Hello, and welcome back for Round 2 of the October 2024 Steam Next Fest. If you missed the first post you can find it here. It covers the following titles:

  • The Rise of the Golden Idol
  • Nurikabe World
  • Rift of the Necrodancer
  • Glitch Dungeon Crystal

I’ve played several more demos, and have chosen to cover another 5 of them below. So, without any further delay, let’s get into things.

Warside

Elevator Pitch: Advance Wars, but not locked to Nintendo hardware. For those unfamiliar with Advance Wars: it’s a Turn-based Strategy game where players deploy a variety of modern military vehicles to overwhelm your opponent’s forces.

Frosti’s Thoughts: Ehhhh.

Advance Wars is one of the few Nintendo franchises where I’ve enjoyed all of its entries. As such, I’m always on the look-out for new games that are inspired by it. When developers aren’t weighed down by the baggage of an existing franchise there are so many different things they can change about an experience. Cassette Beasts, and Lenna’s Inception come to mind as 2 great examples of games inspired by Nintendo properties that changed things up to create interesting new experiences. If nothing else, it’s just neat to see how a new group of developers will envision a familiar formula.

Having said that, I’m a little disappointed to report that Warside doesn’t seem to be making a ton of changes. I think the biggest change was made to capturing resources. In Advance Wars players need to park a soldier on a building for several turns to capture it for their side. If their opponent wants to reclaim the building, they have to do the same, which gives players a couple of turns to respond to their opponent’s aggression. The whole system is fairly slow paced, and tends to provide a huge advantage to whoever can get to a particular building first as reclaiming it tends to be a Herculean task.

By contrast, Warside allows players to instantly capture unclaimed buildings, but they’ll only have 20% of their total health. This means that buildings can be recaptured with much greater ease. Furthermore, vehicles can attack cities, which makes capturing them way easier for your infantry units. This makes Warside a lot more about properly controlling the battlefield, instead of simply being about speed, which I’d call a positive improvement.

However, the other aspects of the demo left me a little underwhelmed. It wasn’t any single thing, but more a combination of a lot of tiny things that got me. For example, there’s no sound effects for selecting a unit, there’s no way to see a unit’s combat proficiency outside of the deployment window, there’s no way to repair units after they’ve been deployed, and the overworld music was a little underwhelming. None of these things are deal breakers on their own, but together they left me wondering why I’d want to continue playing Warside when I could just go replay an Advance Wars title.

That feels a little mean toward the dev team, and I know they’ve been actively collecting feedback based on the demo. I’m hopeful that Warside gets a bit more spit and polish because I think there might be something special here. It just needs a little more time in the oven.

Wishlisted: no, but I do have the game followed to keep an eye on future updates

Knights in Tight Spaces

Elevator Pitch: a cross between a Tactics game, and a Deck-Builder where players lead a squad of medieval heroes to fight on very small maps.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I didn’t care for it.

Knights in Tight Spaces is a weird one because, on paper, everything it has should be up my alley. I like my turn-based Tactics games. I like outmanoeuvring AI squads when the odds are stacked against me. I like deck-building. These are all things I find fun, and Knights in Tight Spaces has the whole array of them. What’s not to love?

However, I just couldn’t gel with Knights in Tight Spaces. I played a couple runs of the demo, but it didn’t really click for me. I think it’s because it felt like I was never able to actually do anything impactful. Both movement, and attacks are cards, so I kept burning a ton of actions across encounters trying to position everything just so, only to fail to draw any cards that would allow me to meaningfully capitalize on my current position. For example, players can push enemies out of the arena to instantly defeat them, but I’d never manage to draw the exact combination of cards I needed whenever I finally got a baddie properly lined up to be pushed off the map, which was extremely frustrating.

That and the early combat encounters were super tedious. They reminded me a lot of those first few fights that players do in every run of Slay the Spire. They’re not particularly hard, so the encounters are easy to churn through with the boring starter deck. Then players can hope they draft a handful of interesting cards to start building a unique strategy around, so they’re not stuck using a flavourless deck for a protracted period of time. The difference in Knights in Tight Spaces is that those first few encounters take an enormous amount of time to actually finish, instead of being a short-lived pain.

Wishlisted: no

StarVaders

Elevator Pitch: a Deck-Builder where players pilot a giant robot that is fighting off a Space Invaders style invasion.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I liked it. A lot.

I actually missed StarVaders during my initial sweep of available demos. I found out about it last night because LocalThunk, the creator of Balatro, gave it a nod. Balatro was fire, and its demo was one of the best I’ve played across any Steam Next Fest, so I decided that kind of endorsement was worth its weight in gold, and promptly downloaded StarVaders.

Sure enough, LocalThunk was spitting, and the folks at StarVaders Studios are absolutely cooking with this one.

The basic premise of StarVaders is that players are piloting a mech at the bottom of a game board while trying to eliminate aliens that are slowly descending, Space Invader style, toward the bottom of the board. The twist here is that all of the player’s actions are controlled with cards, so they need to flesh out a deck that allows them to move, and attack in a way that’ll sweep through the deluge of oncoming enemies. If too many reach the bottom then it’s game over.

I’m sure some of you reading are wondering how that’s any different from Knights in Tight Spaces, and I’ll admit, they are very similar conceptually. The biggest difference for me was that StarVaders had a lot of cards that allowed for movement, and attacking simultaneously. This meant that my turns playing cards felt very impactful as I cleared out huge swaths of enemies.

Players can also blitz through the first few fights of StarVaders relatively quickly, which means they can escape the confines of early-game decks much faster.

If you’re a deck-building person, then you 100% need to check StarVaders out.

Wishlisted: yes!

Sliding Hero

Elevator Pitch: A Metroidvania where players traverse the world as if they’re solving an ice puzzle.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I liked it.

There were 3 different Metroidvania games that I downloaded from the current Next Fest. 2 of them leaned heavily into the Castlevania influence, and subsequently were not my cup of tea. However, Sliding Hero is a lot more puzzle focused, and therefore was a lot more my tempo.

I don’t know if my description above is actually informative enough, but if you’ve ever played a game with ice puzzles in it then you know what to expect from Sliding Hero. Any time the player character moves in a direction, they fly forward until they collide with something. This kind of puzzle is usually fairly niche being relegated to an Ice Dungeon in RPGs, but Sliding Hero is attempting to make an entire game out of the idea. For what it’s worth, I thought the demo did a fantastic job of selling the concept, and I’m eager to play more of it.

The other big thing that I got out of Sliding Hero’s demo was the atmosphere. The world is super weird, and the music that plays throughout is equally unsettling. I got the impression that’s exactly what the folks behind Sliding Hero are going for, and I’m all for it.

Wishlisted: yes

Sorry We’re Closed

Elevator Pitch: a very stylish PS2 style Survival Horror game.

Frosti’s Thoughts: The demo turned my butthole inside out. I’m very excited to play the full release.

I know that’s not going to sound like a great endorsement, but a Horror game scaring the crap out of me is a great thing. Almost the entire duration of Sorry We’re Closed’s demo left me completely unsettled. The visuals are just fuzzy enough that my brain could run wild with the different monster designs even when I got a clear look at them. The sound design was also superb, which I believe is what really sent me over the edge.

The other big thing for me was how combat is handled. Players have access to a mechanic called the Third Eye, which exposes an enemy’s weak spot. However, while using the Third Eye, all shots that miss the weak spot will do no damage. It also has a limited range, so enemies need to be fairly close before it will work. This introduces a neat little bit of risk-reward where players have to decide between staying safe but using more ammo, or allowing themselves to potentially take damage but conserving their ammo for later. In my case, I kept using it and found many of the combat engagements thrilling as a result. Doubly so when I was able to actually land all of those close range shots before I got smacked.

There also appears to be very limited amounts of inventory management in Sorry We’re Closed. That was a big part of why I enjoyed Crow Country earlier this year, so that’s just another reason to eagerly await Sorry We’re Closed’s release later this year.

Wishlisted: yes!

Alright folks. That’s it for today’s round-up. I should have another 1 coming over the weekend, but I’m not sure when exactly that’ll be. Hopefully before the current Next Fest ends so that you can try out some of the demos yourself if anything catches your eye.

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