Welcome back for the fourth, and final round of previews that I’ll be doing for the October 2024 Steam Next Fest. I was hoping to get this post out earlier, but almost all of the demos I played today were very engrossing. As such, I spent way more time with every single game than I had intended to. I suppose in some ways that’s the best kind of endorsement.

Regardless, if you want to catch up on yesterday’s coverage of Next Fest, then you can do so by clicking here. In that article I covered the following titles:

  • Dimensionals
  • Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
  • Wilmot Works It Out
  • Zero Order Tactics

With that out of the way, let’s get into the final round of demos.

OMG Words

Elevator Pitch: a game that is looking to do to Scrabble what Balatro did to Poker.

Frosti’s Thoughts: It’s a neat idea, but I found myself satisfied by the demo in a way that doesn’t leave me wanting to play more of it.

OMG Words is attempting to do something that I think is really smart: it’s taking an existing game, and augmenting it with new rules, and variance. This is exactly what Balatro’s creator LocalThunk did to Poker when making Balatro, and the results are phenomenal. Similarly, I think OMG Words puts an exciting new spin on Scrabble by adding special spaces to the game board that increase your point total, and by allowing players to augment their score with additional bonuses.

However, after playing through a couple of runs across 2 hours of playtime, I found myself feeling totally satisfied with what I’d played of OMG Words. That’s a fairly small sample size, but all of my runs felt exactly the same regardless of what items I found along the way. I think that stems from how I wasn’t able to actually alter the available pieces, so I ended up thinking about, and spelling a lot of the same sorts of words. Obviously that sort of repetition is entirely on me, but it made me feel like I’d already seen everything OMG Words had to offer.

I’d bet that Scrabble nuts are going to lose their mind with this one though. OMG Words wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I’m sure the right kind of person will absolutely love it.

Wishlisted: no

SULFUR

Elevator Pitch: an FPS Roguelike that uses elements from Extraction Shooters to heighten the tension of continuing to explore deeper into the unknown.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I liked it, but was truly awful at actually playing the game.

I had a bit of an epiphany while playing SULFUR: it’s really weird that so few Roguelikes feature loot extraction. Games in the Roguelike subgenre are designed around players repeatedly going through them to collect a variety of different weapons, abilities, and upgrades. Extraction Shooters aren’t too different with a primary gameplay loop wherein players try to loot weapons, currency, and upgrades from an area that is populated by enemies, and other players vying for the same goodies. And in both cases, when the player dies they drop all their shit. In that regard, to me at least, there seems to be a little mechanical overlap between these 2 subgenres.

SULFUR explores that very same shared space by asking how a Roguelike would play if the player could leave with all of their loot. There’s a catch though: players can only leave at set intervals. The result is a game that feels extremely tense to play, and the tension only gets heightened as players find more valuable stuff to lose.

As someone who isn’t very familiar with the gameplay loop of Extraction Shooters, I was immediately hooked, and I spent way too much time playing SULFUR as a result. I can’t really say how it compares to similar titles, but it was the first time in forever where I actually felt something besides mild annoyance upon dying in a Roguelike. Being able to escape with my ill-gotten gains added some real stakes to each run of SULFUR. Worse yet, if I died then I could potentially lose several runs worth of progress. That’s devastating. But that sense of loss made the thrill of success so much sweeter.

Wishlisted: yes

Critter Café

Elevator Pitch: a Cozy game where the player manages a picturesque café alongside a bevy of adorable creatures.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I spent 15 minutes in the character creator, and another 30 decorating the café. There is no mechanical advantage to any of this. That’s a long way of saying I enjoyed Critter Café a lot.

I’m honestly not sure what else to say about Critter Café because it’s exactly what it says on the tin. Players are given a café, they can decorate it however they please, and they befriend a variety of tiny critters that help them run the place. The demo only features 2 of said creatures, but they were both adorable goobers. I hate choosing favourites, but the newt looking fella with the mantis shrimp face was the clear winner. My wife had a bit of a laugh at me because of how enamoured I was with him.

I also think the demo did a good job of showing off a variety of different cosmetics for customizing the player character, the café, and the critter island. My hope would be that the full release will have a lot more different items as customization of these 3 aspects of Critter Café seems to be a focal point of the experience.

Regardless, I’m eager to discover more of the critters in Critter Café when it launches toward the end of November.

Wishlisted: yes

Guidus Zero

Editor’s Notes: I’m not sure why, but neither the developer, nor publisher posted the trailer for Guidus Zero on Youtube in conjunction with the Next Fest event. As such, I’ve included an old dev vlog, back when the game had a slightly different name, which shows how Guidus Zero plays. If you’d like to view the trailer for Guidus Zero then consider looking at the Steam page for the game.

Elevator Pitch: a classically designed Roguelike (one that is actually like Rogue), but combat takes place in real-time instead of being pseudo-turn-based.

Frosti’s Thoughts: I really enjoyed this one, and had to pull myself away from it early to finish playing other demos.

I’m a big fan of how Roguelikes have expanded as a genre to include a very wide array of different types of games. However, I also believe that a little something was lost during that transition. Namely the type of Roguelike I grew up playing: grid-locked, turn-based, and extremely punishing. I’m not too fussed on that last point, but there are certainly days where I wish I had a new grid-locked Roguelike to play so I could get my Mystery Dungeon fix without having to replay one of those older titles.

Luckily, it seems the creators of Guidus Zero feel similarly as they’re making just about exactly what I’m looking for. However, instead of the game being pseudo-turn based like those older Roguelikes, everything happens in real-time. This gives the game a similar cadence to Crypt of the Necrodancer, but it’s far less punishing as the player isn’t obligated to act in-time with music. As such, I found it a lot easier to back off from combat when I needed a moment to let my brain catch-up to the action that was happening on screen.

While I wasn’t able to completely finish the demo for Guidus Zero, I was really impressed with what I saw. The combat felt great, with the bosses being a key stand-out. There’s also some different system mechanics that I wasn’t able to mess around with too much, but they hint at some permanent character progression that allows players to customize their hero’s stats to build them out a certain way. I’m always keen on that sort of thing, so I’m looking forward to when I can sink some more time into Guidus Zero.

Wishlisted: yes

Letalis

Elevator Pitch: Gameboy era Pokémon, but players are collecting, and training a menagerie of gladiators.

Frosti’s Thoughts: we’re finishing off strong because this was my favourite of the lot from today.

I think I could best summarize my experience with Letalis’ demo by sharing the following story.

Shortly after finishing the tutorial, I was let out of Letalis’ starting town. I journeyed into a forest, and reached a fork in the road. To the North there were bandits. As such, I decided to head South. Unfortunately, I ran into a bear who unceremoniously killed my entire party of warriors. Upon returning home, my father chastised me for my failure before bestowing yet another gladiator under my purview.

I decided that I couldn’t live down the embarrassment of another failure, so I hired 2 more warriors with my limited funds, and then spent the next 10 minutes training in-town against chickens. After the chickens were no longer a viable source of experience, I ventured back into that forest, and decided to head North to deal with the bandits. Hilariously, I was super overleveled, and completely mopped the floor with them.

Despite all of this, I absolutely loved Letalis. That whole experience was genuinely funny, and it also gave me a little extra time to internalize certain aspects of Letalis’ mechanics. It features turn-based combat akin to Pokémon where different warrior types have advantages, and disadvantages depending on who they’re attacking or being attacked by. The game does tell players all of this via its UI, but having it memorized speeds things up, and also makes me feel like a bit of a smarty-pants.

Also, full disclosure: I am old. Not super old, but I’m old enough that the graphical style of Letalis hit me like a freight train. It even has an option to use a green gradient colour scheme as if I was playing on my Gameboy Pocket from back in the 90s. Y’all don’t even know how bad that got me. I was feeling things just from looking at Letalis.

That’s all a really long way of saying that I really enjoyed the demo for Letalis. I didn’t know I wanted gladiator Pokémon with Gameboy graphics, but, now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I can’t wait to play more of Letalis.

Wishlisted: yes!

And with that, I’m going to call it on my coverage for the October 2024 Steam Next Fest. It’s been a fun few days here exploring several different genres, mechanics, and art styles to see what different indie devs are cooking. However, I’m exhausted, and will be returning to my hole to hibernate until the end of the month. It’s a surprising amount of work to play through so many demos, and subsequently write-up thoughts on each with some level of detail.

Also, due to the nature of how I covered Next Fest, I feel somewhat obligated to name my favourite demos from the event. Top 4 feels like a good number. That’s partly because I split my coverage up into 4 parts, but also because there was a clear frontrunner from every day that I covered the event. So here are my favourite demos from the event for those that are curious:

  1. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
  2. Letalis
  3. The Rise of the Golden Idol
  4. StarVaders

Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you next week for October’s Month in Review where I’ll be talking about Echoes of Wisdom, and something else probably.

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