#note that this is less based on the sprite art and more on how dice are designed.

[tainebot01]

I thought about the Pippins for too long. Send help.

[19thperson]

19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions Jun 2025 Edition - Day 7

Day 1/Day 2/Day 3/Day 4/Day 5/Day 6

Last day. Exausted. Notes will be a bit less edited I guess.

Rue Valley

Time Loop Disco Elysium.

At 8:00 PM, Eugene Harrow finishes his first session of court appointed therapy, held at the Rue Valley hotel, a run down hotel in the middle of nowhere. At 8:47 PM, a nuke goes off. At 8:00 PM, Eugene Harrow finishes his first session of court appointed therapy.

I feel sorry for the state of the disco-like. It's not often that the first title in a sub-genre knocks it out of the park like that. It's a tough act to follow.

Rue Valley isn't reaching thay height yet. Its prose isn't as cutting, and Eugene, for all the possible permutations of mental problems you can give him, is no DuBois. Both lean toward the somewhat more generic. But I think the game knows it can't reach that height, and is aiming for something else.

The scope of the title seems a lot smaller. It seems the game will take place in a single location, with a smaller cast. Ideally the 47 minute loop will mean that the cast will be more reactive, have more permutations on where you go with them. Hard to tell with the demo alone, though.

I kinda dislike how this game handles the skill checks. Instead of Disco's dice roll, it's static. If you have x amount of personality trait, you pass. The variability comes with status effects that change your stats. Then again, if we're going to loop, failing something from a dice roll might get in the way.

Anyways I'm a sucker for time loop games so I'm in.

Ball x Pit

Twinstick Breakout Survivors

After an asteroid collision, ballbylon has fallen. Adventurers dive into the pit of what was a great city to search for riches

The game plays like a combination twinstick shooter and breakout. You shoot balls, they bounce against the enemies and walls, and if you catch them, you can reshoot them faster. Special balls have effects like causing status effects, spawning more balls, or doing AOE damage. Combine this with static effect upgrades to create synergies.

Behind all these systems, this is basically a vampire survivors like. You kill enemies to get gems, to upgrade your stuff, to keep the horde at bay. A gigantic DPS check.

I only fought one boss and it did add a wrinkle. It was a giant skeleton head and arms, and it could only be damaged by hitting its crown, meaning you needed to bank shot your way to the back.

In between runs you do base building. place structures to spawn resources, give effects, or unlock things. Harvest them by having little guys bounce around.

This is shaping up to be a perfectly cromulent survivorlike but seeing all these progression systems, alongside each character getting their own level up tracks, just made me feel tired.

Heatwave

Freeform Indie Fighter.

On a design level, this is an ambitious fighter, and there's a lot to like here. Multiple grooves with different base mechanics, assists, shorthops, super jumps, dashes and air dashes, parries, roman cancels, bursts, EX moves, guard cancels. There's a lot of ingredients in this soup. This is aiming to be a fighting game player's fighter. The AI in the arcade mode showed off some really interesting tech.

The problem is the art style. Not just on an aesthetic level. The incredibly low resolution sprites make the animation hard to read, at least for my eyes.

And the music… needs work. It's a bit flat right now.

There's a good fighting game somewhere in here but it's not exactly inviting me in.

Holstin

The most Polish survival horror possible.

The year is 1992. You play as Tomasz, whose friend Bartek went undercover in Jeziorne-Kolonia to investigate in the slaughterhouses. After he goes silent, Tomasz goes to retrieve him, only to find the town overrun with a creeping flesh substance, turning people into monsters.

Game has a very unique look. Seems to be mostly, if not entirely, sprites, arranged to make a 3d environment with dynamic lighting. Most traversal is an over the head isometric look, but aiming down the sights turns the game into an over the shoulder view.

The tone is very prototypical slavic dour. Your currency is cigarettes. Your healing item is herbal booze. Everyone is acting… incorrectly to this apocalypse. Either seemingly unaware it's going on, despite it happening in front of them, or treating it as "great, another fuckin thing on my plate."

At the very start you meet a scientist who claims to be partially responsible for what's happening trying to kill herself. When you take away her gun she seems less distraught and more annoyed.

Didn't feel "Scary" perse but had the usual survival horror tenseness. Limited inventory, scarce resources, limited save items. The classics.

Didn't finish it but that's more because I got the gist and wanted to get to another game.

Hotel Barcelona

Not sure what to make of this. Not much plot here right now. You play as Justine, a federal marshal heading to Hotel Barcelona searching for "the witch," alongside the spirit of serial killer Dr. Carnival. That's kind of all I got there.

The demo kind of throws you into the deep end with no intro or tutorial. just get to playing. And I feel that's a mistake here? It seems there are some weird systems in play, and I didn't understand all of them.

It's a 2d beat-em-up, where every stage is based on a classic horror movie genre. The levels branch into several routes before you hit the boss, and each door gives a different buff. There are random effects from the weather each attempt, and every time you retry, an echo of your last replay follows. Their attacks will also attack enemies.

You lose the ghost if you change route from last time, though, which really limits your options.

It has the problem of too much of your kit being hidden behind upgrade trees. It feels like the game expects several failed runs to build upgrades before allowing you your first win.

I'm not sure if I can call this grindy though. There is a dynamic I like. Each run is timed, so you can't sit back and grind enemies. If you don't spend your resources between runs, however, they are lost. So you need to try and optimize your resource farm.

I dunno. The base systems right now feel kinda stiff. Maybe it'll be less so once I have a proper moveset, tutorial, and more of a framing story.

Hirogami

Papercraft platformer.

You play the foldable hero Hiro on a quest to reactivate the shrines and stop the unspecified Blight. The gimmick here is that you can fold into separate forms with separate abilities on a moment's notice.

The demo has 3: the standard humanoid form for basic combat and exploration, an armadillo form for speedily rolling through breakable obstacles, and an inbetween "flat" form that can be used to glide through the air. The latter two makes me think there will be interesting movement tech for speedrunners, depending on how lenient the level design is.

The combat felt… prefunctory. Standard 3d platformer 3 hit string, with a charge attack I never used. Felt more useful for breaking stage hazards than fighting enemies.

The demo only had the first level, so it didn't exactly push me challenge-wise, but I enjoyed what I saw. It rewarded backtracking and detail hunting, and overall had a really good vibe.

Leap Galaxy

Alien Bunny Precision Platformer.

Super Meat Boy style platformer: short levels meant to be blitzed through as fast as possible, then replayed to shave down milliseconds. The physics feel good, the level design seems fair, and its 2 bit art style is really readable.

The main problem is probably less the game's fault and more my own:

The gimmick momentum mechanic is called the star. Which is essentially a high momentum dash in any of the four cardinal directions. The problem is it's shown as throwing a star behind you, launching yourself forward with the momentum. If you press dash-right, your player character shoots to the left to do it.

My brain immediately read the action as primarily shooting the projectile, not dashing. When I want to dash up, I hold down, because that's the direction I'm aiming the star. This is entirely as self-induced muscle memory problem, but it's something that I'll have to put effort in to unlearn in the full game.

Memory's Reach

First Person Puzzle Metroidvania.

You play as a human explorer searching the planet Virishal, and the ruins of the once great Mairi empire. Dig through abandoned facilities slowly being overtaken by nature, as you look for the history of this planet and its civilization's downfall.

The game takes a lot of its design language from Metroid prime, from its visor HUD to its scanner system to it's 3d map.

One thing it doesn't have are some pretty crucial Metroid verbs: shoot and jump.

A good portion of the game's puzzles are traversal puzzles: how do I get from point A to point B using my limited tools and no jump. A fun one was a series of purple platforms that rotate 90 degrees when you press a purple switch. As in, all of them, on the entire map. There was a lot of accidentally closing paths behind you and having to make roundabout paths.

The other type of puzzle were these abstract tile puzzles that felt disconnected from the world at large. I did not like them.

I am a bit confused by some aspects of the worldbuilding? The opening cutscene made it sound like we knew next to nothing about this civilization, but the AI partner and scanner is able to translate their documents and give commentary about them.

The demo did reward rubbing my face up against the walls for details, so it's hitting my buttons. I like it.

Closing

And that's it. 40 demos. That's as many as 4 tens. An average of 5.7 demos a day. And that's terrible.

There's one last bit of housekeeping I want to do: Earlier this week, I recommended the demo for Tamashika.

I would like to rescind my recommendation. Play the game it's iterating on, Post Void, instead.

[monkey-network]

Good Stuff’s Best of 2017

WARNING: I’d like to thank everybody who was here for me when times were low. Thank you, take care out there, and enjoy.

Cartoons; the one thing that I will continuously watch until I go blind. 2017 was an emotional handful and an exhausting trudge, can’t deny that, and I’m counting down the best cartoons/animations I’ve seen and loved this year in no particular order. Only two rules, no sneak previews of future projects (sorry to Unikitty and Hideo Kojima). Here we go....

10. HANAZUKI: FULL OF TREASURES

This was a sleeper hit tbh. The fact all the episodes were free on Youtube blew my mind, but having a well structured story with a lovely cold space color palette, actually relatable characters, and a sinister undertones below its tender, colorful charm to be as a nice headliner to when Friendship is Magic came back in spring. It was an inviting start for the year, and with the guy behind Motorcity and Superjail taking the helm and having two more seasons being produced, Hanazuki is something I find is in good hands come 2018.

9. LITTLE WITCH ACADEMIA

Four long years. I waited FOUR long goddamn years...and fuck me was it worth it. A spectacle is what I can call Little Witch Academia. Almost every episode dazzled me with its stage made bravado and confidence that always made me say, “Okay. Let’s make it til’ the next week”. Even when things got serious, LWA knew how to have fun and make the most of its concept. There is a sense of predictability sometimes, but the series would still throw you some good curve balls to never lose your interest. What did lose my interest was Netflix’s sorry excuse of a dub. The movies: fine. But Netflix, try that again, with any other anime, and I will rip your nuts off.

8. Now I might be cheating here since it’s not a cartoon, but shit it might as well have been

CUPHEAD

The effort that went into this is phenomenal, beyond the many other games of the year no doubt. While not everything is animated, I could tell they were cutting corners in some areas, the frame BY frame animated enemies, bosses, and effects made this one of the most visually colorful and alive games to date, next to Mario Odyssey. Not only was this game a frustrating yet joyous romp to start and finish, but the music and art flawlessly channeled the essence of a time where the word “cartoon” was only starting to make good progress. My favorite character would have to be Satan King Dice, whom is an animated homage to great musician and composer Cab Calloway. His stache, his clothing, even his Cheshire grin captured the cool, jazzy vibe Calloway always provided in his performances. He and his fight was the highlight of Cuphead for me and I hope this game, if a sequel isn’t possible, is well remembered for its unexpected excellence in how a video game can look.

7. CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS/L-EGGO BATMAN

Faithful is what I can describe these two. Captain Underpants was just an awesome book to elementary schooler me, but to see a well animated, well written movie about a dude in his underwear was nothing short of a simple yet powerful masterpiece. As for Batman, this is one of the three truest DC and Batman movies around this time, and it has a gay undertone with Batman and the Joker’s relationship (how can you not pull that off, Suicide Squad?). While not a big fan of lego myself, The Lego Movie put my faith WB making another one equally as good, and they did not disappoint. It’s a shame it got snubbed at the Golden Globes, it deserves the award more than the Boss Baby. Plus it had a Superman that didn’t bore me while having a terrible CGI lip job that’s only made worse by his two way dick nose....

Justice League costed 300,000,000 dollars.............

6. DANGER & EGGS

To me, this series felt like one of the few steps forward the world took to make the LGBT+ community feel more welcome and inspired in public outlets; a small step, but progressive none the less. It is a colorful and lively action comedy, a first to be created by a transgender person, where you can see a non-binary character, a pride fest, diverse background characters of orientation and ethnicity, and it feels like they are a part of the world and not footnotes that states that you should respect queer, bi, ace, and so on based on a say so. It’s a show don’t tell type of series and it brightened my summer before I had to remind myself that college exists and is expecting me.

5. TANGLED: THE SERIES

*ring ring* “Hello?” Ye, Disney? How fucking dare you?

My hype for this was undoubtful. I love Tangled the movie, I consider it one of my favorite 2010 disney flics beside Wreck it Ralph and Moana. And when the art style was up for a preview for this (?), I just sat and waited until it finally premiered and damn. I never stopped loving it, but it is until episode 16 where the series starts to hit high note after high note with the direction it’s going for the story. The fact that this all takes place not long after the movie makes the thought where Eugene and Rapunzel finally get married feels all the more earned. It’s working its way to a happily ever after, I adore this show, and this makes me appreciate Frozen a bit more for how far that’s fallen in the world after its one year of fame. Seriously, Gigantic had to get chopped, but Olaf can still live? Give me a break, Disney.

“Sir, I understand your enthusiasm....but this is Domino’s.” Then I will have the 5.99 large with Salchicha and pepperoncini with a liter sprite on delivery.

4. MADE IN ABYSS

This was so beautiful, so awesome, and much better than...

I wasted my life and I cannot say that I will ever reclaim that time proactively again the Anime

Made in Abyss is like Hunter x Hunter except Gon’s more booksmart and Kilua’s a timid robot. The bond between Riko and Reg was a fucking dynamic and heartfelt where Riko’s helps build Reg up and Reg kept Riko and himself safe with his bodily arsenal. That and this series has the best world building where they not only give the low down on almost everything about the titular abyss, but the atmospheric environments and the designs of the inhabiting creatures made this a unique world to want to explore myself. It knew what to show, and knew what to share. When things got serious, I actually tensed up at the thought of shit truly going down; they knew how to soften the terror while maniacally instill fear in us for the safety of the traveling kids. I want to recommend this link to an awesome breakdown of how great Made in Abyss was. However, as it seems that a season two has gone down the abyss as well, and I’m afraid it can’t come back up.

3. LET’S BE HEROES!!

Is it safe to call this the M.U.G.E.N. of cartoons? Just an all up mashup of stuff I love in a Saturday morning? Campy, action, and laid back, this is something I can be sober or grab some kush and I would be enjoy the show just the same. They even have references you might not have ever heard of, but might like the search. OK KO’s a popcorn cartoon, it’s not for everybody, but it established itself well into the modern CN era when Adventure Time finally has to move on. 

2. SAMURAI JACK

Getting this out of the way: episode 6 toiled the final season of Samurai Jack for me. Not gonna go into detail, but if that episode was remade, I would have been more satisfied looking back. However, that does not stop me from saying this is how a revival should be, this is how a reboot should work, THIS is how you can bring nostalgia back. Samurai Jack was great back then, but this season, wrapping up the loose plight of our boy trying to get back to the past and defeat the demon Aku, was satisfactory to many fans. Even those who’ve never heard or remember Jack could just enjoy this as a dynamic mini-series; it gives you context of what happened before without having to recap the original plot of it. For non fans, it’s mostly about an ageless samurai, longing to return to his own time, stuck in the future for over 50 years to the point of losing his honor and his mind. It’s a binge worthy 10 episode season, originally intended to be a movie, and aside from polar opinionated finale, this made Samurai Jack feel great to love again.

1. TRUE AND THE RAINBOW KINGDOM

This is a personal choice from me because 2017 was an honest to god terrible year for me; nothing but turmoil, season to season, and the struggle to cope with that despair in a way I felt actually could help. However, this small series here boosted my spirits because even with it being a show for little kids that I originally wanted to watch as a joke, the competent, enthusiastic spirit it had just moved me in a way that cartoons that I love for eons could only try to do on a whim. It’s not the best made cartoon, it’s not something I sincerely recommend to you all, but it helped me realize that the best thing about life is finding and seeking things that don’t just distract you from the hard and testing times reality puts on you, but gives you a moment of honest bliss and happiness that can influence your outlook on looking forward to better things because things like this, cartoons like this, CAN make you feel better. 

*sniff* Which is why, the actual cartoon of the year....

1. is STEVEN U., BABY!

Just kidding, guys! You will NEVER win, Steven!

TEEN TITANS GO! WINS IT AGAIN, BABYYYY! ONCE AGAIN BABY (i don’t even like it no more...), YOUR NEW FAVORITE SHOW (i don’t even fucking like it no...) RISES TO THE TO-

But Steven Universe in Space, though. That’s when it’ll be great again.