Next Fest ended weeks ago but I wanted to finish a couple more games and then got busy for a bit. Oops. I think this time I intended to look around the RPG and Puzzle offerings, but in practice I mostly ran into the “decoration” subgenre, and also cooking RPGs. I saw the word “cozy” thrown around a lot as this year’s “chill” or “wholesome.”
Overall, this was a rather mixed outcome. Nearly all of the games I thought were great were puzzles or organization games. Granted, I didn’t get around to the Solasta II demo despite downloading it first, so maybe that would’ve been the demo to save the RPGs from the clutches of inadequacy.
However, the demos I did like I *really* liked. Followed and immediately on the wishlist great. Great enough to get their own category.
Fantastic
Is This Seat Taken?
A logic game about placing shape people where they want in various scenarios.
I liked this one a lot! It’s my favorite demo of this Next Fest. The game is very well polished and incredibly lightweight (a ~160 mb demo is peanuts considering I have a 26 gb demo). The concept of reading people’s requests and placing them appropriately, and possibly having to move them around in later parts, is enjoyable and executed well from the 6 levels available. They weren’t particularly difficult but I can definitely see how the difficulty will scale with request complexity. Usually games I wishlist during Next Fest languish there forever (unless it gets bundled somewhere) but if it’s reasonably priced for the amount of levels I might grab this on release.
The little dialogue segments and complaint quips are well written (and “A kid :(“ for someone going >:( is really funny) and convey information effectively while just being enjoyable to read. I am extremely invested in the little drama these shape people have with their tastes in seating neighbors. There’s a cute little story as well with Nat and Alexis.
If there’s any complaint that I have, it’s that it would be nice to have different shapes be different colors as well. It’s a bit hard to see which person I’ve picked up or am swapping on the fly. If color comes into play later though then the single color makes sense.
Kemono Teatime
I installed the demo because of the cute cover art and the promise of catpeople. This in the same “visual novel-cafe” subgenre as Coffee Talk. Most of your time is spent reading conversations, sometimes picking dialogue, and fulfilling tea requests. However, Tarte, who you play “as” for tea segments, is a full character with her own motivations and thoughts, not all of which are revealed to the player.
Kemonomimi pandemic… From what I can tell, there’s a pandemic where anyone who starts becoming a kemomimi has a limited amount of time before they either die or turn into a kemono, a beast that only has animal instincts. And this has apparently caused the death of 80% of the world population within a year? Which on one hand is terrible, but also, for a brief period of time you can have animal ears and a tail, so really how bad could it be.
I will say, though, it’s kind of peculiar that the game gives you the ability to select what items you want to get from Quiche and Scone/Jam but not only are there obvious right answers (ex. lemoncane needed in day 2, lemoncane and honeybee balm needed in day 3, pretty sure you needed berries+adept cookware for day 3, that anti-aging herb for day 4), Quiche’s options are randomized as well. My guess is that this is meant to give the game replayability? Like, fulfilling people’s orders perfectly unlocks more dialogue and might change the routes.
Also, there are ages in the character descriptions and I am just going to fully ignore them. There’s zero way Macaron is 12 years old. There’s no way Quiche is 17. I am mentally adding 5 years to everyone. Please do not have the 12 year old fully in charge of the kitchen and all the meals.
But yeah. The game is cute, has a nice artstyle and aesthetic, and has great sound design and worldbuilding. And then also throws in a heap of tragedy. I do not see this game ending in any way other than bittersweet, considering the 21 day time limit. I was a bit concerned about why there are so few NPCs, but now that I’ve completed the demo (5 days) I might know what they’re going for. Definitely keeping an eye on this.
Whisper of the House
The mouse controls are weird. I do not like having to pan with the mouse wheel held down. Hopefully the full version lets you change the controls.
Other than that, though, I really enjoyed this. It’s another Unpacking-like interior organization game, except that you’re not following the same person and instead operating a housekeeping service. You also get stuff to decorate your own house and display rooms that supposedly you’ll be able to share online. Basically it’s kinda like House Flipper but with less cleaning (so far). It plays fairly well, too - the room movement could be faster, but being able to rotate some objects in 4 directions provides a lot of versatility.
There’s also a twist in that you also gain access to time travel - you use it to go back in time and help unpack an elderly man’s belongings so the present day so he doesn’t pass away, and you prevent someone (you helped move in) from leaving her apartment (and then her friend moves in with her!) by catching the squirrelguy hoarder landlord living in a secret room. I think this is a neat mechanic with great potential.
Apparently, in a previous version, the hidden room in the first house belonged to the landlord, who hid in there to drug, forcibly dress up, and most likely sexually assault the female tenants living in the apartment - and which led to the disappearance of the girl you helped move in. They changed it into a hoarding squirrelperson for the version I played, and I agree with the change. The original goes too far for a cozy game. Like, “the person you helped move in was possibly sexually assaulted before you went back in time to stop the culprit” completely contradicts the tone. Even a content warning at *minimum* for “landlord who rents to women with the express purpose of violating them, including the woman you directly helped” would be utterly bizarre for the tone and raise people’s defenses, since cozy games often fill a purpose of escapism, and that is extremely far from being escapism. Squirrel guy is fantastical enough to break from reality and not evoke the same vibes. Still wary about future “hidden stories,” though, considering this apparently blindsided the dev.
Great
Cats in Cozy Rooms
Despite following the “X in Y” naming scheme of those hidden animal games and activating my fight-or-flight response to the flood of that genre on Steam, this is not a hidden objects game. This is an interior decorating game with a cat theme.
It’s a pretty basic and casual game, and very easy at least for the two levels given in the demo. The budget is more than generous enough to go 15 objects above the requirement. The art and aesthetic style is what really carries it - I think the art is well done and detailed, and the approach of it being cats is arbitrary but cutely done, though I think it should embrace the theme more and have more cat-focused furniture. I love me a cat tower.
The level select screen is really creative - I really like the approach of having the level screen be a set of the houses you’re designing, though it took me a moment to find where level 1 was. If they add a bit of ambient sound and more animation (like shadows of cats in completed buildings) I think it’d be even better.
The controls could be a bit more responsive, though. Wall objects should automatically turn to snap to a wall, and you should be able to rotate selected objects even if it’s not in a valid space. The ability to change colors on placed objects would also be nice. Some objects couldn’t be moved at all, but that seems to be a glitch.
Overall, cute. With some polish I think it’d be a good game, even as a very casual experience.
Einstein’s Cats
Another placement logic game but with cats. Here, your hints are listed out on the side and has things like “cats with collars like to be left of orange cats” and “Fluffy doesn’t like being down low.” There’s an additional puzzle if the game is referring to a cat by name - sometimes you don’t know for sure which one it is, and you can label the cat if you figure it out. There’s also a nice QoL feature where most relevant hints are highlighted when you pick up a cat. It helps narrow down what to keep in mind, and for when I mix up the fur coats or wonder whether something counts as a cat color. Very importantly there’s also a sticker mode where you can make little scenes.
I found this to be a little harder in both difficulty and navigation than Is This Seat Taken? - whereas that game generally could be approached one by one and has multiple solutions, there’s exactly one solution in Einstein’s Cats, and I felt like taking an overview approach and then finetuning when I inevitably mixed something up was more effective. Also, considering each cat has one spot they want, I’d like a (maybe toggleable) feature where, once every cat is in a spot, the response popup shows whether each cat’s preferences are fulfilled instead of all of them at once.
That’s not to say the game is bad or anything. I liked it, but they have distinct differences in how they play and are approached. It’s cute, though. I put this one on my wishlist, but this one I think will languish there.
Seeds of Calamity
Typically I consider the scale of farming sims/RPGs to be from Harvest Moon (no combat, relationship building) to Rune Factory (heavy combat focus, relationship building), but this game drops the relationship building altogether. I’m not sure if the dev intended the game to focus on combat, but they should, imo. It’s the strongest part of the demo, to the point where I felt the point of farming is really to fund combat runs.
Combat is like a common card battler setup - you get 7 action orbs per turn, and use orbs to cast spells. You can also unlock more spells with gold, and hopefully there’s a system for upgrading spells and orbs (considering the base water and lightning spells are essentially identical). I really liked the whole synergizing elements thing. I find it fun to puzzle out, and it works well with the dungeon setup where you progress by passing into different rooms that have different content like fights or mining spots or puzzles (kinda like Hades, and not like Stardew’s floor system). I also appreciate that healing via eating food is seemingly a free action.
In terms of farming, though, it’s as close to a Stardew Valley clone as you get except that the NPCs are there for their utility. Even donation restoration is practically identical. I do like the QoL of having all the tools be on hand at all times and not take up inventory space, though. It’s a bit disappointing that there’s seemingly no relationship metric, and that characterization comes largely from quests and daily dialogue (I appreciate that they all congregate in one spot at night to get your daily dialogue in, even if a lot of it is stock lines) but if the game’s focus is the combat then I’m okay with that.
Overall, I really like the combat and dungeon approach. It’s creative and works well from what I’ve seen. I’m interested in seeing how this one develops.
Good
Dragonkin: The Banished
26 gb demo. I have full games that are a fraction of that size. It’s not even like the endgame dungeon preview has a bunch of random dungeons, it’s literally just the one. If this is how much space a demo that should have only limited assets takes up I’m rather concerned about the size of the full game?
This is a Diablo-like top-down hack and slash, though you only have the choice of four (three currently implemented) “classes” - on the other hand, each one has a wider variety of skills, which you choose from as you set up your Ancestral Grid. Progression is measured at both the character (level, stats, gear, etc.) and the city level? The more you develop your city, the more features you can access. There’s fast travel within the city that works without fading to loading screens, which I appreciate, considering you’re teleported to the location to access merchants/services.
I quite like the approach of the tutorial - it shows off every playable hero and gives you their backstory while you fight as an overpowered version long enough for you to get a good feel for their gameplay. I definitely also appreciate that they open with the options menu and that they default to subtitles enabled, unlike a certain other Diablo-like game that doesn’t have subtitles on by default and throws a full cinematic cutscene at you…
It’s all downhill once you get to the city, though. There are three main things I was interested in knowing about the game: the Ancestral Grid system, character customization outside that system, and how characters interact in multiplayer. Character customization I did get to see (and I like that you can freely change your stats in the city), and while I would’ve liked multiplayer I understand that it’s not their focus until late early access. However, the preview for Ancestral Grid is woefully inadequate, and bad where I did get an impression. At a basic, not-just-a-demo-issue level, you can only have one grid setup and there’s no way to save layouts. Despite the system being the exact case scenario for needing to save a lot of sets. The grid consists of both your character’s skills and wyrmling skills, but there are four wyrmlings with their own sets of skills. Node passives can synergize with active skills and each other. However, only having one pre-filled grid makes it incredibly difficult to mess around. Not only that, you don’t get additional nodes to experiment with out of the gate. You get three nodes for another wyrmling element (a wyrmling has five skills), and that’s it. Ideally, I would have preferred if there was a way to save grids, and if each character had 3+ grids saved - two endgame builds and whatever the level 1 build is - to demonstrate the variety available for each hero and also give the player the ability to freely make their own build from scratch and see how the grid interacts from the ground up. At the very least I wanted more nodes without having to go through all of a dungeon for RNG.
The game itself plays ok (once I swapped to WASD movement and make the cursor large because grey-brown on brown isn’t visible). It’s about what you expect for a Diablo-like, though it needs work. I felt default attacks are too weak and mana is too limited and getting stuck in place for default attacks when hitting mobs is how you regain mana faster is really counterintuitive. Overall I see the potential and like the hero-city integration and the tutorial was great, but there were just so many roadblocks on actual gameplay, plus my concerns about the lack of saved grid sets, that I couldn’t really enjoy it.
Fellowship
Comically, even though there’s a mandatory queue to log in, you can still get rejected from the server immediately after passing the queue because the server is full. Like, what’s the point of the queue at that point.
If you took an instance-based dungeon MMORPG and left only the part of running dungeons, you’d get Fellowship. It’s a condensed version of what an instance dungeon MMO is. You have the trinity, you have PvE dungeon maps with a boss at the end, you have a bunch of trash mobs to kill along the way. The way the game phrases terms makes me feel like it’s like a hero shooter. A hero MMO? It’s… not wrong.
My biggest issue is just that it doesn’t feel fun to play. Movement feels weightless, especially when you get hit by a knockback and go absolutely flying. Your hitbox is very big, so being a caster feels sluggish and you still get hit by things because your toe is a hitbox too. The UI is very minimalistic (also the text is small). The target health box doesn’t show cast bars, so while I like that you can see interruptables above all enemies, it’s hard to tell whether you’re interrupting the right target. I’d also like scaling and transparency options like what you get in FFXIV’s similarly nearly-full UI customization. Also, I get that there are going to be gaze mechanics, but I wish there were an option to face the target automatically when using skills (the lack of auto face and the absence of “weightiness” on skills makes it really easy for me to drop attacks because I’m facing the wrong way). FFXI didn’t have auto face either and I take issue with it there too, but the perspective is much closer, skills are generally slower, and you’re typically targeting one at a time anyway. There’s a reason why auto face is a recommended setting in FFXIV.
In terms of dungeons, they’re pretty much what I’d expect. Maybe a bit less. 3 adventure maps are basically hallways with some splits in it and a couple dead ends, and a boss at the end. Wyrmheart is wide enough that even linear pathways have optional packs. Empyrean Sands breaks from the hallways in the beginning, but what replaces it is a big open field. The only “side objective” for not taking the shortest route possible Is to fulfill your kill score (I think for the leaderboard), since your only loot is the boss chest. The paths just blur together and are effectively the same. Basically, take the complaints about hallway dungeons and send it here, because this game runs into the same problem. I didn’t get a chance to go into the dungeons but those seem to be FFXIV-style dungeons with the 3 bosses.
The problems I have are a shame, too, because it has a bunch of QoL features that are probably ripped from WoW plugins really work in an MMO style game. The big chunky health bars going horizontally across the screen make tracking hp very visible (maybe too visible, would like to tone down the transparency). Combined with mouseover target heals for both the model and the health bar, it’s just easy and satisfying to soft target a heal. Both tanks and all (available) DPS having an interrupt is also very nice, since there’s a guarantee that 3/4ths of the party have the button.
So, overall… I wish I liked this one. I wish it felt better to play. I think there’s a dearth of cooperative PvE games where, like in MOBAs and hero shooters, playing with randoms is expected at the casual level. I still think it has potential and is made by people who have an understanding of the common issues in MMORPGs, but it would need a lot of improvements to actually feel good to play.
Grimm Kitchen
Perplexingly, the game has utterly zero graphics or control options. You can’t customize the control scheme, the resolution is locked at either fullscreen or max window size (can’t tell because ctrl+enter doesn’t do anything), there’s not even an option to turn down the camera sensitivity. Unfortunately, what this means is that the game became too nauseating to play after half an hour. The mouse sensitivity is just way, way, way too high, there’s motion blur that kicks in if you dare tap your mouse, and whatever post-processing method they used is very demanding - as in, it has my GPU chugging worse than in games where I expect the high demand - and lags my game whenever it fades an object from the camera.
Which is a complete and utter shame, because otherwise the game is good. The combat is simple and generic mobs don’t pose a challenge other than as hp sponges (which is fine since they’re for gathering ingredients) but there’s a little bit of strategy with dodging boss mobs. I can’t really have a full opinion on this since I was trying my best not to move the camera. What I really enjoyed was the restaurant management. It’s a bit too much without a full staff, but once I had that for the second day it was pretty enjoyable to run around tossing flyers and serving dishes and cleaning tables. It’s hectic but fun!
So yeah, if I were to compare Grimm Kitchen to the similar Dragon Song Tavern I would prefer Grimm Kitchen, because it drops any “cozy” appearance the moment you step into the restaurant. I just wish it had actual graphics options and the camera movement wasn’t so nauseating to play.
Sorting Inc
Ah yes, a sorting game. You get five objective stages plus one endless stage to try out in the demo; four of them are about sorting color pieces, and one is sorting different sized nuts. Objects can be stacked up to 6 times (there’s no bonus but feels more efficient) and slide a bit when “thrown.”
It find it nice to clean off the desk by organizing the pieces, but that’s only present in the first four levels - the endless mode throws ~20 pieces at you and always gives you more pieces when you sort them into slots, and level 5 moves on a conveyor belt. At the very least I wish endless mode gave an option to give you that big pile of things to organize and let you refresh it manually.
Also, the stacking mechanic could use some work. I appreciate the mechanic, but it lets you stack different objects together. You can unstack, but it uses a queue structure - last in is last out when you click to undo. Good luck with that, especially if you have the misfortune to accidentally grab the wrong object at the end of the stack and have to click to separate the entire stack just to get it out. Combine that with the sliding toss mechanic and the close proximity of objects, and it just becomes a needless frustration.
Generally the game just seems simple and mindless enough to be unremarkable? It’s not that it isn’t well made - because it is decently put together and mostly works as intended (pieces sometimes teleport if they hit the wrong sorting slot) - it’s just so insignificant in my mind that I can’t even call it great. It feels like the best use case is as a destressor where I don’t have to think at all.
Urban Jungle
Apparently I played an older version of the demo for about 10 minutes back in the June Next Fest. The essence of the gameplay remains the same - you select plants from a randomized selection, then place them while fulfilling their ideal preferences to progress. It’s a neat little puzzle to figure out where and how to place them to maximize the scores, though imo it feels like in a realistic scenario you would not want to be clustering plants in random places like I was doing. There are also additional side objectives, like effectively unpacking the protagonist’s belongings in stage 3 and generally cleaning and organizing things. I liked the part where I organized stuff more than the plants, oops…
The game also unlocks a “Creative Mode” once you finish each stage, where you can fully decorate the rooms with seemingly no limits on furniture (you can use anything from completed stages). This feature I think is really neat.
All in all, I think this one is… decent? It’s definitely also evoking Unpacking vibes with the whole decorating part and the stages with story background, but also has its own twists with the plants and side objectives and more focus on organization of existing furniture/props, and especially the Creative Mode. It’s definitely more unique than the multitude of clones directly ripping off Unpacking. Unfortunately I have zero interest in its main gameplay and the main gameplay is how I’d get to the part I like, so it’s kind of a hard sell.
Meh
Animal Spa
What I learned is that this is way too much activity on the bottom of my screen even at the smallest size and it’s genuinely too distracting. There are things I need to do when I’m on the computer and my eyes would rather look at the little critters chilling in the bath, and I think I can’t do desktop idlers at all.
Which is a shame, because I think it’s otherwise cute. It’s a chill “management” game without any stress about actually managing or failing to satisfy customer’s needs. Just decorate your spa however you like. My poor singular staff member struggles to keep up, rip.
Dark Land Chronicle: The Fallen Elf
Obligatory smut game, I guess. I’m always on the search for smutty RPGs that have some substance to the RPG side.
Honestly, this one feels more like a proof of concept than anything. I like the concept well enough as an isometric RPG, but there was just the one mandatory combat encounter (if you don’t want to go murdering nonaggressive NPCs). Also, despite it being a porn game, I only encountered two sex scenes, though there are other erotic or suggestive scenes and a set of explicit diary entries. Also, because of the extremely limited resources you have, I think ultimately right now you can only ever just softlock yourself if you’re not careful.
The scenes that do appear are all based on noncon, though, and there is ample amounts of implied monsterfucking, so I guess I’m interested in that sense at least. I guess I’ll follow its development in hopes that it gets some more substantial content, but I feel it’s going to take a long while.
Dragon Song Tavern: Cozy Adventures
I swear there’s a game extremely similar to this one where you go out and collect ingredients to run a cafe and there’s a baby dragon and the title is Dragon Cafe or something.
The part of the game I played was pretty much what I’d expect from a “store management life sim” - you plant crops, fish, and buy ingredients to make ingredients for your dishes, then manage your tavern by ferrying dishes to them. You can research and experiment with making new dishes with a hint system, which was neat, but I got stuck trying to figure out what it wanted by a “affordable fish with flaky flesh” when the fish descriptions don’t discuss texture. The shops (and game description) suggest you will also go out and explore areas, and that there is combat, but I didn’t reach that point.
And the main reason why I didn’t see any exploration is because of the controls. They feel… floaty? The character moves slowly, interacting with NPCs during tavern management is difficult (the angle you need to hit is far too narrow), and the way planting movement snaps to the grid is a bit too strict. It doesn’t help that interiors feel too big as well - the shops are massive rooms where you only talk to the shopkeeper. Your tavern Is massive too, but at least that can be explained as having room for more furniture/food options.
Also, the way they do buildings and props in the overworld is to have them as 2D images imposed in a 3D world. It’s a neat stylistic choice, but there’s absolutely no give to the sprites, so certain camera angles make objects look distorted as you walk by them. I’m not sure if there’s an easy perspective solution to this, but it is unfortunate.
Overall, rather disappointed. It looks nice, but plays poorly, and as another one of the overt “cozy” games I’m also not particularly enthused about the pacing of the game. There are a lot of them in this genre and this one just doesn’t stand out.
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