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yashkonu · 11 days ago

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it's next fest! thought i'd share a few games i found interesting.

next fest is always hit or miss because there are a zillion roguelikedeckbuilder/openworldsurvivalcraft entities for every one of anything else, and those are both genres i'm just fully done with. also for added difficulty nowadays you also get a second zillion worth of shovelware badly papered over with ai art. here's a few things out of the mess that i actually liked:

Mycopunk

is a co-op shooter where you play as a bunch of robots and explode mushrooms. I don't honestly have much to say about this one other than 'it's fun how the enemies just sort of seem to assemble themselves like k'nex pieces until all the ones you've been ignoring are now a big pain katamari catching up to you' and 'i don't think extraction shooters are a good format'. It's another in the Hardspace Shipbreaker lineage of games that make their story about being abused by a corporate entity, which is always just kind of tedious to see in a game. Maybe I've just been a working adult for too long to think it's anything other than a bummer setting full of jokes that don't land. Still fun to play! Probably a good time in co-op.

Mina the Hollower

Is a top-down 2D action-adventure game very much in the style of the game boy zeldas. My intro to zelda was oracle of seasons so i'm especially susceptible to this. It's by Yacht Club Games, whose other work includes milking Shovel Knight for all it's worth and nothing else. I'm truly glad to see they're doing literally anything else. Mina the Hollower is a game about a rat girl inventor and fighter on a mission to save a cursed island. The art looks great, the movement and combat both feel terrific (and very much in keeping with the game boy style of game they're emulating) with some systems borrowed from other genres—you have estus flasks, kind of, and castlevania sub weapons, kind of—in ways that actually feel good and not just like an attempt to fit a genre mold. genuinely looking forward to this one!

Prison of Husks

is a soulslike, but not like that. A persistent woe of mine is that the sweeping majority of soulslikes aren't particularly soulslike, they're bloodbornelike. DS3-like at best. I need that Dark Souls 1 'wander around darkroot garden for several minutes and get very confused about the moving tree with a health bar' sort of flavor. That Demon's Souls 'where the fuck am i, they werent lying that swamp sure can sorrow' type of delicacy. Tromping around and only having enough stamina to attack twice, or once if you want to dodge after. Prison of Husks seems to be delivering on that, and is about a doll seeking its beloved, who is a woman. The demo truly scratched an itch and I'm looking forward to more.

Bubblegum Galaxy

isn't really for me, but I enjoyed my time with it anyway. It's a very genuinely cute game about a cat woman with a small house on her head interning at a company that makes planets by assembling tiles. Yellow flag on the 'haha, isn't work shid,' story framing, but it's a charming little puzzle game and you know it has to be doing something right because my tendency to sneer at any game calling itself 'cozy' is severe. I'd make a killer cartoon supervillain.

AEROMACHINA

absolutely fucking rips. It's a 3D platformer with some combat and exploration that mesh nicely with the platforming, and the demo is honestly more of a prologue than a demo. It has hidden optional bosses. The movement is the best I've seen in a platformer since Pseudoregalia (please don't ask me which is better i have no idea) and the upgrades you find expand on it in really gratifying ways. The combat isn't complicated but plays with itself really nicely—your little basic one-button melee combo isn't much to write home about, but when you start working in the other abilities you end up at things like combo -> end with a launcher kick -> bullet juggle -> aerial combo -> kick back to the ground. It's really fun. Terrific character design too, look at these three

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