in action, players adjust the position of the club, the angle of the hit, and the power of the swing. But while most games use a ratcheting system of degrees to dial in your shot, Normal Golf Game is a fluid mess that always gets out from under you when you least expect it. The result is the golf version of QWOP, a game more about threading a needle than mastering mathematics. Normal Golf Game is deeply frustrating but also majorly rewarding when you manage to get the hang of it. It’s a steep learning curve, but I’d wager Normal Golf Game has gotten closer to capturing the nuance of golf than any game before it.
Truck-Kun Is Supporting Me From Another World!?
For the less anime inclined among you, one of the most pervasive stories to take over the industry is that of the isekai. In it, our hero, typically an every day sort of guy, dies in an accident and is reborn in another world, usually driven by game logic. More often than not, our hero meets their end at the hands of a truck while saving some stranger, underlying a tragic but heroic end worthy of a second chance. Truck-Kun Is Supporting Me From Another World!? sees our heroine about to start her job after a new promotion only to meet her end at the grill of a delivery truck. Now in communication with the guilt ridden driver, the two must work together to bring her back to the real world before she’s late to work.
A bit on the high concept side, the actual gameplay here is a mix of Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi. The side is full of small little set pieces and scenes for you to rampage through as every civilian you run over gets transported to the fantasy world as a grunt for the heroine to defeat and farm experience from. Still needing to make ends meet you can also pick up deliveries and take them to their destinations to keep your income up. In practice there’s a lot happening here and it can be a bit unwieldy, but once you get your hands on the wheel Truck-Kun is smooth and responsive and proper gameplay comes down to rampaging through town as you go from one destination to the next. It’s writing can be a bit over bearing, but by the end of my time with the demo I ended up charmed.
Slayblade
Taking cues from the micro RPGs that filled the GameBoy Advance’s library, Slayblade has players take on rivals in a BayBlade style spinning top game. Slayblade has a lot going for it in the style department and it’s loose guiding system gives you enough influence to feel in control without taking the random element out entirely.
The issue here seems to be the game not surfacing its systems very well, which leads to a lot of floundering during fights. It’s hard to really know what stats you want or how they effect other systems playing normally. I appreciate a game that doesn’t waste time, but a little foreplay is nice. Even with these caveats, Slayblade has so much going for it that I wanted to include it in the round up as it feels like a game so close to greatness deserves a little spotlight.
Vholume
Described as a “liminal parkour” game, Vholume puts you into the world of PS2 aesthetics and sprawling mega structures made of sandstone to compete on leaderboards for fastest time. In practice Vholume feels like an anti idle game, rather than rewarding inaction Vholume feels like a game whose sole purpose is to be tactile and present. As impressive and appealing as the environments are the real draw for me is the stark simplicity. There’s no HUD, no marker, no crosshair, no enemies, barely any mechanics. Just you running, jumping, and sliding through an unsettling place. There’s something deeply appealing about Vholume for me and I realize I’ve been looking for it for quite some time. Often when I idle my time away with friends, I look to keep my hands busy, but as games have become more mechanically dense, I find it’s hard to do that with anything save basic puzzle titles. Vholume seems like the perfect game to whittle away time in voice chats to, and if that sounds back-handed, I assure you it isn’t. The sense of speed, aesthetics, and freedom you get out of Vholume takes real talent to cultivate, and it’s high up on my wishlist as a result.
Foghorn’s Drown
Skewing more cerebral, Foghorn’s Drown seems to be a horror title in the vein of Mouthwashing, mechanically not much more than a walking simulator, but overflowing with intrigue. You are one half of a duo put in charge of the local ferry. When the foghorn blares, you and your compatriot carry the denizens of Birchwood across. But this is an old, superstitious town and there seems to be something terrible bubbling under the surface of the foggy lake. There’s not much more to say about Foghorn’s Drown, especially as it seems slated for a launch this month on July 20, but it’s atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t leave an impression.
Phase Zero
There’s no shortage of love letters to classic survival horror these days, but most of these titles opt for the fruitcake approach of just mashing all the influences together to produce something edible. Phase Zero knows what it wants to be and it isn’t Silent Hill, this is Resident Evil through and through. Taking place in the snowed in town of Flint’s Peak, you awake from a coma to find the hospital staff turning into shambling cannibals. Now you need to juke out zombies and manage your shotgun shells as you try to escape the growing mass of flesh in the hospital’s basement.
Despite it’s 40-ish minute play time, Phase Zero is stuff with unsettling imagery and novel game mechanics. What really sells Phase Zero as a lost Resident Evil is the music. Classic RE titles always had a unique tone and style to their music that the modern ones have never been able to capture, yet here it is in all it’s splendor. Phase Zero actually released it’s demo last year, but in the spirit of Next Fest I’ve included it here in the hopes it’ll get some extra publicity before it’s release later this year.
FISH
FISH is an eclectic little title. Somewhere between Mega Man and Cuphead fish gives a strong first impression as it’s art style is composed almost entirely of stock images repurposed as sprites, but it’s true value is quickly uncovered when you start to actually fire the little handgun your fish carries. Guns fire fast and hit hard, maybe even a little too fast and hard. Different weapons don’t just have drawbacks in their fire rate or reload speed, some use the games physics. Fire a shotgun blast and your fish is flung backward a good foot or so. FISH is already out in Early Access.
Penguin Colony
Harder to describe than to understand, Penguin Colony is sold as a cosmic horror story through the eyes of a penguin. It may surprise you then to hear the game plays closer to Journey than it does to Call of Cthulhu.
Dropped into a large open mass of ice you’re given a vague direction and a belly slide to explore, inevitably coming upon an expedition to uncover… something. Penguin Colony is a weird assembly of systems and mechanics that don’t all seem to gel together in any real way. Get close enough to another penguin and you can swap control to them, though the benefits seem largely aesthetic. Explore the world and you may find motes of light that seem to imbue your penguin with knowledge, but to what end is unclear.
It’s hard not to look at the game and feel half the team wanted to make a penguin simulator and the other wanted to make an homage to The Thing, and they just decided to do both. And it works. It works bizarrely well. The sheer confusion I felt booting up penguin colony might feel the closest to HP Lovecraft’s hapless heroes that any adaptation has gotten. I have no clue if or how Penguin Colony could come together in the final product but I’m incredibly excited to see. As if to sweeten the pot, the devs have brought on Lenval Brown (the narrator from Disco Elysium) to do voice over, which may be worth the price of entry on it’s own.
About Fishing
Following a little girl with a unique attunement to fish, About Fishing isn’t the first game to inject something unsettling into a fishing simulator, but it does seem the most robust.
Following a little girl and her (hopefully) grandpa on a rainy afternoon, the two happen across something… upsetting. Much like Normal Golf Game, part of the “joke” here is that About Fishing is a fully realized unironic fishing game. While it’s not as nuanced as Normal Golf Game, About Fishing also does have a lot more working for it in the atmosphere department. Rainy, dreary, but weirdly upbeat, About Fishing sticks with you.
…And Many More!
Next Fest has dozens of demos, old and new, that we couldn’t get to or didn’t quite come together how we’d like them too. But every one of these demos is a bold declaration of the future; a promise of intent, and even the ones that fall short are worth seeing. So take some time to try something new and see what the future holds.
