Wahay!

BE Witches [Best In Show]

Let me just hit you with it: the BE stands for Breast Expansion.

Coming from French indie developer Nosebecc, BE Witches was recommended to me by a friend who added "Please don't address the elephant in the room for [this one]", a sentence that tickled me greatly so I didn't there. Now, if I say "match-3 game with scantily-dressed anime girl images", it likely conjures countless images of veritable slop you can find weekly on the Nintendo eShop (and specifically it, the PSN and Steam get different strains, I have some experience in wading through them), the sort of thing made to bait people who are mad horny and of shockingly poor taste.

That's part of what makes BE Witches a fucking shock to the system. It's not just a real ass (there's also ass expansion at some point, apparently) game, it's three or four games fused together.

The art style outside of the battle screen above is mad colourful and very cute, with everyone being Paper Mario-esque flat sprites in a 3D world that spin around and reveal their flat cutout nature as they do. They have piles of expressions and animations, and NPCs have a wide array of designs in the starting town. The UI is covered in cute little touches and flourishes.

The interface is a point 'n' click adventure game, and it has puzzles befitting such. Some quite tricky at that, navigating a web of colour-combination jumps to get floating fragments into the right colour and then rotating them to fit into slots to open doors, for example, needing to remember what combinations cause which colour changes, and if they simply swap (releasing an orb holding the old colour) or fuse (erasing the orb used for the change).

The world is on a dungeon-crawler grid, think Etrian Odyssey, albeit not first-person; you can also write notes to attach to specific rooms and then check your map later to review these, to facilitate finding puzzle clues and elements across the map.

There is an equipment system with stats, there's a wide array of spells to collect and equip, it's a proper RPG with levelling. This is the backbone of the combat system, which is a match-3 Panel de Pon style puzzle game where cleared colours fill corresponding spells' mana costs so they can be cast to hit enemies. Said enemy attacks come in a mix of automatic hits (giving fights a time limit) and special actions that cause elements like drifting jellyfish or targeted tentacle strikes to whip out at your mouse cursor, so you have to dodge them as you play the grid.

The soundtrack is a goddamn fucking legitimate Mega Drive soundtrack, it's got the funky sounds and heavy beats of the thing, being either one of Yamaha's repro synths, an actual Mega Drive chipset, or a really good approximation thereof. The music is incredible!

It's a visual treat (the little animations for Vuu nodding eagerly or shaking her head rapidly as yes/no selectors, for example, god it's such a cute game), it's an audio dream (the combat music fucks), it's damn cute with charming writing, the big glow-up images look great and appeal well, and its puzzles and combat are genuinely really compelling and have a bite to them. It does so much at once and so well it's hard to fathom! And remarkably, despite the name, the demo is fairly light on the titular BE; it happens as reward for a boss fight, when you rank up, which boosts your level cap and stats, so it is seemingly plot-tied (though the title image shows it'll get there in the end).

BE Witches is best in show and I'm looking forward to it eagerly. This is the sort of shit one hopes for dearly in combing Next Fests, and made the initial disappointment with my first search so worth it, even if I didn't find it myself.

And for the friend who recommended it: I don't see it on your wishlist, fucker. Get in there!

About Fishing

Coming from indie developer/studio (?) The Water Museum (of Arctic Eggs acclaim, I may have to give that a look). About Fishing is a fishing game that makes it really clear I should watch more than just the few episodes of Twin Peaks that I have, as I feel it comes up more than I'd expect.

About Fishing is a fishing game with rather interesting turns on the expected mechanics; the actual reeling in of a fish is simple and works intuitively, but casting your rod hasa level of freedom and manipulation in how you sling it affecting its trajectory, its angle and approach, letting you curve around things. Your fishing line's material presence in the world is also emphasised; I caught a fish sitting in rushing water by curving my cast such that the line wrapped around a rock and dangled the hook in its face, which also meant reeling the git up and around the rock on the way back.

Once reeled, you can dump fish into your RE4 attaché case-styled tacklebox, and from there you can retrieve fish to cast back out, controlling them through the line to do things like wrap the line around stuff underwater so you can pull it up. Your demo for this in the tutorial is also how it chooses to edge in its horror vibes, which it does incredibly well. There are such secrets in the water, and you must find them.

The aesthetics and especially the colour palette in use give everything a surreal feel, the dialogue adding to it all sublimely. About Fishing is going to be such a trip when it releases, from the little idiosyncratic things (your grandpa's manner, the way you can just pinwheel caught fish before putting them away) to how genuinely good its fishing mechanics are. There was sea of fishing-themed idler shite this time so I'm so fucking glad my little special interest of fishing games/fishing minigames in other games isn't completely plagued.

SPRAWL zero

Coming from independent American studio MAETH, SPRAWL zero is fucking sick. Think back, if you will, to the mid-to-late 2000s, the time of the late PS2 and throughout the PS3 (and the PC market throughout); first and third person shooters are evolving along a few lines from the madcap boomer-shooter era, and one of these lines is The Gimmick. Bullet-time like Max Payne, physics manipulation like Half-Life 2, shmovement and effective AI like F.E.A.R., psychic powers, environmental interactions, experiments with how health should work instead of pure health packs (regenerating health is most of the time a mistake, a crutch made to patch bad gameplay, I will die on this hill), the lot.

SPRAWL zero is a homage to those, and as such has, uh, basically all of that. You have bullet-time, you move fast and have a slide that can be used mid-air as a dive instead, you have gravity gloves that can grab objects and throw them at enemies and it's used for puzzles and opening very rad interpretations of doors (ripping open walls, blowing open shutters, ripping open train cabin doors, etc), and in this demo one of your abilities is a psychic(/gravity) shield that catches bullets and projects them back at enemies. You move fast and have generous aim-assist so you thus have a capacity for violence bordering on Doom 2016/Eternal, and the resulting combination is fucking wild.

You tear through levels and encoutners like a maniac, health drops from using bullet-time when killing enemies to encourage aggressive use of it, guns don't reload so empty guns are thrown at enemies and your gravity gloves used to grab dropped spares from slain foes, you have a very slow but insanely metal instant-kill punch for desperate times/showing off, the works. It all results in a very fast and frenetic shooter that feels fucking great and excites like few others.

The game is an example also of how while the tools can impose on limits, and Unreal Engine 5 does have a vast host of problems, you can do wild shit if you really get in there. SPRAWL zero looks like a remastered game from the 2000s, perhaps by Nightdive, something that originally did run on the Source Engine or any number of its contemporaries, but it's actually significantly modified Unreal Engine 5 with assets, shaders, etc all made toward achieving that aesthetic. You do need the skill to fight the engine, evidently, but it can be done, you can, in fact, have a real art style for your game on there! You should still consider in-house work or moving to Godot because the recent news about Urneal Engine 6 being a slop production line bodes poorly, but still!

It is the story that once sacked by the decaying big Western studios, industry veterans who try to stay coalesce, form new studios and set about trying to make new AAA games. It's one of the recurring tales in the ongoing mass layoff burn-down of the Western games industry that they do so, get through preproduction off of investor/initial publisher money, then the real cost becomes clear and the backer drops it. MAETH is a studio that touts being industry vets and new devs together, and it strikes me that they seem to have found success by making something much lower scale and fidelity that is still fucking sick. They're defying an unfathomable amount of conventions, this lot.

Veritas Tales: Witch of the Dark Castle

I go back and forth deciding on if this or About Fishing are runner-up for Best In Show, and at the moment I lean this. This comes to us from solo developer Yoshio Nishimura, long-time Capcom and more recently Vanillaware veteran artist, who left Vanillaware sometime after Aegis Rim: 13 Sentinels to move out into the countryside and live on a farm. In that time, his story goes, he kept on working on games, spending six years making this, doing all the art and game work outside of the music (and voice-acting, of course) himself, with that being handled by Hitoshi Sakamoto, fellow 30-year industry veteran but most famously of Square Enix, in particular being the one who did score work for Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII, both high-rankers in a series with myriad industry-best soundtracks and legendary composers, scorers and musicians aplenty.

Suffice to say, Veritas Tales is a fucking treat.

It pays homage to the root legacy of videogame RPGs by hearkening back to tabletop RPG sourcebooks, being in-game a tale you are following by essentially playing through a scenario book for a tabletop RPG. The UI has stats and numbers shift by being erased with an eraser and rewritten with a branded pencil, there are countless stylish illustrations for every bit of the scenario and every character met, and there's a wizard as your DM who narrates for you and leans in with things like a clock when you're put under a time pressure for some sequences. It plays like a mix between a spritely-paced tabletop RPG and a choose-your-own-adventure book - it even denotes the pages you're jumping to depending on your results and choice, and yes, you can notice which page is the death page if you pay attention.

Dying lets you roll back immediately to checkpoint/last safe decision (or restart completely) so it's just as easy to pass by as in an actual CYOA book, and the whole thing is thusly rich with a delightful, comfy aesthetic. Combat is all dice-roll but it's fairly quick and mostly biased in your favour when it comes up, and death there also sees you just roll back to where you need to immediately. It's all done with a pleasing grace, which makes some aspects of the game funny; your menu, for instance, is done by you mousing up top to see the menu being held by a fairy next to your wizard DM, there is no menu button. Hitting Escape to try and bring one up closes the game.

Truly, made by one guy in his spare time over six years. There's also no graphical options, the game has a fixed window and by god you'll like it. God willing he figures out fullscreening it at least!

A truly rare, rich treat, this one. Jump on it immediately, it's so fucking good.

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

So goes the Golds, only four but four immaculate ones at that, some of the best of any of the Steam Next Fests. The highs are immensely high, if nothing else.

Onto the SIlvers; good games, some possibly even great!

Asterika: Phantom Rose Refrain

The thing about wanting to take in-gameplay screenshots is it's a ballache for some genres. See if you can tell what trying did to me up there.

Coming from indie developer makaroll, Asterika is a minor trip as I know the Phantom Rose games as roguelike deckbuilders (at some point the first landed on me, though I've not played it, probably because the art style is fantastic); is this it, with any luck, are some beginning to break into other genres instead?

The music is fantastic and the art is great; the gameplay is a neat take on a rhythm game, you have to hop around a grid filling it with your colour, timing movement to the beat, as hazards spawn in as single elements or as rolling patterns you need to dance around. You have to fill at least 3 grids to pass, there are mashes and holds, it's nifty; the mashes feel a little incongruous and pace-breaking with the rest as you don't move during them, but that's about the only issue I take on that front.

If I do have an issue it's kind of the UI; the beat markers on the side are a metronome that doesn't give a shit about what the actual music is doing, and it is the sole determinant of your hit 'notes', and whether or not movements were good, great, perfect, etc. So you end up relying a lot on the markers, which means keeping your eyes tilted to one side of the grid or the other. You can just learn routes and the patterns for songs are consistent from what I've seen, but it's a strange kind of disconnect. Once you adapt to that it can work fine, but maybe having some other placement for the metronome would be better?

I popped it on the wishlist all the same, and recommend you do the same.

Phase Zero

Coming from Polish indie house SPINA Studio, Phase Zero is testing my drive to not be so flatly comparative in talking about games so much, because its central inspiration is both openly cited and also extremely obvious. In that sense, it only makes sense to make the comparison, and hell, they seem like they would quite enjoy it.

Phase Zero takes after the PS1 Resident Evils, with a commitment to visual authenticity that is kind of stunning in its accuracy. Higher res, of course, and you can see that with the models in particular, but they nail the look so hard. Prerendered 90s CG backgrounds with characters running on them is such a fucking look even now that it delights me to see it increasingly spreading among indie devs; with the shit we can do today, even using more modern visual fidelity could still work and look insane if you're brave enough to try it!

To the Resi formula it follows, Phase Zero mostly adds neat refinements; for example, quickturn is one-button (L1/LB), and it hard commits to tank controls as is right and proper (tank controls are good, you just need to grow up) but you turn and walk a bit faster than usual for these games, or at least it feels so to my hands. A particularly neat addition is door highlighting: when you get near a door you can operate or enter, its outline is highlighted in bright white or red, with white indicating you can open it and red indicating it is locked in some fashion. It's a little aid to help sift background details from actual ones, and as it's proximity based, the game's aesthetic isn't being annihilated constantly. Hell, not that the outline does that anyway, it's nice and tight and looks almost wireframe-y, which is itself a very PS1 aesthetic touch.

The demo character just gets a shotgun immediately, no fucking about with a handgun first, which is probably because of the chapter-based and multiple character structure the page reports, which makes this a good little slice of what these kinds of survival horror feel like in general. There's just enough shotgun shells about for what you need to do, but you can't go completely nuts with it, which is the right balance.

Easily one I'm watching for, that age of Resi ripoffs when it popped off originally did produce some stinkers but I'll be damned if I wouldn't consider myself fed if we got a continuous stream of these.

RoboGAL: Gaga Delta Lady

The game's text is in Portuguese and I can't find word on if that's Portugal's or Brazil's so I'm just going with the language name: coming from Portuguese indie studio Twinklesoft, RoboGAL is in the same boat as Phase Zero where I don't want to just flatly compare to things but that's also, pretty clearly, the point here. And to that end, yeah, that's a pretty good Mega Man game.

The controls are responsive and good, you have the proper moveset (that is, charge shot and slide both accounted for), and the level design is pretty good, lots of appropriate stage mechanics and neat enemy combos to create challenges that rise in trickiness. It has explicit checkpoints so levels are a bit longer than classic Mega Man ones tend to be, including one in the tunnel to the boss room which is nice of them. Boss sprites are about your size and thus a bit small relative to screen space, but they make good use of the space and I never issues landing hits on them.

Hits all the right notes, graphics are cute and character designs are nice, and the music is neat too, get in there.

Silly Polly Beast

I'm cheating a bit here. This one's already out (came out October 2025) and its demo is just up, so it's not part of the Steam Next Fest, but I was recommended it by a friend during this so fuck it, here we are. Thank your stars I didn't roll the Onimusha demo in here as well to fill a slot in desperation.

Coming from UK-based indie studio Anji Games, Silly Polly Beast is a horror-styled top-down/isometric shooter, wherein the titular Polly, trying to escape police capture after burning down the abusive orphanage she was in and escape with her sister (I think it was) Alice, ends up falling into Hell and having to fight her way out. It is beautifully, adorably straight from the daydream fantasies of a scene/goth/emo kid, somewhere in that spectrum of successive subcultures, with your starting weapon being a skateboard with STFU written on the underside, Polly getting two guns and fighting faceless shadowy demons all over.

It's pretty good, and in particular makes good use of camera angles throughout its initial chapter in good ways instead of clinging to its default perspective. It does sometimes shift perspective for gameplay bits and these are of debatable worth; the room where you're put side-on and have to fight an enemy horde while pinned to a 2D plane with a moveset (and enemy movesets) made for evasion in a 3D one isn't the best, for instance, but by large it's fun and has neat ideas and great art, and suitably grungy metal music tracks.

There's one scene where the demon that gives you your magic gun locks a chained collar onto Polly and another, right at the end, where she sprouts demon horns and it's just delightful, this would've been crack for a lot of teenagers when I was growing up. Hell, maybe it still is.

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

About as many silvers as golds, which means big piles of bronze this time; usually there's more of these than the others but it felt a bit much this time. Usually I kind of skim on these ones as part of the issue is not having much to say on them, but this time there's a few I actually do want to elaborate on, so them first.

Reshine & Restory: Chill Electronics Repair

Yeah I got some joint points to make so these get to go together.

Reshine comes from Polish indie studio Quite OK Games, and Restory comes from Russian indie studio Mandragora, and the two are games about restoring and repairing old objects while being Wholesome and Cozy. Yeah you know I've shit to complain about when I capitalise those.

As games, both are kind of okay; I am more taken by the bevy of tools Reshine has you using a variety of tools immediately, whereas Restory clearly has a progression curve it wants to go along first but that also means the bulk of your work is just taking devices apart like Lego bricks and brushing them all. I was hoping either of them would be more indepth than they appear, but both are rather strictly regimented and there isn't much room for you to develop your own sense of process or figure out the best order to apply your tools in. Reshine makes you fully dissassemble the thing (point and click on the exact parts it wants you to do next) and then just auto presents the right tool for each step of the restoration process (sandblaster -> polisher or spraypainter or etc etc). Restory didn't get past just taking thing apart and brushing them, though it does have the element of scavenging similar devices and buying them from eBay to get working parts to restore items for clients for money, with a money-management and job system and such and a flow of time to watch for. But, that aspect of it is pretty low-key so as to stay Cozy, so eh.

Both go for ideas of Cozy that could almost work but don't because they're completely enraptrued with the Consensus View of what Cozy entails. Reshine has loving shots and panning of the wooden attic room you're working in with a cat dozing nearby, and the music is purely all classical in nature, because That's Cozy (and all your project work is 1800s-1900s objects to gel in, so far, to be fair it is early days). Restory, meanwhile, is that particular kind of "Cozy, Japan" that distinctly non-Japanese developer studios obsessed with making cozy things go for, where it feels like they have a surface-level idea of what Japan is like and know some Japanese things to put in because they saw them at a HMV once, and they are aware of but kind of afraid of the concept of anime unless it was one they saw on TV as a kid, and that just kind of jars. Perhaps it's the taint permeating through the rest of this movement swaying my view or perhaps I'm the weird one twisted by too much Like A Dragon and copious amounts of glorified tourism ad anime, but it makes it kind of cloying and ineffectual, even phony.

It's also kind of that thing glorifying small shops and tiny one-person business stuff that a lot of Cozy games do, but you get the vibe either they or their audience would never partake of the real-life businesses except to show off partaking in The Aesthetic.

Like, I dunno, why is it always this kind of aesthetic, this kind of music?What if I want to listen to Dance Of The Dead style music while sandblasting old paint off of a Victorian era toy? Yeah I could mute the game's music and put it on myself, but like, what you leave out is telling of what you're going for and what you think applies. It's always these kinds of aesthetic, and when there's a creeping sensation of wanting to deaden themselves or their audiences to the realities of things and not question what goes on around them that dovetails horribly with the risen fascism of the Western world in particular - it just feels bad, you know?

I mean come on, I want to restore an old painting or decipher the riddle of an old artefact while the soundtrack is like this, why's it always have to be classical music or "lo-fi" pop shit? Reshine in particular with its sort-of darkened attic would be incredible with this sort of tone while sifting through and sorting things.

Variety is ultimately what I'm asking for, variety in tone and aesthetic and concept. Get in there, be a freak about it.

Washington Prime

Coming from indie studio (?) Ultra CDG, Washington Prime may initially look like a boomer shooter, and if you try to play it like one it will educate you harshly. Styled after 80s and 90s action movies, stuff like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, thrillers where a lone hero must carefully shoot his way through a legion of evildoers, probably corrupt law enforcers at that, Washington Prime is very much a tactical shooter.

Lethality is super-high for you and your enemies; one handgun round in centre mass is enough to drop most enemies even from significant distance, you have iron-sights aiming for clearer shots, and on Normal difficulty you will die in about 3 shots and there's direly few health restoratives. Enemies are pinpoint accurate at massive range and have realistic eyesight range, able to spot and identify you from the opposite end of a 10-20 metre corridor. The level design is a fairly realistic, normal ass office, with cubicles and small offices to duck into and not much else in the way of real cover. There are options to toggle on bleeding out when shot (find a medpack to stop it), starting with a medpack, etc. Being outnumbered even slightly is a death sentence and stealth and being very clinical about movement seems most vital.

Washington Prime is down here not because it's bad or anything, but just because I couldn't get far in at all with it to find out more of its deal. It's a vicious one, and I think I noticed the Save and Load options on the pause menu too late; it's made in GZDoom (too far in to skip to UZDoom, I suppose, after that forked out to escape AI code by the GZDoom head), so it feels like Doom at a base level, but good lord the lethality meant I should've been saving early and often.

It is a technical marvel, too; you can see from the shot above the enemy is a 3D model, but enemies are styled and animate like they're Doom enemies, flat sprite enemies in a 3D world with limited movement and attack frames and so on. They don't smoothly go between attack, neutral, hit and dying state animations, and when they crumple they look like they should be flat 2D still but are actually 3D models. The shift, if there even is one, is unnoticeable; it's one of the most impressive fucking visual flourishes I've seen in any game.

Washington Prime is for when you want to really test yourself, it seems, that or I was playing it wrong any which way. It's rad as hell but demanding as well.

=====

Alright, onto the rest of the bronzes, these ones quickfire style as I didn't have much to say, or may not have been impressed:

Bird of the North: An investigative game where you have to infer, from observable context and the sentence itself, who in a scene said what sentence. Kind of rushes into things and is fairly simple, but neat enough.

Jupiter Junkworks: I don't want to single it out so it's in here; s'bad. Tetris if it were slow and clunky, with excessively, aggravatingly slow menus tripping over their own trite aesthetic, and it loves making you sit through boilerplate dialogue ad nauseum.

Kaido Genkai: An Anime Racing RPG: In the same "Cozy, Japan" shallow boat as Restory, but a better game. Controls well enough, driving around is intrinsically fun. Open world mission structure is good and makes the most of its space. Soundtrack options are neat but again, unvaried.

LarsGadiel: I have had a long one-sided beef with Xenon Valkyrie, the game this is a prequel to, for having nice splash/cover art and then the world's tiniest, least detailed, least appealing sprites possible. This is better about that specific element; a functional Metroidvania with some questionable design decisions like placing enemies right at room borders so you get clipped when you enter a room.

Magical Blush: Action RPG, kind of pretty but mostly just blandly functional. Cooldown system for attacks isn't very fun and it becomes just circle-strafing with dash held down too often.

Realm of the Wyvern: Hyper-simple take on old early 80s PC RPGs. Neat and has good pacing, but no real story or compelling world that I found, which kind of hurts it a bit as it's too simple otherwise. Ultima and Wasteland et al had flavour, if nothing else.

Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key To My Heart: I'm not sure if people say "rizz" now. Functional dungeon crawler with some fun designs, but too wrapped up in trying to be 'wholesome' or just not perverted, loses a lot of charm because of it. Pedestrian after BE Witches.

Slaughterhouse: A neat concept, a point 'n' click on a time schedule where you have to set traps to kill five people in a mansion. Really impressive go at capturing authentic mid-80s IBM EGA graphics style and OPL2 synth audio for sound cards of the time. A specific kind of 'period piece', in that sense, it'd be good to see more of.

Silver Pines: Survival horror metroidvania with really naff combat. Yeah survival horror combat doesn't necessarily have to feel good but ideally there is a tradeoff to feeling bad, such as inspiring a panic or feeding into the anxiety the rest of the game gives you, and this doesn't have anything capable of doing that, it's very bog standard with its monsters and stuff. So it's just kind of iffy.

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

And that's that, for a few months more. The highs have been very high at this year's Steam Next Fests, but the lows are also very low as AI slop floods the service and the general plague of the lazy and uninventive continues to fester and worsen. But, at least, we shall not want for good shit to tide us over.

Some screeds on a few topics that came to me as I went through this one:

Idlers

I've chosen a particularly abrasive example here for the screenshot, I know, but I could hardly resist.

I've railed about the growing presence of "idle games" and "idlers" at these Fests and in general a few times lately (in fact, in the February post, I mentioned this specific blight offhand when giving off about roguelikes co-opting gambling aesthetics directly) but this time took the absolute piss. Before ennui set in and I gave it up, I had reached 20 individual idler games, games proud to not be played but simply left to the side and gurgled at, and there were more. I note with irritation that putting the tag in the tag blocker completely shifted the sort of game I was being shown, though I didn't find too much more after doing so.

I sometimes have the desire to be diplomatic about these things, such as by suggesting that this genre isn't intrinsically tainted by original sin and there must be some of worth in there somewhere, or the good ol' It's Not For Me line, but actually I'm just not going to because I can't. This batch didn't have the near-identical trailers showing using a browser or Microsoft Word with """game""" footage slapped on top with a consistency that suggests machining (as in the pre-genAI youtube video slop kind of machining), that I saw, but they're all just as bleak. Games that just automate whatever illusion of gameplay they have, ratcheting up meaningless numbers somewhere on the UI to appear like something's happening. Are people buying these? Are they really? These things being popular is indicative of a population under torment and torture, obsessed with Productivity.

They've also begun increasingly using "Incremental" as a screening tab/phrase, to imply the point is to incrementally get better/more shit as it goes, but it's just synonymous with idler at this point, when they aren't just using both. It increments the numbers itself and this is supposed to make it look like an actual game.

Occasionally when I glance through twitter to partake of the Japanese artists who've refused to move elsewhere (regrettably many), I see bits of this or that topic or discourse of the day, and the recent one has been a timely sprawling shout-match about people who don't want to play games, just watch playthroughs of them, but still expect to be regarded as serious fans of the medium who play videogames. It's the usual sort of shit, people driven purely by FOMO or a foul obsession with The Community and Being In The Fandom being mad about not being praised relentlessly for not engaging with the thing they allege to like, but it feels especially dire in this moment as I see these things grow in number. One of those posts was from a fandom-fan who wrote a list of bizarre non-reasons that were reasons for not playing readily accessible and easily available games and it dovetails with this. Some people really do just want to be seen as or thought of as Person Who Plays Videogames but don't actually want to play games. Are they driving this increase in these literal non-games?

It also feels like it dovetails with the significant increase in Gen AI slop appearing, and the reams of people who insist they have to use or are better off using it. I don't think this has hit the "producing more helpless people than capable people" event horizon yet, and instead is hitting that vast wellspring of extant people who've convinced themselves they can't do anything, but goddamn is it bleak seeing so many. And some of these worthless "games" use that shit, too; there are people who can't even be bothered to make a game that has no gameplay or story or anything to it!

We've been in The Cool Zone of history for a bit but the end isn't in sight.

Cozy

If you couldn't tell, the above example was made with Gen AI. There's so much hack shit, but this one is the double-whammy for also going in on nostalgia as well.

I do wonder when this all started, sometimes. The first time I became aware of it was the, I think, first Wholesome Games Show, part of the cavalcade of shows that eat up the annual early June slot led by Geoff "Dewrito Pope" Keighley's Summer Game Show, a successor to the long-dead E3.

The discourse on "cozy" games has evolved quite a bit as the trend continues to mutate and twist. Initially it was that; it was "wholesome", as in games that weren't violent or dark, had low or no stakes, colourful and often pastel colour schemes, and generally hovered around the range of social sim, farming game, puzzle game, visual novel, narrative experience/walking sim, the sort of thing that appeals to people outside the marketing industry's favourite demographic of cishet teenage or adult boy. As it continued, however, the notion of "wholesome" and "cozy" has increasingly warped as the type of game it focused on began to shift.

Perhaps it's my politics tilting my view, but it became distinctly noticeable when it increasingly became about being "a small business owner", and distinctly one with no worries, concerns, stresses or stakes. It got that stank of things that are branded "aspirational", it began to tilt more towards "stress-free", "carefree" "wholesome" versions of things that are anything but. We eventually hit the point of the cozy airport security game where you invasively scan people and rifle through their things to see if they can be branded as terrorists.

I think the high-water mark, the thing that indicated the true shift, was the Witch In The Alps tweets, referenced in that article. These ones:

This has probably been circled enough that it barely needs explaining but there's so much comically wrong and stupid about these posts that it's stunning. The notion that the type of story you write, the choice of character and setting are not part of the writing is insane, asserting that the writing is incredible but then separating out the protagonist's identity in a game that is, in part, about identities and also that specific identity as a thing that could be removed is comical, the works. The cherry has to be going "urgh, an old white man" and then suggesting, as an alternative, the whitest possible setting. There's so much that could and has been said about these tweets and how much is so fucking wrong with them, it's unreal.

But the core of it is this: it's the attitude that underpins the shift in "wholesome" and "cozy" games now and what they trend towards being - the abdication of awareness, of responsibility, of anything deemed stressful or "too much", like having to think about your actions, the structure of the world around you, or, indeed, politics. Anything too "icky". It coats itself in progressive markers to ward off criticism and is quick to frown at and castigate anything that reflects reality even a little. It begets fascism.

I reflect on this because in addition to seeing the trend spiral in and connect to the odious idler one above (the first 10 or so games on each list are mostly the same games) and what it entails, and seeing Gen AI slop merchants begin to encorach on it, I saw on Bluesky a long thread and spiralling controversy about the indie studio Spry Fox, a studio focused on making cozy games like, well, Cozy Grove. It's about their new game, Spirit Crossing, a "life-sim MMO" that touts being cozy in its description and its tags.

Spirit Crossing is using genAI for coding (specifically Anthropic's Claude), and did not disclose this on its Steam page. It was discovered when a Claude folder and related files were noticed in the files of the Steam playtest version of the game. At the time of writing, there still isn't a disclosure.

Here is one the studio head openly saying a disclosure will not be added to the Steam page because it will make people not buy and play the game, as they will be informed and able to make an informed choice about what they want to support with their money, and thus Spry Fox must deceive people about the usage. People's morals must be violated for profit.

The thread is a trip and the many messages from studio staff shown throughout are baffling, particularly when they start the "We're Just A Small Studio" defence and also start listing off that they employ lots of trans people and also women and thus their virtue justifies paying money for the shithouse services of a company actively making the world worse in every single way it can, from facilitating US military combat actions to aide its genocidal ally in an active and ongoing conflict (pursuing a literal lebensraum policy), to stealing the work and labour of untold hundreds of thousands of people if not millions, to active destruction of the environment through its immense resource use, on and on.

But they're making "a thing that is good for the world".

This right here is the apotheosis of the rot of "cozy game" as an idea. It is the perfect encapsulation, the best demonstration of what I've tried to describe and what many have recognised and worded better before this. You are seeing it here, the call is coming from inside the house, the iddle-widdle oopsie-woopsie indie house who just make cozy stress-free games you don't have to worry about things in are using The Great Defiler to craft their cutesy, relaxing, inclusive and wholesome work. They complain of not having the money to make it without The Great Defiler, and simply do not address the question of why they're using their sparse funds to pay for the services of The Great Defiler if they are so strapped.

And to just go for bingo, two posts up or so from the post I linked specifically is a post from the studio head primarily featured throughout inexplicably running defence for Anthropic and saying that Anthropic are righteous because they are "literally legally obligated to care about more than profit".

If a game calls itself wholesome and cozy, beware of it. Do not partake of it. There are plenty that are legitimately so and they do not have to coat themselves with those labels to try to ingratiate themselves to you.

Gambling

A footnote here; in February I posted about the growing prevalence of gambling-themed games and games using casino and gambling iconography in the wake of Balatro's success (and I should have mentioned that the other big favourite, Vampire Survivors, is made by someone who used to work in the industry designing machines to attract and hold onto gamblers, a throughline that seems increasingly important). I mostly note here that with the exception of that Colorful Slots idler game, the only other one of note I saw was Wizards 95, a grand fusion of the friendslop, PS1 aesthetic, nostalgia-focus, and "cozy" trends that also has an emphasised and explicit focus on gambling rolled in.

All the others vanished when I blocked all roguelikes at the tag level.

I just find it funny.