i played some games for Steam Next Fest

note: you can also read this post for free on my Patreon. plz consider subbing though, if you don't!

chart of Steam demos launched during the window of each Steam Next fest for the past five years posted by Chris Hanney on bluesky

 

 

 

it feels like every other month in these troubled days new info makes it way out onto social media about how the amount of new game releases on Steam has again increased at astronomical rates. the past few years it's not too hard to find numerous proclamations on social media about why this means the game space of a few years ago - perhaps even a few months ago! - was fundamentally different from the one of now, and we must adjust accordingly. invariably, this always portends ominous signs for the future financial viability of the game industry. most pressing of all, this means the endless torrent of talks that litter conferences like GDC about how to best market your game are all now obsolete. which means it's time to get on it again, folks. time to pump out more of those marketing talks so can we fill that void quickly again! the forever industry of self-appointed market gurus advice-mongering to anxious and insecure game developers hoping to get any kind of edge must continue. the advice must flow!! in a further narrowing market space of possibility, this is what we're left with: the gold supply may be rapidly running out, but there is always better business in selling shovels than there is digging. and Valve is perhaps the ultimate shovel-seller of all, to echo what critic Jackson Tyler said on bluesky recently.

games are strange, though, in that they still retain this image of being a major exception. it's an era where all art, especially in the digital realm, is being devalued into sloppified interchangeable content at alarming rates thanks to AI and rapidly decreasing interest from creative industries in actually supporting their workers. but people still actually broadly do seem to pay for games, for whatever reason - even if the games they pay for are overwhelmingly just a handful of the biggest and most well-known releases. other games than that still do sell pretty well, though, even if it feels less clear than ever to whom exactly they're selling to, or for what reasons. games as an industry still have this image of a golden jewel, a supposed endless money well that figures in other creative industries are boiling with envy about in a world that otherwise shows apocalyptic hostility to art. perhaps this only continues to feed the endless torrent of aspiring creatives jumping into the space to try their hand at commercial game development, as every other space is even less viable.

but even when they do sell, it sometimes feels like an overwhelming percentage of games on digital platforms like Steam have taken on this strange role of "library filler" - i.e. games users will accumulate cheaply from various bundles and sales, but never really play. my own Steam collection right now feels kind of like the equivalent of what many people's mp3 collections used to be like in the 2000's - a huge mess of hypothetical things i could play somewhere down the line, if only i had the time or energy to. i've tried to counteract that somewhat and more aggressively engage with my frighteningly large digital library in recent years, but that engagement is a drop in the bucket - and easily wears me down. and even when these games are being played, there is often precious little (if any) actual broader critical discourse about them outside of consumer guide-like recommendations due to both the sheer amount of stuff on the marketplace and the hollowing out of game criticism and journalism.

honestly, reaching enough people like me who will take a chance on some niche thing if it's cheap enough that we might not play at all is one of the better scenarios for most developers. most of the time, they're just playing the lottery by slapping down the requisite hundred dollar platform fee on the table to Valve in the hope that it will attract enough organic attention to launch some kind of game career - whatever that may look like. if it wasn't already, at this point it really feels like a total necessity to play this lottery, especially as most other venues like festivals and game incubators don't seem to promise much materially as they might have in the past. itch.io of course still exists, but the average normie game designer doesn't seem too interested in using it for that long to build a community making small games before jumping onto the imagined 'big leagues' of Steam. but hey - in the case of some games by people i know (and some of the below games i'm talking about) jumping onto Steam with little prior experience seems to be working out for them okay thus far. doing so is certainly not a model i'd want most inexperienced developers to follow if they want to stick around, but it's not like some people can't get lucky!

browsing through demos on the main Steam Next Fest page for June 2025 this past week or so i noticed way more games that felt like first time student projects, cheap clones, or even the dreaded boogeyman - "asset flips" - than i had for previous rounds. at first i wondered if what i was seeing was the result of the floundering fates of all the game industry layoffs of the last few years finally materially affecting the space. maybe videogames are finally, truly, entering their flop era. but the above release chart clarifies that it's more likely that just about everything anyone is making is getting thrown up on Steam now - and, as a user, i'm just seeing it all more or less unfiltered. and for each of these developers with their demos on the platform, that's another hundred dollar platform fee: thus reinforcing the hegemony of Steam as the unquestioned ruler of the entire PC game marketplace.

there was a point in time not too long ago where the prospect of a full scale independent developed game existing at all was exciting, and worth celebrating. that was the (metaphorical) selling point for a full-featured free game like Cave Story back when it hit the internet in the mid-2000's. but now, it feels as every developer is punching their ticket into this monopolized universe of Steam just to get a chance for any kind of larger audience. perhaps the curation tools have gotten better than they used to, but in general - this arrangement is definitely not about benefiting developers. Steam and other platforms like it (like the Nintendo Switch store) are obviously aimed towards the general consumer. but even for consumers, they can be pretty unwieldy and overwhelming to navigate due to the sheer amount of stuff on there, and a lack of coherent organization. even as the dominant monopolized digital platform for PC games currently, your average normie adult who is only casually into videogames probably does not use Steam much if at all, and may not even have heard of it. it certainly favors a hardcore audience who is more deeply engaged. but perhaps most of all, it benefits online video content creators who have an endless assortment of games to draw from to make content around. online video on the internet of the moment is far more accessible than anything else out there, after all - far more than games themselves can be.

and i swear - each new game i seek out for Next Fest, regardless of the quality - a large majority of them seem to be the first game by that particular developer up on Steam. i find this quite disturbing! and it's not because i don't want new developers in the space or whatever. like perhaps this is just because some of these developers worked on other projects that are not on Steam, or are under a different name. but there are absolutely a significant number of developers to where this is their first real project of any kind. Steam is the default digital platform du jour now, and to any eager developers looking to jump into commercial game development, it is basically a requirement. why not just jump in right away to where the most people are? 

and will these new people ever stick around and make another game after? or will they jump aboard this train briefly, like so many others before them, and then, like so many others before them, realize it's not worth it and quit? imagine if every eight or so out of ten musical artists you discovered, you were always encountering their first and only album? wouldn't you start to get a really eerie feeling about that after all? like, where did the other people go?? it really just adds to the feeling of disposability of the entire process and undermines the supposed sanctity of a platform like Steam as the "big leagues". as a developer, if you fall by the wayside - there are always endless new faces to replace you. even developers who reach a decent amount of success and visibility have a good chance of not finding the grind of making and marketing a commercial game really worth it to continue. 

i've seen so many people come and go from the game space since i started being involved about fifteen years ago and it's absolutely dizzying. it's easier than ever to get into game development - although it never seems to stop anyone from thinking they're the first to come up with ideas that have been done several times before. no broad awareness of anything but the most mainstream game history means the past is continually erased and rewritten, and the old becomes new again. everyone seems believe they're the exception. and then, once they realize they're very likely not, they leave embittered. or they deal with a gaming audience overwhelmingly either disinterested our outright hostile to their kind of work. but we never see those people, for the most part. and i dunno about you, but it feels like there's been this ongoing psychic backlash from our beloved gamer hordes ever since any of them had to experience the indignity, the shame, the horror, of having to HEAR the name of someone like Phil Fish. wait a second... this guy... sounds... PRETENTIOUS?? how... DARE you not center the Gamer AT ALL TIMES! our most blessed of creatures, our precious child. our sweet special gamer must always be king. it is the job of a developer to meekly bow in submission and be the true anonymous code monkey they are. for, you see, they can be replaced any time.

another strange thing to grapple with re: Steam as a platform is how it is far more global than anything one could have ever conceived of in previous eras. as a developer, it is genuinely extremely hard to know what kind of audience will stumble upon your work and expose it to broader daylight. i certainly never anticipated that anyone from Brazil or Latin America in general would have any engagement with my work at all, and yet i've noticed a lot of interest from there in my work over the years. and as a consumer, you rarely have any idea who made the game you're playing or where they came from. different ideas come and go rapidly, and some important context is often missing. this is how most people in the West played Japanese games (and how people in the the rest of the world played Western games), so it's just an inherent baked-in part of people's personal histories with videogames. as someone who is fervently anti-nationalist, i think this is one of the great aspects of games and online culture in general. we should not be restricted by borders - concepts and styles should intermix freely. the idea that i could encounter some work from someone of wildly different background and experience to me without it really even occurring to me as strange at all is really cool to me. it's one of the utopian promises of the internet. it's part of why i keep pushing work like the Doom wad A.L.T. even when they might have one or two questionable aspects about them. 

but the flipside here is this is also incredibly flattening - it potentially pushes towards a global homogenization of art. it risks applying a universal standard that crushes chances to build more unique indigenous styles. because within videogame culture, it's invariably the blessed Gamer, our special treat enjoyer who must always be centered - regardless of where you might be coming from as a creator. this is also why the "keep your politics out of my gaming" crowd has had ammo to be so loud for so long. they've traditionally been centered, regardless of the context a game they played has come from or how actually 'political' any of the games are. there's traditionally little tolerance for stepping outside established bounds and genres. as the African developers of the anti-imperialist themed heist game Relooted no doubt encountered after being on this month's Summer Game Fest stream, for one example, your game might not be represented very well in western media - and is far more likely to receive the ire of the typical highly mobilized racist and sexist western gamer audiences as a result.

this all is maybe why i'm so annoyed by Steam being categorized by at least one usually pretty on-point vocal tech critic who i'd rather not name as one of the few tech platforms that (to paraphrase) "just works" and is an unequivocal good. to say that Steam "just works" is grading on a really intense curve, and ignores the monopolization, the platform fees and less fair revshare vs. comparable platforms, the DRM, the absolute joke content moderation, the bizarre and troubling work environment at Valve, etcetera. 

tech platforms that provide basic services in a somewhat competent way that somewhat center the user instead of the shareholder are rare these days. especially ones that actually seem to have any kind of even passing interest in the creative space they exist to make money off of. and there's no doubt to me that leadership at Valve care more about games as a medium than leadership at Spotify care about recorded music as a medium, for example. partially because they're still actively (theoretically) trying to develop games. and that does mean something!

but still, that's such an immensely low bar! this means it's really easy to over-praise a platform for doing something that really shouldn't be that hard to do - mostly just because they were there first, and haven't horribly fucked it up yet. Patreon as a platform has managed to make a widely valuable space for creative people online like me, in spite of basically doing little to nothing but collect money from users while continually raising rates, and even fucking up its payment processing numerous times. they're one of the more basic useful services on the internet and they've almost completely fucked it up anyway. it shouldn't be this hard! so Steam is here, and it's what we've got. but please, my god: Valve doesn't deserve any of your glazing. these platforms are not our friends! especially not when they're basically unaccountable monopolies.

however, the one very small way i will praise Valve is: i find Steam Next Fest one of the few unequivocal good things they've done. i am a person who would like to experience a lot of different things without spending a huge amount of time or money doing so. it is a very nice feeling when i get to do this. it makes me feel special. and it is something i already get to do a little bit of when judging for festivals, or curating for the Experimental Game Showcase. it was and is one of my favorite things about playing free games. so getting a relaxed free glimpse into a bunch of these bigger and more ambitious commercial projects is very cool to me. i don't stream on twitch very often, but i started streaming a handful of demos around each Next Fest three years ago in June 2022 because i liked the idea so much. perhaps above all of those other things, it brings me back to encountering shareware compilations of games i grew up with on the PC in the 90's - another space where you could have a lot of fun even if you didn't actually own that many games.

perhaps it's me riding the high on both this year's Experimental Game Showcase (which you should watch) that i hosted and helped curate, or the recent Unearthed Treasure Room stream of recent overlooked games (which you should also watch) i co-hosted with esteemed game developer, musician, and critic Melos Han-Tani. or perhaps it's just morbid curiosity about the increasingly confusing and impenetrable game space where we're all disposable pawns in the hands of uncaring platform owners, obnoxious content creators, and special little treaty treat lover gamers. or perhaps it's my general existential dread about the state of the world and if, among war and fascism and many many other horrible things, trans people like me are going to continue to lose access to basic healthcare in my country of residence. BUT.... this time around, i went overboard, and played around twenty demos for Next Fest. many of these were games i had already thrown onto my Steam wishlist at some point, and many had demos that came out within the past year that i hadn't seen until now. 

i'm going to limit this post to the five (okay, six) game demos that i played were most interesting to me personally. as much as i'd love to include a write-up of every one i played, i am not going to do that. partially because it's a lot of work, and partially because i'm still too traumatized by the Blog Wars of the early/mid 2010's and i don't want to start a discourse about if i'm punching down or not on some smaller game i don't like. i mean, i personally don't think there should be a mandate towards bland positivity in criticism, especially with how little respect a lot of hugely popular content creators with far bigger platforms than someone like me have shown to developers who are still forced to prostrate themselves to them for exposure in the past. but i also don't want to be a scapegoat in that fight or start unnecessary drama. so sorry - we can table that discussion for now.

also - i don't mention them below, but in this round i played the narrative-heavy, LucasArts-esque coming of age point and click adventure Perfect Tides: Station to Station and the new big Bennett Foddy joint Baby Steps: i'd recommend them both. you should also play this year's IGF Grand Prize winner Consume Me's demo if you haven't.

but otherwise, here we go:

========================================================

Danchi Days by Sandy Power, Melos Han-Tani, and mogmu

okay, i already tricked you. i was going to save this one for last as a little surprise, because i felt like i might be showing too much bias if i included a game co-made by Melos Han-Tani (my Unearthed Treasure Room co-host) on here. but there are interesting things to talk about here that are maybe tangential to the experience of playing the game itself - or, at least, are something the game's larger themes introduce.

to just quickly summarize what you do in the game - it's a narrative game with light action, puzzle, and exploration elements. it features top-down, colorful but simple 2D graphics and a concept that was apparently inspired by a Japanese-only Gameboy Advance game called Sakura Momoko no Ukiuki Carnival from 2002. you play as a little girl named Hoshino who lives with her dad, grandma, and brother. at the very beginning of the game, your grandma trains you and your brother how to "look" around the world of the game in order to read signs and other environmental details. the system for “looking” in this game is distinct from just standing next to objects and hitting a use button - you have to aim at things to “look” at them at wait for a cursor to move over them. the advantage here is you can also "look" at things that are farther than one unit away from you. as far as i can tell, there's no real challenge to doing this. the game generally doesn't emphasize reflexes too much. but i think it's interesting how very simple actions like even just looking at an object are recontextualized in ways that maybe don't necessarily add a lot of difficulty or challenge, but do make the action feel like a distinct thing vs. other videogames of the same type. what purpose doing this serves in overall shape of the game is basically up to you to determine - but maybe it will be made more clearer in the full game.

once you're successfully able to "look" at objects, your grandmother teaches you that you can, when moving around specific objects, kick up magical dust out of the environment. if enough magical dust is kicked up at once, Hoshino can summon it into her body and enter into these simple top-down grid-based movement minigames. usually these amount to collecting enough specific objects themed around the environment where the dust came from. you have a certain number of moves to do this before you run out of energy. these are generally very simple, and not particularly difficult to complete. again, it's interesting how this game introduces some surprisingly complex systems while appearing so simple, but does not make them difficult or challenging at all. later on you'll find out that by optimizing your movement in these minigames and using less of your energy, you can either achieve a bronze, silver, or gold medal in them. a higher medal rank means more points which you can use to unlock secret areas. higher ranks offer a little more challenge, but aren't too hard to achieve. the dust theme and the top-down minigames are also perhaps a reference to the Anodyne series by Melos (and Marina Kittaka's) Analgesic Productions, and certainly bring on similar themes to other games Melos has worked on.

after you, as Hoshino, demonstrate your ability to complete these minigames - your grandma congratulates you and says you'll be an expert in no time. the game then abruptly fast forwards several years into the future. right when this was happening in the game, i had the thought in my head of "gee i have a strange feeling this game is setting me up for some kind of Mother 3-esque tragedy." but instead of setting up foreshadowing for some later point in the game, you're matter-of-factly thrown right into it in the next scene. Hoshino's grandma now is completely incapacitated in a wheelchair with dementia. she is basically unresponsive. your brother, who has now grown into a surly teenager, tells you to let go and that grandma is gone. but you are still obsessed with the idea that you can cure your grandmother’s dementia. 

the transition here from a very light tutorial to the much darker central theme of dementia is pretty jarring for something with such an otherwise cheery and upbeat presentation, especially which doesn't outwardly present that aspect in its advertisement. this moment honestly left me pretty emotional throughout the rest of the game. while you might not be doing anything else outwardly fucked up during the game and the tone is pretty happy throughout, the dementia colors the whole experience in a much more interesting way than it would without that as the central element of the story. 

one of the Steam reviews for the demo said "finally, a cozy game that is actually about something" which stuck with me. it's well-trod territory of discussion at this point, but one of my many issues with the genre of 'cozy' or 'wholesome' games is how many of them default towards this general cheery pastoral escapist aesthetic almost unthinkingly. there's an implication that all of these games are supposed to be approachable but trivial, so as to not alienate audiences. but many of them do this by also presenting as being diverse, egalitarian and "for all", even while having all these very ideologically weighted themes like escaping the city to the country and managing a small business that are totally unaddressed. in spite of some of the progressive imagery, these are generally not spaces for deep explorations of feelings or ideas at all. there's an inherent conservativeness to these games, and this label overall that clashes with the diverse and open-minded image they're trying to portray. 

Danchi Days, by comparison, feels genuinely subversive. it just throws the dementia in there right at the beginning as the central theme of the game and it doesn't feel the need to either equivocate about it or over-dramatize. which begs the other question: is this game for kids? it's surprisingly complex in terms of its ideas in a way that you wouldn't expect from something with this kind of simple gameboy advance-like presentation. but in terms of the gameplay it's pretty basic, and certainly could be played by kids. Melos said recently on bluesky: 

"One curious (minority) opinion on Danchi Days is that it is contradictory because 1. 'the gameplay is for kids' and 2. 'it can't be for kids' because it centers dementia, as if children aren't exposed - and perceptive - to death and destruction on a daily basis! re: 1 - why do people believe it's 'for kids'? Reasons include 'the gameplay is simple to understand'. Simple, versus... what? something where you manage numbers or cities or do 1000 quests? if a game needs to emulate work to be for adults, I will stick to kid games then. I think stuff for kids should engage with them as perceptive humans capable of thought and recognizing the complexity of the world. the sooner the better, look outside! 2 kinda relates to how Miyazaki/Ghibli stuff gets flattened all the time into an idyllic aesthetic. a good game should be some distillation of the complexity and imagination within our living reality." 

what Melos says here echoes some of my feeling about how this kind of twee idyllic pastoralism flattens more complex and multi-faceted media into another flavor of Thomas Kinkade-esque mawkish escapism. the ambiguity here of who this game is for is also clearly intentional, and is something you can feel playing it. while a lot of games Melos has worked on have been relatively accessible and simple challenge-wise, that's not necessarily the case for the most recent Analgesic Productions game Angeline Era, which is much more of a reflex-based action game. so clearly, the simpler and less intensely challenging design is an active and intentional choice. it's meant to draw out other parts of the experience, or perhaps suggest an alternative approach for design for these types of games.

all of this does also make me think of a much larger question - how much does the outward presentation really define everything about how we see what a game is supposed to be in this day and age? how much have appearances become the entire selling point and define all the assumptions we make about the relative function of games, to the detriment of everything else? and as a designer or artist - why has giving the audience exactly what it expects based on outward presentation been turned into almost an unending virtue, instead of something to be subverted or avoided? in spite of all the struggles to claim games as a consequential artistic territory over the last half-century, we're still looking at games primarily from the lens of product design. all attempts to do otherwise are seen as pie-in-the-sky and unrealistic to developers trying to make commercial games, and therefore must be cast off. doesn't that hobble our abilities tremendously as a creative medium? 

i think its fair to say that providing elements of an experience that cut against typical audience and genre expectations and aren't immediately apparent from marketing materials is still one of the major taboos around the game space - and perhaps all art in general right now in online spaces. in this way i think Danchi Days is challenging its audience more than a post-apocalyptic horror RPG like LISA: The Painful is challenging its audience - because you fully know what you're getting with the latter from the outset. the way games continually become siloed into rigid genre mandates is disturbing to me and i think does them no favors. the feeling of surprise is rarer than it should be, even with the amount of games that exist out there. and it's a shame that the way games are increasingly marketed online, and the reflexive fear of alienating angry audiences keeps people from exploring this realm very much.

i guess it's funny to say all of this too because outside of the main theme, this game isn't doing anything substantial to challenge and alienate its audience. in an attempt to awaken her grandmother more, Hoshino decides to resurrect these yearly things called Danchi festivals her grandmother used to run before she got dementia. in doing so, Hoshino discovers some imaginary (or maybe not?) monster companion long buried inside a tower who decides to join her on her mission and help her along. later, Hoshnio's dad helps her set up a website and make invitations to other people in the community, and post updates about the Danchi festival planning via her little pocket PC device. as Hoshino, you spend the rest of the time wandering around the facility your grandma lives in and connecting with the various older people who live there and inviting them to the festival as your monster friend follows you around. in between, you do those little action puzzle minigames occasionally that correspond to different parts of the environment. connection to the environment is clearly a large part of this game's themes as well, and central to the purpose of the Danchi festivals. the other major element of the game is a Hypnospace Outlaw-esque virtual world where all of the principal characters have their own little web 1.0-esque personal websites that reflect their very specific interests that you can use to help make connections with them.

so yeah - thematically, there are a strangely large number of elements to the game even though it has a very simple appearance, and nothing you do is particularly challenging. i managed to basically talk to all the neighbors and reach the end of the demo, so i'm curious to see where the story goes. it’s hard to know how much further the game will go into exploring the psychological storytelling and how much in the story is metaphorical, or if the dementia is really just the setup for an otherwise fairly light adventure. the almost infantilized dialogue with the characters and their fairly oversimplified special traits (like the above pictured local housewife Chathie who cannot stop talking for even a second) point at a more simple and childlike sort of narrative. but there's no reason to believe the writing couldn't shift tone at some point too. in fact, abrupt tonal shifts have been one of the principal elements of Analgesic/Melos's work. so i do really enjoy the ambiguities and surprising complexities of an experience like this where you would not normally expect to see it based on first glimpse. in some ways, it also feels more surprising to see it here than it does in something like Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, which is also a very unique and surprising game - though i personally prefer Anodyne 2's more obviously 'arty' approach.

but yeah, overall this game brought up some complex thoughts for me about the nature of our expectations for games from assumptions we make based on appearances. i in fact saw this game on one of the Summer Game Fest streams but passed over it completely at first because its appearance made it blend in so much with other games around it. the mostly child-like tone and relative lack of challenge means it won’t be for everyone, and as a player i tend to prefer a bit more outright surreality, a little more challenge to my puzzles, or a slightly more overtly darker tone. but it manages to be pretty engaging throughout regardless. and it definitely feels unique and not quite like anything else i’ve played because of that (other than other games by Melos/Analgesic). so - check it out!

 

Eclipsium by Housefire

okay, now here's one i actually have surprisingly little to say about. i saw this trailer pop up on youtube labeled as part of the PC Gaming Show around Summer Games Fest but i don’t know if it was actually part of the stream or not. as an aside, maybe it's just residual nostalgia from subscribing to PC Gamer starting around age ten or eleven - but the PC Gaming Show is the sole one of the bigger Summer Game Fest streams i find actually somewhat pleasant to put on in the background. 

anyway, Eclipsium is a walking sim that seems perhaps slightly ashamed to to admit that it is walking sim. there's no shame here, buddy! the visuals are obviously the most notable part of the whole experience - they have a very specific kind of pixelly dithered lo-res look that’s very striking and adds to the uncanniness of everything in every environment in the game. they're a bit like you’re looking at old interlaced video on a 90's interactive FMV CD-Rom game, or through some sort of foggy pixel window. this lo-fi dithered look really helps every environment you encounter feel very much specific to this game, and not generic or stock engine assets like a lot of first person walking sims can have a tendency to do. this highly specific uncanniness also extends to the color palette, which is intentionally limited in a way that older PC games are - causing some interesting sort of color bleed effects where colors normally far outside the range of what you would normally see in a higher color count are substituted because of the limited number of colors available in the palette. this creates some interesting artifacting that gives this game its unique look. and it's a neat trick overall, and i haven't seen tons of contemporary games do as an intentional aesthetic! 

of course, even though the visuals signal 90's, the game itself feels like a very modern experience to me. the navigation is pretty smooth- there's little of the choppiness of 90's FMV outside of the lower framerate on the hand animations. which, by the way - it's of course also impossible to talk about this game without mentioning your avatar's giant photographed hand that you see throughout your journey, which helps you navigate basic environmental puzzles. with each little environmental puzzle where you have to manipulate some object, there's a little hand animation that goes with it - which could either be seen as cute and charming quirk of the experience or maybe a bit chintzy and precious depending on who you are. i don’t know if any of these developers were ever part of the Haunted PS1 community or not, but it especially looks similar to games called RIVP-1 and RIVP-2 in one of the Madvent Calender compilations that involve tearing apart things in the environment with your giant rendered, low-framerate photographed hand like this one does. though perhaps overall this is not the most uncommon idea.

the experience of playing one is a bit hard to summarize? if you've played any sort of surreal walking sim from the past ten or fifteen years, you probably will get the drift. you start out outside on a camp in a mountaintop on an island outside of a very funky warped looking cabin. sometimes it's hard to tell how much details in the environment have an outright surreal/reality bending design vs. if that effect is being heavily enhanced by the grainy low-res visuals. there's no text instruction or dialogue in the game, but your goal you can pretty quickly surmise is to move towards a giant Oblivion/Sauron-esque glowing red eye in a tower across the water in the distance. this leads you to eventually descend into some slightly evil looking red caves. throughout the demo, implied horror elements are certainly present but only ever there with a kind of light touch. there are no monsters chasing you or giant piles of corpses, or anything like that. subtlety can be rare when it comes to these kinds of horror-adjacent games, so you have to treasure it when it's there. 

you wander around the evil caves for awhile and light various torches in the correct configuration to open up some gates. and then you reach a sort of industrial warehouse area filled with giant metal shipping containers, and solve various puzzles to lower the water that is blocking your path. there’s a cool bit of non-euclidean navigation throughout where you continually loop back around to old places and the environment has changed a little. the path forward ends up being in a different shipping container each time - as if these shipping containers all contain portals to other places. also if you die by falling into a pit or spending more than a few seconds in the water, the game puts you in a clone of what looks like your character's bedroom and makes the room's exit by some nearby area where you died - which is a cool effect.

if Danchi Days is a game where the experience of the playing is not entirely what you'd expect based on the surface appearance, this is a game where you can more or less anticipate exactly what it is by looking at the screenshots (beyond it being slightly less horror than you might guess). perhaps this is why this game has benefited from some attention - according to the developer as of February 5nd of this year it was one of the top 1000 wishlisted games on Steam. for an (apparent) first time developer, they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves! i guess that's what striking visuals get you in this day and age. one of the great mind tricks the Haunted PS1 community has pulled on a lot of gaming public is that as long as there's a vague suggestion of some horror elements, or possibly some implied lore elements, the public will basically tolerate any sort of "art game" type of experience without really any misgivings. i have to thank the zoomers for being the primary engine of this innovation. i notice a lot less active hostility towards a lot of "art" games than i used to, even when the audiences for the game aren't super large. an audience has been silently inculcated against aversion to walking sims, and i'm grateful for this mind trick.

after i got through the warehouse, there was a section with some sailing on a boat to a different island and a surreal horror setpiece involving twisting around a parallel underwater version of the world. that is where the demo ended. it's a beefy demo experience overall, though it certainly left me wanting more. while this is walking sim with light puzzle solving at its core, and it’s probably not going to show you anything you haven’t seen before - it’s also engaging throughout, and feels high effort enough to be unique the realm of surreal walking simulators. the subtle magical realism that doesn’t go for outright horror as much as just general atmosphere is really the biggest success of this game, for me. it's definitely one of those games where it doesn’t spell anything out at all and you can read into it however much or little you want. it's also blessedly free of Lore, which i appreciate given how many of these games aren't.

that said, it's probably the least deep or interesting game to talk about of the six here. it's more like a particularly well designed theme park ride with some nice sights and sounds. as far as i could tell, the story isn't really "about" anything and doesn't try to make any particular points about anything in any kind of explicit way. that might change outside the demo, but honestly that kind of experience is perfectly fine with me for a game like this. there are times i'm looking for a little more than a theme park ride - but in lieu of that, i'll certainly take what's given here. it's a low-key well crafted experience overall. the arc of the demo was a self-contained experience. even if the entire thing is very linear, the atmosphere and setpieces were cool, and all the non-euclidean stuff when it popped up really added a lot to the whole thing. given that i played this in the midst of around twenty different games for Next Fest, several of which experimented with various kinds of frustration and difficulty: a smoother experience like this was much appreciated.

 

Funi Raccoon Game by Crayon

a noble furry anarchist game embiggens the smallest man. the spirit of Glorious Trainwrecks is alive and well. not that i'm assuming the developer Crayon has familiarity with that community or most of the works it has produced, but this definitely feels like a higher effort/more polished version of a Glorious Trainwrecks game. you know what i'm talking about if you've ever seen one of Blake Andrews's games, or Revenge of the Sunfish before. and maybe the word “polish” seems silly to say about this game if you look at the screenshot above, but if you've played Glorious Trainwrecks games you know what i mean. Funi Racoon Game is a version of the kind of crude but spiritually bounteous Klik N' Play symphony that is a bit more commercially accessible, for better or for worse. it marries the cartoonish, dumpster-dived aesthetic of one of those kinds of games with open-ended, 3D, Katamari Damacy-style sanbox chaos. 

in many ways, Funi Raccoon Game establishes its own world and feels like an unfiltered free-associative look into the mind of its creator. in each area you have have these small chaotic 3D planes usually modeled after some kind of silly facsimile of real places - like office complexes and train stations. each place you go to are kind of small 3D islands floating in a void with tiled background skyboxes reminiscent of Mario 64. as your raccoon character, you jump and climb the various buildings and building-like structures that use low-res photo-sourced textures and simple geometry on these planes. throughout your time in the game, there are objects you can pick up and interact with that will sometimes do different things. picking up objects is especially important to your existence as a raccoon, for whatever reason, and any time you pick up a new one a "yippee!" sound will play and it'll count towards a larger total of collected items. there are also different entrances to other side areas you can find - either hidden, or out in the open through glowing yellow doors. the game will tell you on select menus when you enter into a given area how many sub-areas you've unlocked.

some areas involve little environmental puzzles you have to solve or animals/people/objects you can talk to. some just involve platforming and navigating the slightly jank jumping physics to get to the right place. there was one main area in this demo as far as i could tell - Norwich - and most things were based around it. there are other areas - like an office complex, or the waiting room where it instructs you to wait for a new version of the game that i missed when i streamed the demo initially, though. the music in Norwich plays this kind of silly filtered 90's-style hip-hop beat that sounds like you'd be likely to hear in some sort of skating game from the period. my favorite background track is in a secret area of a train station by a pool of water where a placid synth drone plays and a distorted voice you can only sort of hear mumbles a story about water sports in a childish tone, only to break out and say "get the fuck out of here, we straight up do not want you" in a louder, angrier tone and then return to the excited water sports talk. the track also ends abruptly and does not loop, leading to an eerie silence if you linger in the area afterward.

throughout the stages sometimes there are also comic-panel like billboards that will remind you of some feature in the game or instruct you on what you need to do. other areas will have secrets where it feels like you're clipping in between the building structures. and throughout there’s very clearly an anarchic internetty sensibility to the humor in the game, with lots of random explosions and janky 3D physics objects ala Goat Simulator or something similar. in one area you can steal a gun from a cop and then a massive array of cop cars immediately mob you everywhere you go in the level - maybe the most realistic part of the game. the design similarly feels very improvisational, intentionally throwing into ridiculous situations or exaggerating moments that happen for comedic effect. but the world also feels much more specific to the game, and there's less 'lol random' humor going on here than in a lot of other internet meme-style games. not to mention that it feels more consciously designed in several ways - all of the little secrets and different ways to navigate each environment make it fun to explore and pick up objects just to see what will happen. the ways the game doesn't try to be logical at all or justify what it is while still having its own kind of very specific logic makes it feel like a more sandboxy and commercially accessible version of something like my own game Problem Attic.

in the setup of the game, there is a fake OS that looks like a combo of C64-era of computers and a 90's-style web browser. the screen resolution is appropriately squashed like a 90's PC game would be as well - one of the many games i played in this round of demos to actually do that. perhaps more and more of us are trying to escape the hegemony of HD and widescreen resolutions. you have a central dumpster server room that's kind of connected to everything in the game, though you can only access one or two primary areas and its off-shoot secondary areas in the demo. at the beginning of the game, the character select screen of smaller raccoons moving around and carrying giant 80's or 90's style beige CRT computer monitors reminds me both a little of Katamari Damacy's character select, and also Super Mario Bros 3's title screen. and this actually gets me to something related to this that i wanted to talk about a little more...

i've said before that one of my favorite games of all-time is Super Mario Bros 3. as a small child it was probably the most formative game for me, but it's worth articulating why, specifically because so few accounts of childhood nostalgia for popular games like this ever seem to. i think i saw something in SMB3 that i also saw with my favorite Looney Tunes shorts as a kid - a kind of expressive squashing and stretching and playing with the medium it's working within. there's the famous silent title screen cutscene where the title of "Super Mario Bros. 3" drops down with shaky thud on the screen and a markedly more intentionally cartoony looking font than previous SMB games. and then you see Mario and Luigi there like these little puppets on a stage, jumping on each other and bumping into various hazards and powerups you encounter through the game. this doubles as a quick little intro tutorial on some of the ways you can interact in the game as Mario or Luigi (and also implicitly references the battle mode you can enter in two player), and it tells you to expect some goofy chaos throughout the game. 

but there's another element being set up here. the root of Nintendo's appeal as a game company was always in animation, because it was Miyamoto's background. and the theatrical elements are intentionally played up in SMB3. in 1988 upon the original Japanese release of SMB3 Nintendo was only at the very beginning of being the forever entertainment behemoth it's become: a company with a surprise generational-defining hit console in a still fledgling medium. throughout the second half of the 80's and the 90's they were still trying to find their footing on what videogames, and specifically their games, could look like the future. SMB3 feels like a conscious commentary on the sudden popularity of Mario as a consequential symbol of entertainment media. it attempts subvert the formula SMB1 and 2 (what we might know as The Lost Levels in the west) that had become kind of staid by stretching it in as many directions as possible. SMB3's levels move in all kinds of different directions and dimensions. most have one or two distinct ideas to them and then just end, sort of like they're some kind of 1-minute punk song. there is just something kind of silly and loose feeling about a lot of SMB3 (or the SMB2 we got in the West, Doki Doki Panic, for that matter) like a goofy little playground of rule-breaking that wasn't present in the more tight platforming of the first game. this kind of sensibility is more Bob Clampett or Tex Avery or Chuck Jones rather than Walt Disney. if Disney tried to imagine an idealized and happy world you'd wish to escape into, those Looney Tunes guys wanted to play with the artifice of the medium and have you look behind the curtain, to see how it all works. they wanted to show you why it's all a show.

this is where the imagery of the red theatrical curtain comes in for SMB3, and why you exit every level by walking into the black void of backstage. it's there in the diorama-like structure of each of the individual worlds, or how you can even walk behind stage decorations at times to access secrets (which is hinted at by the title screen itself). this is all interesting to me specifically Nintendo is much more often a Disney analogue, where pastoral elements of an older era are romanticized. The Legend of Zelda is meant to capture a sort of natural world that didn't exist in Japan anymore by the time it was made thanks to rapid industrialization, but still could exist in the popular imagination. in that way, it's much more similar to how Walt Disney went to great lengths to push those who worked for him to recreate idealized versions of his own Kansas childhood in his movies and in Disney Land/Disney World. 

for Nintendo, playing with the tools of medium expressively has always been important. and the wild more anarchic side of this does still exist in the niche outings like Warioware or Rhythm Tengoku games, but it's generally far more constrained and restricted in the mainstream games. sometimes it's not clear if the experimentations are more stiff and conservative than they did before when the medium was still fresher, or it's just that Nintendo never really changed or evolved past what they set into motion with SMB3. but even arguably by Super Mario World with its sprawling overworld and extensive secrets, Nintendo were starting to codify what Mario was and it was beginning to lose a little bit of the still formless energy of Super Mario Bros 3 or Doki Doki Panic. certainly, even after the Switch era infused a little bit more lifeblood into it, the Mario series has been the most rote and safe of their franchises for a pretty long time. 

Nintendo right now seems to exist firstly as a guardian of IP, a hegemonic cultural force who exists to embody some vague notion of "play" in a diminishing monoculture. they harshly discipline any copyright violators out there who might try and do anything with their work or stretch it beyond their rigidly defined bounds. with every big release Nintendo ordains to reassert its own dominance over the idea of childhood "magic" and "play" in the games realm with their mainline franchise games, all so tearful adults and their children can rake over some money to re-experience some lost past. and to be fair, many times these mainline Nintendo games are still broadly more creative than what other mainstream games will offer, if only because Nintendo has been grandfathered into this role culturally. but the parameters that they're working within are still very limited due to their role as the hegemonic family-friendly company. even when they are wilder, the experiments in these games can feel just as much like they're stiffly holding the medium back from exploring its true potential than they are expanding it. especially when you go beyond their specialty realm of playful mechanics and into content that challenges audiences in any kind of ideological way. the recent surreal creepypasta Mario 64 romhack B3313 has really stuck with me specifically because it's the kind of experience Nintendo never could, or would, provide. and it recontextualizes that in a very haunting, if sometimes slightly juvenile, way.

all of this is to say, i think Funi Raccoon Game has far more in common with SMB3 to me than the products that Nintendo makes now. the feeling of genuine surprise is something Nintendo tries to snuff out as much, if not more, than it tries to create in their products now. the sketchy looseness of Funi Raccoon rhymes with a lot of games people love like SMB3 or Katamari, but in a homemade and distinctly personal way that feels deeply unique. it sets into motion the potential of those games and moves beyond all the ways they're restricted by trying to be fully polished, mainstream commercial products. those who now declare that videogames are gradually losing their "weirdness" would best look at games like this. there is a huge necessity to supporting these kinds of games not just from some kind of symbolic "it makes me feel good about myself" angle - but more because the more visible and broadly celebrated the weirder niche stuff is, the more acceptable it becomes for mainstream games to adapt those ideas too. we have to reclaim the spirit of games like Super Mario Bros 3 by taking it further than it could ever go itself. that's the next step - the spirit that lives beyond the hegemonic IPs. 

and honestly part of the reason for my Glorious Trainwrecks comparison for Funi Raccoon Game is it goes back to what i liked about so many particularly free indie games circa the late 00’s/early 2010’s. at that point in time, there was this idea that games had become staid and solidified into a kind of forever mediocrity. as smaller scale designers, we had to re-evaluate what function game served at some level and offer something different. that was a time as a free indie game maker to invent some kind of new form, because you had no idea what would take off and take root. many people (including me!) were trying to do very novel or unusual takes on games in a sort of anarchic way as a result. that felt like the time where the door was open to be doing it. and some audiences were very hostile to this - but others supported it and helped some games become bigger.

sadly, that spirit just got gradually absorbed into commercial game making that has attempted to smooth a lot of these elements out and professionalize the process of making indie games. i often worry about academic game programs like the one i teach at NYU are contributing to this in some way. for all the current talk about "deprofessionalization" in the current game industry, the amount of amateurs acting like professionals in the hope that it will secure them acceptance and a career in the space has skyrocketed to absurd proportions. perhaps less people are material "professionals" (whatever that really means tbh), but everyone seems to want to act like a professional. and tbh what i liked the most about this demo is how much this game was its own thing - and not trying to obviously model itself after other games, in the same way some of those earlier free indie games were. it feels like it’s bringing back that sort of lineage of anarchic and loose experiences that aren't concerned with looking "professional", whether consciously or not. and in an era of so much obvious nostalgia aping of particular games from twenty or thirty years ago, i couldn’t be happier to see some of that spirit come back.

so yeah - fully recommended! AND - if you like it, you should support the currently still active Kickstarter so the developer can finish the game.

 

Am I Nima by HO! Games

another game i don't have tons to say about, mostly because the demo i experienced was short. HOWEVER, i did not realize until just now looking it up that there are in fact multiple endings to this demo, so more on that in a second. but the premise is you’re like a pre-teen girl who is actively being tied up and held hostage by her mother for some kind of reason involving a scientific experiment. there’s an implication that you have been violent and/or have behavioral issues in the past, and that’s why you're being held hostage. though it’s hard to know if that’s the actual reason, or that's simply the justification your mom makes for treating you the way she does. you keep losing your memory, so you have this system where you can talk to your mom to help regain memories. and for each thing you talk about, or for each object you will interact with in the environment, it brings up different conversational subjects that come up inside your head that you can then use in conversation.

the game is heavily dialogue based, and mostly unfolds as interactive fiction with occasional sections where you can sometimes explore or examine objects the environment around you. the illustrations have a warped, fish-eye like quality to their perspective which clearly enhance the feeling of fear and unfamiliarity your protagonist is dealing with. the colors in the game also heavily emphasize bright neon greens and reds, sort of like an uncomfortable bright florescent light shining directly onto your face in an otherwise dark room. it makes you feel like, as Nima, you're some kind of test subject... so this is appropriate. almost as if you're an experiment, and in the same way the dialogue options are there to help you remember, they are training you to remember what your mom wants you to remember. based on the fact that this demo does in fact have multiple endings and is labeled "Choose Your Own Adventure" on Steam, it seems at least to some extent to be “choices matter” kind of game in the conversational system, and what topics you bring up from your head in specific moments will affect what happens in the story. a lot of this connects back to how much you're willing to call out your mom.

i had a couple conversations with the mom, and a section in between where i looked around at numerous trinkets in my bedroom to remember more about myself so that i had more topics to bring up in the subsequent conversation. you find out over the course of these conversations that you had a good relationship with your dad but he died awhile back, and also that your mom is some kind of archaeologist. your mom claims you lost your memory from hitting your head while swimming, but you are clearly aware that she regularly lies about this sort of thing and you have no reason to trust her whatsoever. much of the conversations involve you trying to remember while also performing what you think she wants so as not to anger or further inflame her, as she gaslights you by trying to reassure you that she knows what's best and only cares about your well-being.

i should mention that i saw this game in the Southeast Asian Games Showcase stream for Summer Game Fest. what attracted me to this game in the first place was the disturbing rattling sound design and fish eye visuals in the trailer. i'm definitely glad i stuck around to check the game out, because you never know what kind of experience you're in for from just watching a brief trailer. and clearly i'm not the only one who felt that way - i found out from looking it up, that as of writing it's the 595th most wishlisted game on Steam. so i would go so far as to call this game Actually Popular as far as these types of games go. but because it was in the Southeast Asian Games Showcase, i imagine some of the cultural experiences bought up in the game are perhaps a little specific to Southeast Asia - particularly the weirdly gritty, nasty bowl of congee (rice porridge) pictured above with twigs and shit sticking out of it that your mother hands you as food. i mostly say that because some of the ideas or imagery might resonate more strongly with you, depending on your own background. but i will say, the emotions captured do feel pretty universal regardless - more on that later, though.

on my run through i got the "bad" ending and figured that was it, so didn't push further. but i guess this demo was popular enough that i just now found from one of those numerous youtube lore channels named GamerSault which attempts to "explain" the story of the demo of the game that there are multiple endings. from this i also learned you realize more about what specifically is happening with your mother the more endings you explore, and a potential way out of escaping this cycle. this is about all i got out of that video unfortunately: because i always find these sorts of lore channels a really mind-numbing and clickbaity way to analyze any kind of fiction. i know as a player i'm much less interested in the specific lore of the plot elements and more what the story is supposed to capture or represent in a broader sense. to me, in stories like this, supernatural or sci-fi elements are really there to exist or dramatize existing dynamics that exist in real life rather than be something that you follow to the letter of the law as entertainment but will never apply to your own life. but again, this is the same old problem with the product-oriented way so many people look at fiction in general, but especially games. they're abstract puzzles to be solved and pore over, they're not fiction to analyze and apply to your own life.

but yeah, independent of the more exaggerated sci-fi or horror elements of the plot, this is an abusive mom simulator. and i identified a great deal with this protagonist and her relationship with her mom in many ways. particularly the way the conversation system kind of has this element of “things you can’t say”, like doing the correct performance in order to avoid violence or confrontation with an oversensitive parent who cannot face up to reality. the way her mom uses shame (“i’m just trying my best”) and the hollow performance of being a supportive parent to gaslight about other abusive stuff that clearly did happen (but as a child you tend to lack the words and are not in any kind of position of power to assert that) is something i know i could relate to far too much!! of course you could relate it back to the dreaded Lore of the character to explain this - but perhaps the fact that you keep losing your memory is about the cycles of abuse, and how dealing with that does mean actively confronting buried memories that are incredibly hard to access in traumatic situations. 

i think with Lore-based analysis in general my fear is always that the way these sorts of games are talked about ignores the attempts to engage with larger themes and ideas and just substitutes a sort of morbid gawking. in other words, it's the true crime-obsessed mom way of looking at the world. everything is always an isolated episode of violence that you fixate on but you cannot apply it to larger life. and i think it’s actually rare you see this kind of abusive dynamic effectively captured in game form, even in a supernatural permutation like this - so i really liked that about it. oftentimes games or other media will go way more over-the-top about real life elements and undercut the internal realism of the story. but this one centers the abusive parent-child dynamic in a way that feels emotionally realistic, even if the literal circumstances aren't. so i hope this one continues on in that direction as the plot moves on, and doesn't squander the premise with anything too out of left-field.

i honestly wish there was more to this demo, though that’s a good problem to have. it's definitely something i’m going to be checking out more of, though i do have a hard time knowing where exactly the game is going to go. anytime anything with a very sensitive emotional narrative gets a degree of attention placed on it i get a little frightened that the fandom is going to try and unduly influence the game and twist it in weird directions. so we'll just have to put a pin in this and see where it ends up later on. but i am glad i saw this pop up on the on one of the showcase streams at Summer Game Fest this year, because encountering an experience that does a really good job exploring real life psychological conflict that you don’t see too much of in games is exactly the reason to brave the mind-numbing task of watching a Summer Game Fest stream.

 

Hark The Ghoul by Deep Denizens

i'll just throw this out there right now - discourse around what qualifies as "good level design" in the game sphere never fails to fill me with dread. a lot of different parties have tried to define exactly what "good level design" means over the years, and inevitably the most infuriating 101-style interpretations are the ones that take over in the popular consciousness. like all things, it turns out every aspect of making games is very contextual - who knew! even level designer extraordinaire and former collaborator of mine Robert Yang recently disowned his previous "whiteboard test" meme image that had been widely spread around on social media for years for being overly reductive. he describes the image in a recent talk as: "...like some sort of secret imaginary invisible line that's mind controlling us, misleading and misguiding us along the wrong corridor" 

but these reductive interpretations never fail to take over regardless. so what is it exactly about this that makes it so effectively mind control us? i know personally that when a lot of people will reference "good level design" casually, independent of anything else, i just genuinely just have no idea what exactly they're even talking about half the time. is good level design something that "teaches the player how to play the game" as the old cliche about Mario Bros 1-1 goes? is it something that is tightly choreographed and controlled, or is it something that is expressive and open-ended? whatever it is, there always seems to be an implied objective standard there on the part of the observer, or at least some sort of cliche that evinces a reaction. once again, in reality it turns out you can't reduce a game to "oh the level design is good" without describing what it actually is and what function it serves in the game itself. but that doesn't work in casual conversation, or on most youtube videos, or perhaps in the board rooms of big game companies. so, again, the tendency is to reduce and turn it back to a sort of bland one-size-fits all product design approach instead of something more holistic. 

and i guess i can extend this thought to "best practices" in general, which always feel to me (if i'm being very generous) more about an expression of compassion and an intuitive understanding designers have for the kind of experience players are going to have, or the experience designers are going to have while making the game itself. so many games rotely implement "best practices" without any interest in context or feeling the game is trying to create. and in spite of the constant presence of these "best practices", it doesn't stop many games from feeling cold and soulless. Shigeru Miyamoto (to go back to the Mario well again) intuitively understood early on in his career that a lot of people would like to move a little likeable cartoon guy around - and that when they do, they want him to feel fun and responsive like a cartoon guy, and not like a stiff tank or a spaceship. this was part of the appeal of stuff like Pac-Man, after all - it felt fun and relatable instead of cold and mechanistic. seeing this cartoon character move around in an abstract space brings to life a natural feeling that makes a strange kind of sense for the tools you're given, even if it's not "logical" or whatever. the job of Nintendo has always been to find the versions of that they feel works within the worlds they've created - with varying degrees of success.

so maybe this is less about "good game design" and more about skillfully and effectively employing artistry in a way that has some sort of unconscious effect on players. as a someone who is considered by some people to be an "art game" person, i don't think people realize how fine the line is for me between an "art game" and a really gamey-ass game that really effectively captures a certain type of experience. there are plenty of gamey-ass games i really like (like Super Mario Bros 3 or Resident Evil 4), and many of them are only one or two major changes away from really being something that could be considered an "art game". it's a very fine line - and the more you can recognize, the blurrier it gets.

but anyway, Hark The Ghoul brought up this feeling in me a bit. it is a King's Field style game with PS1 style graphics, and i never managed to get on board the FromSoft or Soulsborne train personally. but i saw it on another one of the many Summer Game Fest streams (this time the Future Game Show stream... i'm not sure what exactly is futuristic about it). something about how the game looked immediately struck me in a positive way, so i decided to try out. right from the outset, i could tell that Hark The Ghoul was one of those gamey-ass games that i nonetheless contains a lot of artful design. the combat, though slow, is immediately engaging and feels consequential even when you're fighting with the lowest level Ghoul Grub monsters. you also get that little dopamine rush from constantly bust little pods littering the environment open and sometimes getting loot like you're in Diablo. the bug-like enemy design is clearly taking on a Hollow Knight inspiration, but not in a way that is fan-fictiony, and there seems to be a decent amount of variation in types of monsters. the game also has kind of a perfect color palette, with these like dark muted browns, oranges and blue-greens that are atmospheric but pleasant on the eyes. the ambient music also adds to the feeling of the visuals, particularly one of the dark ambient tracks in the main city area.

the level design in particular really stuck out to me as someone who has played tons of DOOM wads. it contains tons of interconnected pathways, and even at the beginning of the experience there are multiple secrets you can find with just a little bit of exploring. these reward attentive players with refills on health, magic, or upgrades that you can make whenever you find the save point fruit tress scattered throughout the game. perhaps most importantly of all, YOU CAN KICK THINGS!!! you can kick enemies into pits just like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (though it's not as ragdoll-y and seems less easy to do in this game), and you can more usefully kick around boxes to help you reach secret areas. the box kicking ends up becoming important pretty early on, as verticality and jumping features heavily in the game - especially in the city area of the demo. i think this is one way the game really distinguished itself vs. my expectations for it as a first person dungeon-crawler, because the added vertical dimension to the levels really opens up so many avenues for secrets and exploration that wouldn't be there otherwise.

but like i was getting into earlier, a lot of parts of the game kind of embody some kind of idea that you could define as "good game design" or "best practices": the combat was well balanced and challenging in spots without being too difficult. the upgrades and save points felt incredibly well placed to where they were infrequent enough to not be everywhere, but frequent to where you didn't have to go very far if you died and need to start over, or save to refill your health. the levels are multifaceted and twist and turn around without being too confusing, and the two main areas that i saw were substantially different in mood and feeling in a positive way. in general, all the systems in the game felt well considered and not just like they were aping something just to ape something. and i think this has less to do with any kind of "best practices" and more to do with the designers being smart and compassionate towards their audience. the iterations of the Soulsborne/King's Field formula feel very specific to the game itself, and not just like they're carrying some kind of past genre cliche over for nostalgia or fandom reasons. 

i should mention that i especially really loved the atmosphere of the city area where the game moves out of some caverns and transitions from just a straight dungeon crawler to a bit more of a melancholy narrative mood piece. here in the city, you have some friendlies you can talk to from various species, and also some new enemies to encounter - like xenophobic villagers who try and attack you with shovels (this might have been because of the "outsider" class i selected for my character at the beginning though), or tough guys carrying guns you need to be quick on your feet with. in the city there are also more environmental details like streetlights you can sometimes knock over, or giant animals dying in the street which imply some kind of greater gothic horror story (is there a plague going on?). in general, the level design and environmental detail add a lot of subtle touches of implied narrative that don't really overtake the main experience of the combat, but color out what you're doing in a compelling way. this is what compelled me the most of anything in the game, perhaps, and i'd be interested in seeing much more of where this aspect goes when the game is finished.

and, once again: big surprise, i must not be the only person who feels this way because this game is somewhere in the 700-range of most wishlisted games on Steam. i don't claim to always have particularly original thoughts or anything - but there are also a lot of broadly popular and critically beloved games i don't actually enjoy playing much at all. my experience with games like last year's Mouthwashing that happened to hit the zeitgeist and i play because they looked interesting enough to me just led to disappointment. sometimes this overly colors my experience towards expressing negativity about any stuff that is popular. popularity is not at all correlated with quality in my mind because of just having so many personal experiences to the contrary. but i guess the converse is just as true: just because something is popular, doesn't mean it isn't good. and that's very much the case with Hark The Ghoul. and the world of this demo is already fully and effectively realized, so there's no reason to believe it won't continue on in that direction. 

maybe it's not a great cultural victory or reinventing the wheel to make another good Kings Field type of game. but, really, making any kind of compelling and unique experience that also happens to be a well balanced and fun game is not easy to do, regardless of what you're doing. so congratulations, Deep Denizens: you've got a good one on your hands. i really don’t have enough good things to say about it. it may not be totally reconfiguring how i look at games, but it's exactly the kind of thing i want to find on Steam, or off some stream out of the blue and play. 

so you can safely ignore the rant about "best practices"/"good design" if you want. just please play the demo, and buy it whenever the full version comes out (supposedly sometime in 2026) - because i'm pretty confident that this is going to be a gem that a lot of people will like!

 

Complex 629 by Lillexstudios

okay, i saved the strangest and most interesting game for last. this is really the platonic ideal of something just totally weird and inexplicable you find from digging through the depths of Steam pages or itch.io. it's certainly not ever the sort of thing you'd find getting bucket-loads of wishlists, or placed on some prominent stream like several of the others mentioned in this post. finding games like this is like what our dearly departed friend David Lynch described as "catching the big fish" to me. purely a random entry in my final browse through of the long list of Steam demos that looked strange enough that i just said “uh sure, might as well add this to the pile” as a bit of an afterthought that i played towards the end of my time with these demos. and i'm glad i did!

i’m not sure i want to describe what this is like to play too much, because it is absolutely something people should check out. it's a top-down 2D game that looks a bit like RPG Maker horror, or perhaps some kind of Game Maker game from the 2000's (and it is, unsurprisingly, made in Game Maker). you’re a blobby blue humanoid guy with two giant hands that are your principal ways with interacting with the world. you can move the snow that litters the entire environment around with these hands using your two mouse buttons, or hold other objects in them to carry around, or talk to people by hitting them with one of your hands. in the main(?) area the game you need to move the snow around to clear a path for yourself through these strange uncanny Yume Nikki-like hallways and avoid a giant crawling monster who eats you if you get too close called “The Grandfather”. this creature is presumably called that because they make a sound like a grandfather clock and have a giant clock on their head. when you get too close to "The Grandfather" you will hear the ominous ticking get louder and a little stopwatch icon will appear over your head. if you succumb to "The Grandfather" you have to go to the afterlife, a floating void where an agitated bunny figure tells you that you're dead and you have to pay a toll to resurrect. 

and you get that toll money from the other primary thing you do in this game - constantly vacuuming up giant coins littered all over the environment. this money can help you buy various items that make some of moving around slightly easier (though not by much). a great deal of the game is either spent vacuuming coins or feverishly moving snow around with the two mouse buttons in the hope that you can avoid imminent monster death and reach the next area. in between, you can go to various places like a giant market or a gym and talk to people who say cryptic things, though they sometimes are more cogent. the environment is just littered with stuff everywhere, mostly furniture, including in the hallways for seemingly unknown reasons. i know i use this word a lot, but it is truly uncanny the amount of furniture that litters the various rooms in this game. you also come upon these floating hearts that, when picked up, a stabbing animation will display through the heart, and it will disappear. this will unlock a new somewhat lurid and flowery journal entry in the quite fascinatingly graphic designed main menu that is read in a kind of pitched old Macintosh robovoice circa Radiohead's "Fitter Happier".

the whole experience feels like a fever dream. the grandfather monster really captures a creeping feeling of anxiety so well, and some of the cryptic and strange dialogue seem to show something of a personal psychological state of paranoia. it does feel like a world where everything has gone deeply wrong and everyone has given up on taking care of basic needs to go down various esoteric self-absorbed rabbitholes. maybe a bit something like... our own world currently, to be extremely heavy-handed about it. it does very much feel like you’re living in someone else’s head in the most visceral sense. i think the creator is from Iceland, and that would explain how sometimes the dialogue does not feel like it could be written by someone who has English as their first language. but i've never seen any other games by them, so i don't know if this is their first foray in the field. but it’s the closest anything recent has come to reminding me of like a Yume Nikki type abstract inexplicable nightmare experience for a long while.  

the one let's play i found on youtube of the demo may or may not be from an earlier version, because the map is different. but towards the beginning of the video, in between rattling on about various modern game engines, the let's player "LiveLick" makes an observation about how the game reminded him of something from the flash era. he then begins to wax rhapsodically about how the flash era introduced a lot of experimentation that we don't see anymore, and was a "renaissance of art" for games. clearly LiveLick is nostalgic - and perhaps this is a sign. last year's UFO 50's re-litigating of the prime Tigsource era already pulled me back into it a bit. but every time i revisit La La Land 1-5 i feel the promise of games that are so simple, so personal, but so thematically complex. La La Land 1-5 is a short series of small snippets that suggests at a way greater world somehow, and has stuck with me vastly more all these years than so many larger scale and larger budget games have. Complex 629 brings up similar feelings that i thought were long buried.

the same goes with many increpare games from the late 2000's and early 2010's. but by and large, while these games might have been influential they were never respectable or profitable enough to be a big industry unto themselves, and there was a perception they needed to be shed for more commercially accessible fare. but if you've read my California Problem post you probably already know about that. these were not products, they were open-ended experiences that expanded my ideas of what was possible for the artform - far more than mainstream entries like Braid or Journey that openly purported to push the boundaries did. and that's partially because these less respectable smaller free games felt accessible - they felt doable, but that didn't take away from their magic. it's similar to how a lo-fi Guided By Voices song also feels doable to write for yourself. and maybe you won't be able recreate the magic of that, but at least it can get you to try - and that in itself is a very special thing, because it helps you unlock a creative space within yourself. 

of course i don't want to pretend like there aren't the real heads on itch.io making this sort of work in the ensuing years. games by Sylvie or Hubol continue to conjure up their own personal version of this sort of era. but the community that drives them is really small and there's less a sense of discovery of the unknown and more a sense of just preserving something that's necessary to exist. perhaps a desire to revisit the sort of anarchic character of that era is changing as people become more alienated from games as a commercial marketplace of bland mandates that must be met to appease gamer audiences, but we'll have to see where it goes.

but yeah, anyway - Complex 629 definitely brought back all of those feelings of an earlier era of loose experimentation very powerfully. it put me right back in that space that i thought might be dead and gone. so if anything about Complex 629 sounds interesting to you, just play this demo. it's such a visceral and gritty portrait of a kind of bad dream world that defies easy explanation or logic. i'm going to revisit the demo at some point, and i’m going to be thinking about what i already saw for awhile. as long as you don't mind shoveling around a bunch of snow in a feverish effort to avoiding the big bad monster, you'll have a very memorable time.

----------------------------------------------

so there you have it! i already far exceeded the amount of words i intended for this post, so i won't hang around much longer. watch the Unearthed Treasure Room stream from earlier this month that i co-hosted if you haven't. and if you don't already, please and consider subbing to my Patreon! 

as far as these games go, i recommend all mentioned above in this post. but i was most drawn to Funi Raccoon Game, Hark The Ghoul, and Complex 629 if you want to keep score. Raccoon Game and Complex 629 resurrected that earlier era of anarchic free game experimentation buried deep within my body that i hope to see come back in more full force in the future, and Hark The Ghoul is just a really excellent game-ass game. wishlist them all on Steam!! and support Funi Raccoon Game on kickstarter! bye!

- liz