Susanah Grace

The Second Reality Room is a visual novel where you play a former chuunibyo who works as a therapist specializing in treating other chuunibyo in order to dispel their delusions about themselves and bring them back down to Earth.

For the uninitiated, “chuunibyo” is a Japanese term for a teenager in that phase of life when some end up adopting an edgy and/or grandiose self-narrative, creating a delusional backstory for themselves and/or a half-belief that they hold some near-supernatural hidden knowledge or powers, and will dress and behave accordingly out in the real world. If you were to do an image search online you would no doubt find fashions often mirrored in anime and manga, and those looks are well represented here in the game’s character designs. True to life, whether through baggy clothes, hair, masks or headphones these teens at once stand out with wild appearances and take shelter from a hostile world by making themselves look unapproachable. Further illustrating (ha!) their emotional vulnerability, every character is depicted with a thin, pale, almost frail appearance, as if they are perpetually on the verge of shattering like a porcelain doll. Even the protagonist hasn’t fully escaped this part of his past, having the same porcelain appearance while dressing in a more mature version of chuuni fashion with his almost priest-like high collar and scarf-like accessory, baggy sleeves and deceptively loud vest and tie-like accessory.

This is typically used as a term of endearment, often enough by people reflecting on their own cringey past selves and friends. Nevertheless, as is ever the case with depictions of edgy teens in media, when they come up in a story they are often either treated deadly seriously because it’s a setting where these imagined powers are just real, or they are there to be gawked at and/or somewhat condescended to by adults or peers that are perhaps too “mature” for their own good. Either way this can have a way of erasing the very real emotional needs and rationale that goes into these narratives in the first place, turning them into something to be objectified.

With that context I couldn’t blame people for approaching a game with this concept with some trepidation, especially if they have an edgy teen past themselves. The idea that you would play a therapist whose purpose is to “bring chuunibyo back down to Earth” definitely sounds like a premise that while promising, also has the potential to go very bad and end up being super patronizing, and so I will try to put those worries to rest as I describe this game because I think they do a pretty stellar job.

A natural starting point would be the devs’ own description of their game, which is “an empathy-driven psychological mystery adventure about chuunibyo—teens who construct their own “reality”—and the relationships that form around them.” They go on to describe an approach that acknowledges these teenagers as being rational people whose behaviour always has a reason and is always rooted in real emotions. Even if their narratives themselves may be delusional, they feel real to these kids, and that is what actually matters, and that is what the game is attempting to hone in on. They do this by framing these counseling sessions as a process of translation, but rather than translating between languages, your job as the counselor is to translate the grandiose words that they use to describe themselves, their pasts and their worldviews into an accurate picture of their true feelings and anxieties.

This of course means that the game will still need to present these chuuni kids in an honest way, and as you might expect this does mean that their behaviour is pretty cringe. And while I’ll get to my feelings on that word and how the concept of “cringe” exists in this game later, them being cringe is actually a big point of this game. Which makes sense because ultimately if you are making a game that endeavors to show (and perhaps even teach?) empathy toward edgy teens, and those characters are milder versions of their real-life counterparts, then you are effectively saying that the real kids are too extreme to empathise with and the pared-down versions are just, you know, easier, which would do both the kids and your game a disservice. Thankfully this is not the case and these teens are presented in all of their melodramatic – yet very sincere –  glory.

As a Millenial whose experience of the internet in his late teens and early twenties was an age where sincerity was unironically considered cringe and so everyone couched everything in layers of hipster-brain-rotted irony out of a sense of… let’s call it social self-preservation, I can see how some people may pick this game up without this context and simply see it as nothing but just basic bad cringe before quickly putting it down and not giving it a real chance, and so never really get to understand what it is trying to do. This would be a shame, in my opinion, because at this moment it sort of feels like the cycle has come back around and we’ve entered into a different sort of anti-sincerity phase of the internet where, instead of being obsessed with the (very cringe-derogatory) idea that popular equals uncool and niche equals cool, people are simply too nihilistic to embrace vulnerability because everybody is so used to everything becoming pretty profoundly disappointing eventually, at a pace that only seems to be increasing, that they don’t even want to bother becoming emotionally invested in the first place.

With this being one of the ruling mindsets of the modern internet, and therefore the modern world, I would say that even with this game expressing a very Y2K version of the chuuni with very Y2K chuuni fashions, creating a story where we empathically interrogate these feelings and seek to understand and relate to them has the potential to make a lot of young people feel seen and validated, maybe even to the point of being able to imagine a healthy future for themselves for the first time. This appears to be front-of-mind for the devs too, because in one of the demo’s cutscenes a newscaster addresses a growing trend of young people becoming more and more apathetic.

But I think that’s enough of all of this background and context-making. Now we can move onto the fun stuff.

You play Kogoro Satori, the 29 year-old Director of the Second Reality Room. He is a counselor who claims to be able to solve the troubles that nobody else understands. As I mentioned earlier, he is a former chuunibiyo himself who considers it his mission to help the teens that are experiencing the same sorts of anxieties that he did when he was young.

As an interesting little note, his birthday is listed as February 4th and, guessing that this is the kind of game that would choose a date of some significance, I tried looking it up. This date seems like it could a reference to a Japanese festival called “Setsubun,” which is the day immediately before the first day of Spring according to the Japanese lunar calendar. Assuming this isn’t just a coincidence, this could mean to signify a sense of renewal and rebirth through counseling and confronting one’s anxieties with a level head.

Our other primary character, the Maya to Kogoro’s Phoenix, is his would-be assistant, Visitor No.001, Mikoto Azusa. She is a 16-year old student who is a beneficiary of Kogoro’s work and has become passionate enough about it to be fully determined to become his assistant. However, for some reason unspoken in the demo, Kogoro refuses outright to take on any sort of assistant, explaining that his work is delicate and “wears a person down,” and that he doesn’t want to put Mikoto in harm’s way. Why is this dangerous? Why does he always say this while looking pensive, as if remembering regrettable events from his past? These questions are not answered by the demo, leaving some enticing mysteries for us to confront between cases.

The last character of note is the “Visitor” that we are assisting in the demo’s prologue, Visitor No.009, Otsuru Amano. On the surface he is an incredibly self-important teenager who used to be at the top of the class back in elementary school but has since changed, starting to talk about things like “fallen fate” and “heaven’s punishment.” His friends notice this and try to talk to him about it, but are unable to get through to him and so he won’t listen, wishing instead that they would mind their own business. Naturally given this game’s whole concept, the prologue is about diving into Otsuru’s feelings by listening to and exploring his self-narratives that serve to deflect from them.

At the beginning of the case Otsuru explains that he is the reincarnation of a fallen angel, considering himself above all of the “lowly humans” that could never possibly understand him or his values. It was a mere 7 days ago that he claims to have awakened to his memories of his past life, one where he was an angel that once stood in the top-most levels of heaven before eventually being cast down by those that didn’t understand him. While he is thankful that his true nature has revealed itself to him, he acknowledges that it has also put him out of sync with everyone around him as his angelic nature reasserts itself. Since then he has come to be disgusted by humans and their “soft” values and finds himself no longer willing to interact with them.

In this way Otsuru has positioned himself as an outcast amongst both angels and humans, finding the most vivid experiences from his past being memories of being met with derision from those around him rather than memories of companionship. Because of this he finds himself unable to relate to optimistic stories with happy endings, preferring instead those with tragic and hopeless ones.

In order to dig into these narratives and ultimately decipher Otsuru’s true feelings, you (as Kogoro) can perform three main actions:

Talk – The purpose of speaking with the Visitor is to listen to them share more about themselves, collecting words that you then go on to “translate” into plain language to determine the emotional truth behind them. As you talk you also collect more topics, which prompts more conversation. Each topic has a time cost associated with it, with your total remaining time listed on-screen when choosing your topic. This implies that beyond the prologue you will need to intuit your way through choosing the correct topics based on the information on-hand, in order to really hone in on the Visitor’s core values and make the best use of your time. I love this because it involves some real decision-making with consequences as opposed to simply exhausting all options every time.

Translate – The main goal of the counselling sessions is to read the Visitor’s true feelings, values and intentions in their grandiose words and “translate” them into plain language. This is done by using a format like the tutorial’s version pictured below, where you are plugging in your collected words into the empty fields. Keep in mind that the Translation following this one ramped up from four fields to seven, so they do get plenty more complex. This of course makes sense because for one, you will only collect more keywords as you progress through the session, but also it just logically follows that the closer you get to the Visitor’s ultimate truth, the more complex the explanation will have to be in order to properly convey the nuance of their deepest anxieties and desires.

Mind Read – Kogoro is able to peer into the Visitor’s Second Reality as shaped by their grandiose self-image for the cost of one time unit. Here the game presents you with large splash screen art of a fantastical scene and it’s your job to investigate it by clicking on various points of interest. This will cause Kogoro to speculate about their emotional meaning, which will in turn provide you with more topics of conversation. Conceptually-speaking the difference between this and Talk is that during Talk, you are gently probing the Visitor for more details that they are consciously aware of and can acknowledge. By probing their Second Reality Kogoro is effectively intuiting the things that the Visitor themself may not even realize. One fun feature of this is that after you finished checking all points of interest in the prologue, Kogoro still had unanswered questions about things that could only be partially visible on that first screen, and so after a brief exchange with Otsuru our perspective literally zoomed out to capture what turned out to be the full image, and certain points of interest that were partially obscured now become fully revealed, giving Kogoro a much clearer picture of what this reality is meant to convey about the Visitor’s real past. This now presents you with whole new points of interest to examine, as well as an opportunity to re-examine the old ones in light of these changes.

Deepening the mystery around Kogoro himself, while he does specify that this is not actual supernatural ESP but just an application of the counsellor’s imagination, he adds that this is “an unexpected byproduct of something I learned long ago.” This is especially intriguing because in the demo there is nothing supernatural at all happening in this story and so I’m not quite sure what he could mean by this, or how this could set him apart from regular everyday people.

So all told, the Talk action is the backbone that supports everything else and maintains the cases’ momentum. You then pay off the words collected in Talk when Translating, which helps you to better understand the Visitor and put all of this information together into a coherent narrative about the kids’ actual experiences. Running out of topics to discuss with Talk is a good indicator that it is time to review your keywords and start to Translate. Once you succeed in a translation your “Translation” counter at the top of your screen then goes up by 1, indicating your progress toward finishing this case. For example, the prologue started with a counter of 0/2 meaning your goal is to complete two successful translations beyond the tutorial.

Once you successfully complete the final translation, you will get a satisfying denouement with the Visitor telling their real, grounded story from beginning to end. In the case of the prologue I found this to be very empathically and skillfully done without any super heightened emotions or unflattering depictions of their Second Reality being punctured. The game, ever gentle, never tries to convince us that the Visitor ever actually TRULY believed in their second reality, and that they themselves did understand on some level that it was just a coping mechanism to deal with their central anxiety.

After this denouement, Kogoro offered his final words of advice which expertly balanced his understanding of Otsuru’s anxieties and desire to retreat from them, with actually confronting them directly. Honing in on exactly where Otsuru’s line of logic broke down, he gave a cogent and mature breakdown of the negative effects that it had on his life and how he could go about handling these anxieties in healthier ways in the future. (I am avoiding going into too much detail to avoid spoiling things, but Kogoro’s find words of wisdom were genuinely thoughtful and insightful, and very well-written.)

At every turn this game proves that it has an incredibly big heart and in my opinion totally fulfills its promise on its Steam page. There are so, so many ways that this game could have completely broken down: corny writing, bring too high-concept to the point of taking the focus off the Visitors, lazy characterizations, shallow diagnoses and prescriptions for the Visitors’ inner turmoil… This game really had its work cut out for it but absolutely rose to the occasion.

Closing us out here by returning to the concept of “cringe,” this game’s demo had me seriously considering how important it is as people to develop our ability to face it in others (and ourselves?) head-on. It correctly identifies it as raw sincerity and sees that as something to be, above all else, respected, embraced and openly engaged with.

When Florida experiences its first ever blizzard and a heat well is detected in the Bermuda Triangle, it’s up to expert pilot and bomb-lobber Dafne to check it out and save the day!

Admittedly when this game self-described as a “Classicvania” I did roll my eyes a bit. What does that even mean? Is this even a Metroidvania style game? I had many questions. Nevertheless, I do love me some 2D sidescrollers and its art style is cool, so I figured I’d try it out to see for myself. As it turns out, the minute you turn it on and leave the title screen hanging for a few seconds, and it transitions to an old-school demo screen showing short clips of gameplay before looping back around to its charming start-up cinematic, you instantly understand what they were going for.

While you can ignore the cheeky “-vania” bit of its self-label, this game is almost entirely designed around the “classic” part, faithfully recreating the style of old linear 80s and 90s 2D action platformers, most notably Ghosts ‘n Ghouls. Its jumps are the most stark example of this because like in GNG, you can’t change your direction once you leave the ground – you’re stuck committing to your trajectory and therefore really need to be thinking before you leap. One upshot to this is that you can face the opposite direction to lob bombs behind you if any enemies are in chase.

Lurruna also adopts a faithfully old-school style of difficulty in a few different ways, culminating in a philosophy that dying is inevitable and rather than being about avoiding death per se, this game is more about constant trial and error and learning from those errors so that you can ideally avoid making the same mistakes again. Often this learning is centered around enemy placement, kill priority, and in some circumstances even pathing.

The main source of difficulty comes from its enemy design and placement. Firstly, it does that old-school thing where enemies will constantly respawn after a few seconds of being killed for as long as their spawn point is on-screen, creating situations where nearly any screen could potentially result in damage or death if you linger for too long. There is also a large emphasis on enemies that appear and attack in different ways such as jumping in arcs, burrowing up from the ground, and of course flying through the environment’s geometry. Enemy attacks can also come in a variety of forms as some will attack from below, some attack quickly while others do slowly creating a constant cadence to deal with, others will shoot projectiles horizontally or lob them from above, all of which pass through the environment. On the busier screens this means that you will be dealing with attacks from all angles while you’re in positions where you can’t counterattack them all, and so you are forced to learn how to balance attacking and moving in the best way to minimize damage taken.

From most regular enemies you can take 4-5 hits before dying, though especially on those busier screens this is not as safe as it may sound. You also have a limited stock of lives, starting with 3 in the demo with no noticeable way to collect more. When you lose all of your lives you will get a classic Game Over screen with a Continues counter. The demo gave you 9,999 continues, though I can’t quite tell if they are being cheeky again and that will be the case in the full game, or if that is just a feature of the demo and your Continues will be a more pressing concern in the full game. After using a Continue you will respawn back at the beginning of the section of the stage that you died on, as opposed to being sent to the beginning of your most recent screen on a regular death.

Other classic sources of danger come from the environment. None of us are strangers to death pits in sidescrollers like this, but the old-school catch here is that you are knocked slightly back when hit. Combine that with your full-commitment jumps and this game’s enemy density and you can see how this can become a problem even when it may not initially look that way. You will also encounter long platforms that will rumble and start descending off-screen with little warning, forcing you to quickly move forward and make it to the next platform before you miss your chance and die. The devs can also get trollish with the placement of some health pickups, putting them in places that are obviously a bad gamble, and yet, if you’re low on health then you may take your chances anyway (and then probably die).

The overall structure of the game also extremely harkens back to the 80s and 90s because it very much favours density over runtime. Lurruna’s Steam page boasts a final runtime of about an hour long, and in that hour they claim to be fitting in 7 levels (more than one every 10 minutes) and 12 bosses (one every 5 minutes). As hard as this may be to believe in the modern context where a game that runs for 10 times as long is considered very short nowadays, back in the 90s this was the norm.

In a more aesthetically retro sense, this game’s soundtrack was made using a combination of two retro soundchips. I am not a techy kind of guy whatsoever but surely somebody out there reading this will be able to meet the devs where they’re at when they say that their music is made by mashing together a YM2612 and a HuC6280? Either way, the end effect is no doubt what they intended, which is an authentically retro-sounding soundtracking featuring noises that haven’t made their way into games en masse for over 30 years at this point.

At this point so much has been said about the dangers facing the player along this journey, but what is the player expected to use to deal with it all? Well at the top of this article I called the game’s main character, Dafne, a “bomb-lobber” so that seems like as good a place as any to start.

Your only method of attack is – you guessed it – throwing bombs in an arc. You can throw them in five directions from a standing position (ie: not the three directions facing downward) and the full eight ways while in the air. Their explosions have enough of a splash range that you can regularly hit multiple enemies at once, and even linger for a fraction of a second to potentially catch additional enemies that were just outside of range.

The coolest part of your bombs is that you are able to upgrade your next one in real-time, up to three tiers above the default with each tier not only upgrading their damage output, but changing the actual qualities of their explosions in ways that you can use strategically. The Level 1 upgrade causes your bomb’s regular blast to emit two shockwave projectiles that travel an unlimited distance to the left and right, giving you your only attack that can pass through walls like enemies’ can by default. An added bonus is that the shockwaves pass through enemies too, so this is a nice bit of horizontal crowd control when you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed. Your Level 2 upgrade will cause the bomb’s explosion to become larger and higher, enabling you to create a sort of makeshift explosion wall to catch both grounded enemies and fliers alike. The Level 3 upgraded causes your explosion to grow in size, take on an X shape, and continuously explode in place for a couple seconds causing massive damage. Most of the time this tier isn’t worth it when dealing with regular enemies, but is great for damaging bosses.

Naturally you can’t just upgrade your bombs at will – upgrading them consumes batterie power, which you replenish by finding batterie pickups in the stages. As with health pickups, some are placed in the stages by the devs while others can drop from defeated enemies. The Level 1 upgrade costs 1 energy, the Level 2 upgrade costs an additional 1 energy, and the Level 3 upgrade costs an additional 3 (for a total of 5 energy). I feel they struck a nice balance here because you are rarely without any batterie power at all, but it is entirely possible to be reckless and find yourself without enough energy when you might need it most.

Dafne is also pretty acrobatic, though in these classic-style games any sort of acrobatic manoeuvre can be a double-edged sword. The safer move is that if you jump while crouching you will perform a forward dash that wouldn’t typically exist back in the olden days, but really feels like a great modern addition. The bonkers that is guaranteed to kill everyone at some point is that if you hit the jump button with a weirdly specific timing in the air, you will roll backwards quite a distance. While this sounds like – and is! – an effective evasive manoeuvre, I’m sure it’s not hard to imagine accidentally flinging yourself into pits, enemies and other traps. Even more hazardous is that if you do this and hold up, this extra jump distance sends you flying higher rather than farther. I found that, while sometimes frustrating, these little tweaks to how you normally expect jumping to work makes Lurruna feel unique and was surprisingly easy to get used to.

The content of the demo gave you access to what I’m assuming were three full stages, as well as a separate and optional tutorial sequence that you can access from the title menu screen. I found this tutorial to be quite efficient with its time and genuinely helpful, and given this game’s quirks I would personally recommend that anyone trying this game do the tutorial first.

The first level that you can play is Sodium Shore – a beach-themed stage that served as a nice on-ramp, as it’s the standard and straight-forward option.

Granola Nook came next. This stage is themed like sparkling crystalline caverns, with some of its notable environmental features being crumbling platforms and sinking floors. There were lots of ranged and ambush-style here that would often attack in swarms, especially as you try to progress upward through vertical parts of the stage (such a classic video game scenario!). This level was pretty tough and I’m sure would have become infamous back in the day.

It also had my favourite boss, which was a floating stone head that controlled floating hands that would grab the boss arena’s two spiked walls and pull them inward, putting a time pressure on you to destroy them before getting crushed. You need to accomplish this all while dodging attacks from the head itself and avoiding jumping yourself into the walls.

Spearmint Waterworks is… a water stage! Naturally this means parts of it involve climbing quickly to escape rising water, though this game has an interesting twist on how water affects your gameplay. While most games would make rising water a drowning hazard and mess up your character’s gravity, this game does neither of those things. You control normally and Dafne can seemingly hold her breath indefinitely, but instead your bombs are significantly weaker and do not explode, instead simply bouncing off of whatever they hit. This means that enemies can quickly overwhelm you and cause you to take a lot of unnecessary damage, so while you don’t need to fear the Sonic drowning song, being caught underwater is still a huge danger.

All of this gameplay experience is wrapped up in what is clearly the least classic aspect of this, which is the game’s art direction. In addition to loving its style in its own right, I appreciate that they didn’t make their visuals too retro because we already have years and years of indie games doing this as it is, and I think it would have made it much harder for this game to stand out. Their chosen route is a much more distinctive hand-drawn, semi-sketch-y cartoon style to it, with lots of blocky shapes and pastel colours that really set it apart. Its visual elements all come together to create a very cute, dreamy vibe that is instantly appealing.

Whether you are looking to recapture a type of nostalgic gaming experience that we don’t often get nowadays, or are curious about mostly extinct subgenres of games that you have ever played yourself, I’d say this game is a charming and mechanically solid option.

Burn-9 takes place in a world setting similar to Metal Gear Solid – one steeped in geopolitical intrigue, conspiracy, super-science and, of course, espionage. However, instead of controlling the Agent on the ground you play the role of the Agent’s Operator – the person back at HQ who manages mission comms, relaying intel between the Officers and the Agent on the ground, hacking, delivering up-to-the-second situational awareness to your Agent and monitoring their position and condition.

When Epoch Base – a top secret U.S. military research facility in the Antarctic – goes dark during a blizzard the CIA sends in a fleet of warships carrying Terminarch Extinction Teams 7 and 8. These are the US’s cybernetic supersoldiers used for black-ops missions, and this is about as black-ops-y as it gets. Their mission: investigate the cause of the blackout and secure something called Burn-9 – a “something” so top secret that despite you being the Operator assigned to manage the mission, and your Agent literally risking her life to secure it, the top brass refuse to divulge what it actually is.

Before the mission properly starts the game has you choose a specialty:

Tactics – Small squad strategies and combat manoeuvres are my strong suit.

Hacking – My skills in electronic warfare are next to none.

Subterfuge – Knowing when to hide is just as important as when to strike.

Management – Keeping the assets on task has always been my priority.

While I really like the idea of choosing a specialty as a way to individualize your play style, this game kind of defeats itself by not actually explaining any specifics of these options. You can sort of make your guesses around the perks of the Hacking and Subterfuge options, but given that by this point you have not played any of the game yet and the Tactics and Management options are so ambiguous, it’s basically impossible to imagine what gameplay advantages they could offer. I can understand that the devs may not want to reveal too much about the game too quickly to keep things mysterious and surprising, at the end of the day this is a game and players need to know the impact of their choices for them to matter. Even from a realism standpoint it doesn’t make much sense because any top-level specialist knows their own capabilities inside and out. This decision from the devs sort of starts the game on a bit of an anti-climax because the first decision that it gives you both feels pivotal and also pointless because you don’t have enough information to actually make it properly.

Out of both a sense of curiosity and because it seemed like it best fit this mission’s premise, I ended up choosing Tactics. Unfortunately I’ve gotta say, even having played through the entire demo I still don’t know what advantages the Tactics specialty gave me. There were plenty of opportunities that I saw that could have benefited from better hacking or hiding capabilities, but again, I just simply do not understand what “Tactics” and “Management” are supposed to mean for gameplay because the game never made this clear. On at least one occasion during the demo one of my dialogue choices were locked, so maybe Management opens those all up..? But then I still don’t know what Tactics does, and that’s the one I played. Very annoying.

Thankfully everything else about the game was pretty great, so while the specialty stuff was kinda sloppy, I wouldn’t let that of all things make you write this game off because it is just one small part of it.

Unfortunately everything is very much not great for our Agents because before they even make it to the mission site, their helicopter is immediately shot down by unknown attackers. All comms from the site go dark and you are introduced to your first true gameplay segment: scanning the area for intel and investigating points of interest. This takes place on a screen showing a simple layout map of the current area, where a single scan will take a snapshot of all of its points of interest at that moment.

A cool way that the devs decided to handle this part of the game is, rather than having you scan the area and expecting you to interact with them all immediately, it is a much more analytical decision-making process where the game forces you to sequentially choose whether each item that is picked up on your scan is worth investigating further. For example, when you detect a faint signal near the crash site, you can choose to believe that it is likely a false signal, or to believe that the signal is real and could be a survivor. I chose to have hope, and sure enough an icon appeared revealing Agent Dodo’s unconscious – but living – body. You can then click on her icon and choose to remotely resuscitate her.

As you wait for Dodo to fully regain herself, you are called by your superiors for a status report. Interestingly, when someone calls you must manually choose to take the call, which could mean that a valid option later on might be to ignore it until the caller gives up..? Given that a significant part of this game’s decision-making is meant to be choosing between different parties’ conflicting priorities and who to give what intel, having the ability to ignore calls while following others’ priorities would be cool.

I did not try to ignore the call and so this is where I met our three higher-ups, themselves each having their own independent interests: Morrigan, the CIA spymaster and your immediate CO. Humourless and mission-focused, she seems to be fairly dispassionate about the Agents’ wellbeing. The Admiral commands the navy fleet that is cooperating on this mission. The prototypical military Officer, he is pompous and entitled. Finally there is The Politician, who serves as the President’s Chief of Staff and Pentagon liaison with all of the dehumanizing political interests that go with it. Particularly emotional, hasty, tactless and callous.

Another interesting detail is that the game will at different times have you speak with each of these leaders separately, which seems to imply that they themselves are not united on all judgements. It should be intriguing to see how they end up clashing and where they all end up siding by the end. Who will end up being trustworthy? Or will choosing to trust any of them at all just be different degrees of risk where you are constantly having to put yourself out on various ledges no matter what?

This dialogue is all delivered through Metal Gear Solid-esque Codec calls, complete with the expected monochromatic digital colour schemes matching the rest of the game’s aesthetic. Each character’s portrait is depicted in high quality pixel art and appropriately subdued facial animations.

Once your call with the brass ends you go back to focusing on your intel map and Agent Dodo. After establishing the conditions on the ground with her you come to understand that she is in whiteout conditions and needs your help to guide her to shelter so she can rest and recover in relative safety. As you were just reminded by your Officers though, you do still have a mission to do and must confirm the status of the other Agents, and so that is your first priority.

And so you do another scan, establish your options and choose which to investigate. As you work through your new points of interest, guiding Dodo to each one so she can provide visual confirmation, you both learn that the helicopter is totaled and Dodo’s two squadmates did not survive the crash. As Dodo reaches each site, if there is important intel to capture you can have her take a photo and send it to you, at which point you are treated to a high quality pixel art render of Dodo’s ground-level viewpoint, which is helpful in breaking up your visuals while playing this game.

Once exhausting all of the scanned points of interest Dodo is ambushed by a small fleet of attack drones. After another quick scan you determine there are no places to hide in this open tundra, and so Dodo’s only option for survival is to enter the facility itself through an access hatch. Unfortunately this hatch is locked and so you need to hack it to allow her through. This is accomplished with a short mini-game where you are presented with a 3x3 grid. Your hacking algorithm will automatically identify the solution to the hack by showing you the sequence in which to “connect the dots” at which point you simply replicate it to succeed.

When Dodo enters the hatch comms go dark again for a short time until she is able to reestablish them on the inside. At this point you find yourself on another intel map screen where you more or less repeat this process of scanning for points of interest, prioritizing which to advise Dodo toward, and reacting to events as the situation changes. At every step of the way, as Dodo reaches a new room she will describe her surroundings and give her commentary not unlike a modernized version of how old text adventures would describe each new environment with prose due to their complete lack of visuals. All throughout you two will also share some deadpan banter that I found endearing – you can already feel your chemistry with her growing so early on into the game.

If the only way that you have experienced this game is my writing then this loop may sound very unengaging and repetitive, but the devs actually do a fantastic job at fending off entropy in a variety of ways. One that was a particularly nice surprise was its sound design – given that you are connected to Dodo’s comms the whole time, even though you cannot see what she sees you can hear the sounds in her surroundings. Dodo’s footsteps as she moves through the facility, the creaking of valves as she turns them, the hiss of gas and rumbling of fire when she is nearby. This all does a great job in really pulling you into the moment and helping make the experience all feel real, which in turn transforms your character’s distance from a source of apathy to a source of genuine tension as you fear for Dodo’s safety.

Another great way that they accomplish this is simply the escalating situations that you two get into, even just over the course of the demo. Even though there is no actual real-time element to this game, on an emotional level you feel a time pressure to make quick decisions to keep Dodo safe and help her take advantage of fleeting opportunities to get a leg up on your adversaries. They pace the push and pull cycle of your duo gaining and losing ground extremely well in such a way that it makes very clear that the two of you are fighting against overwhelming odds, but are still hypercompetent operators in your own rights.

Speaking of your adversaries though, you do end up encountering your rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life MGS-like villains, and they do feel powerful enough that when you eventually defeat them in the full game I’m sure it will feel incredible. Without revealing the full roster, there were two that you encounter during the demo. The first is Manticore, a cybernetic hacker who is so enhanced that he is able to control a whole fleet of attack drones single-handedly. It is implied (if not outright stated) that all of the drones patrolling the mission site – including the ones that shot down your helicopters and have been pursuing Dodo this whole time – are controlled by him, turning him into a living panopticon orchestrating a fleet of hundreds of guns.

The second is Warg, a monstrously huge and nearly unkillable wolf who acts like a stalker out of a horror movie. Equal parts scent-tracker and steamroller made of meat, Warg is not to be underestimated even as it lacks the capacity for human speech. Whether it has human-level intelligence is currently not confirmed. Unlike most demos that I end up playing during Next Fest, I came into this one with no strong notion of how I expected to feel about it or how engaging it would ultimately turn out to be for me. While I am certainly no stranger to visual novels, adventure games and other narrative game formats, the whole military so-called “tacticool” aesthetic is far from my favourite, often being an active impediment to me becoming interested in something, and its relatively unchanging visuals made me wonder if this one would be able to click in the same way. And yet, something about this game’s trailer grabbed me and I found its format intriguing. By the end of the demo they totally sold me on their vision and I’ll be interested to see if this one ends up breaking containment at all.

This story begins with an interesting mystery in an old, abandoned cabin in the woods. After some opening narration you open the door to the old cabin, seeking Season Island. Within the cabin you find another person – a man whose head is literally a square and speaks (in my mind) with an NYC accent greets you. His name is Spike, and while he is defensive at first, he quickly warms to you if you tell him that you come in peace.

After explaining that you are seeking Season Island he brings up a book of the same name that, as luck would have it, just happens to be located in this very cabin! Spike goes on to say that you’d think he’d have read it by now considering he’s been to this cabin numerous times before, but he could never quite force himself to get past the About the Author section. Not because it was boring or offensive, but because he always grew anxious, as if he was reading something that he shouldn’t be. It’s just real weird, ya know? The author didn’t even sign the book so we can’t even say who wrote the thing. Spike speculates with a foreboding certainty that the author didn’t put his name to it because he knew it was dangerous.

After saying his spiel, Spike is able to quickly locate and produce the tome, setting it in front of you before quickly putting some distance between you two. Except… he would if he wasn’t so dang curious! He doesn’t want to be the one to read the book, to be sure, but this is too good an opportunity to find out what’s in it!

And so, together, you open it…

Its first pages read thus:

Season Island A book about the nature of people And the 4 seasons Season Island A story without an end. The moment you turn this page, you will be transported into a fictional world. As much as I’d have wished for its genuine existence, it is important you remember that this world is nothing but an illusion. Thank you for understanding.

Upon turning the book to the following page to begin Chapter 1: Doomsday Bouquet, your screen turns completely white and you can choose whether you are the one to continue reading the book, or if you have Spike do it instead. (I chose to start it myself because I must protect Spike at all costs.) With that, you become stranded in a snow-less snow globe – the same one pictured on the book’s cover – before quickly finding yourself in a scene like paradise. And thus, your adventure begins in Spring.

Season Island is a pretty standard point-and-click adventure game from a mechanical standpoint, but its unique setting, visuals and Undertale-esque oddball sense of humour and world-building set it apart from other entries in the genre.

All throughout this demo you encounter a great cast of characters.

First up is obviously Spike – your very weird partner, which also makes him your proxy during conversations. He can switch between being the straight man or funny guy in an instant, making him hilarious in just about every situation you come across. He is always the funniest character in any scene. After all, without Spike around you wouldn’t get such gold as “These flowers are sleepin well. A little TOO well if you ask me!” and “The grass is dreaming.” (Seriously just imagine The Thing from the Fantastic Four saying that.)

The circle of flowers are denizens of Spring. These ladies are a circle of seven(?) little pink flowers that may not all speak in unison, but join any conversation that the others are in. All with different personalities, they have pretty funny banter with their constant cross-talk and drip lore information in an entertaining way.

Knife Guy is a snootling and thus possesses justified racial animus against the royal family, as the King is responsible for dispersing his people and turning them into a diaspora. Nevertheless, he is in love with Princess Spring, but has a bad habit of brandishing knives and threatening people which has turned out to be… a bit of an obstacle.

Princess Spring is easily the most complex character in the demo and the one who it effectively revolves around. Everyone adores her, but this seems to be in the beginning stages of changing as she is slowly becoming less able (or less willing?) to protect her domain the way she used to. Despite this, her people continue to trust her and it is unanimous that she is very powerful and kind.

From her own perspective, she has grown terrified of her own domain, calling it dangerous. She now secludes herself within her treehouse, locking herself behind an interior door sealed with clockwork mechanisms, and that within a lattice of sturdy vines sealing the exterior door. What’s more, for someone who is such a lover of the arts, her treehouse is pretty barren and lacking in pizzazz.

Once you make your way into her room toward the end of the demo, things start looking more green and vibrant but there is also a sad, isolated feeling to it. Her once beloved dishes that she would share with guests are dirty and discarded, and there are pink and yellow flowers symbolically grown far apart all across the room. Pink for her, yellow for a mysterious “she” who lives in another kingdom and loves digitally making music.

While Spring seems timid and proper on first meeting, she openly flirts with Spike for saving her from Knife Guy and clearly has a sore spot for this mysterious yellow “she” that she can’t mask. She also has momentary bouts of manic anxiety as she briefly loses it over some supposedly approaching end times? Some form of creeping entropy that is eating away at her kingdom?

In hindsight, the way she describes the omens does ring a few bells based on things we’d seen during all the hijinks earlier in the demo… Cherug, the winged snail with the glue-like saliva cannot move his wings as they’re mysteriously frozen to his sides. Florn, one of the circle of flowers, complains that they aren’t feeling well and at least one of the others shows real concern for them. Indeed, they do look significantly less lively and more droopy than the others, which is rarely a good thing for a flower to be.

Spring herself says that her subjects are becoming more unwell, describing shapes to her that she can’t comprehend and seeing ominous stars in their sleep. According to Spike that last part is a condition called “fosfine,” though aside from the mention of the word striking fear into Spring, there was no further elaboration from anyone on what that could mean. It seems pretty bad though, because Spring immediately asks you to visit her sister in her desert oasis kingdom to see if anyone there is stricken by the same condition.

Standing as a shadow over the whole story is King Winter – Princess Spring’s father and patriarch of the royal family. Known for having a short temper and freezing people solid on a whim. He is not nearly as well loved as his daughter, but is significantly more powerful. He is hated by the snootlings for dispersing their people, but worst of all, he has a terrible sense of humour, being obsessed with Dad jokes.

Bolstering its silly tone is the game’s unique, abstract art style. Bordering on cubism, characters come in literally all shapes and colours, and their personalities are just as diverse. You can almost see some Undertale DNA in its look, albeit much more colourful and abstracted, at times to the point of making Undertale’s own style look almost safe by comparison.

The demo is short, covering the first of its four kingdoms, and so I chose not to go into much detail about any of its puzzles. Suffice to say that like any point-and-click adventure game, throughout this experience you will be collecting items, combining them with other items and/or objects in the environment, and using them to solve puzzles. With constantly pausing gameplay to take copious notes for this review (my “notes” normally end up being closer to a pseudo-rough-draft of my reviews) my time in the demo took a bit over 2 hours. If the other three chapters are about as long that would make the full game a breezy… 5-6 hours total without note-taking? Which sounds like a pretty great afternoon to me. All in all this was a very short but very whimsical little adventure that I will be more than happy to experience the whole way through when it eventually releases.

In a 70s retrofuturist metropolis overtaken by warring sports-themed gangs, one woman – an Outsider from the slums – fights her way to the very top to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Furyball: Rogue Revenge presents us with the sprawling city of Neo-Arcadia, a city of seven boroughs each ruled by their own gang, each styled after a different sport, and each warring for supremacy through the bloodsport of Furyball. Drenched in a strong 70s grindhouse aesthetic, this city and its people very strongly channel such classic 70s films as Mad Max, The Warriors and Rollerball. Its characters have a really cool look to them that gives a scrounged-up, post-apocalypse twist to sports gear, giving it a sense of the modern-day armour that it is. (Also, as a quick sidenote: I adore the main character’s design. Whenever her character portrait is on-screen I have to force myself to look away. She’s just so cool…)

Gameplay-wise, Furyball offers a type of exhilarating action that you can’t find anywhere else.

This being a roguelike, as you’d expect, it is run-based. Assuming I’m reading the map’s layout correctly, you progress through a maximum of four stages, each with its own series of arenas, and each ending with a boss fight. With that said, there are seven stages total, so the flow is that the bottom tier of the city has three stage options, the next tier up from that has two options, and then the final two stages have just one option each. This is of course according to the demo build which only gave access to one stage per tier, so I can’t say whether you get to choose your stage in the bottom two tiers or if they’re assigned randomly.

I can understand if this talk of 4 tiers, 7 stages and numerous arenas can be a bit confusing to wrap your head around in writing, so below is a picture of its “world map” to help.

The arenas are where the action gameplay takes place, in which you are moving your character around in an isometric view, “serving” your ball to unleash it and then hitting it with your bat whenever it gets close enough in order to aim it toward your enemies. There is a billiards aspect to this where you are naturally trying to aim your ball to maximize how often it hits your enemies, which oftentimes means banking it off a wall or some other feature of the arena. Once you hit the ball it will go rocketing in that direction, bouncing off of anything it comes into contact with and damaging enemies as it does so. If this sounds like the ball can go out of control then yes, absolutely. It’s almost part of the point, because the more you hit it the more Fury you build up in the ball, and when that Fury hits its maximum capacity it will go into Hyper Mode, traveling and bouncing at truly unhinged speeds and causing more damage. In this way, Furyball is less about slowly and carefully setting up clever shots and more about controlling a chaotic battlefield.

If this sounds intimidating then I do also want to mention that you’re not just left with a shrug to deal with this unassisted. For one, when the ball gets close enough to hit the game will slow down temporarily (for maybe 1 to 1.5 seconds or so) to give you a chance to properly aim the thing without breaking up the action in an annoying way. Something else to remember is that the game gives you an aiming line once you wind up your bat which extends out a pretty good distance, showing the bounce angles along the way. The last note here is that you also have a Recall mechanic which lets you spread out a circular field around you. If you end your field while your ball is within it, it will call it back to you so you can choose to either hit it like normal, or pocket it to re-serve when you choose. I did not value this mechanic at all at first, but quickly grew to appreciate it as it can help minimize the spans of time when your ball is bouncing around parts of the arena that are not useful in that moment.

So while the game’s chaos can feel truly insane at times, especially while your ball is in Hyper Mode, you do have plenty of tools to help you harness it for your own gruesome purposes.

The arenas themselves also have different features that can help you and are responsible for this game actually being much more pinball than billiards. Keeping in mind that these arenas are procedurally generated and so different combinations of these things will pop up, here are a few examples of pinball features that I encountered in the first stage:

Flippers, which hit your ball on contact.

Bumpers, which burst with an area electric attack when your ball flies into it.

Tracks that will carry your ball from one end to the other when your ball makes contact with an entrance/exit. While being carried your ball is still considered active and so damages enemies along the shape of the track without bouncing until it is unleashed from the track’s opposite end.

Glowing floor panels that charge up in whatever way these pinball features work… I never did quite understand these. Once they reach full charge, a four-way fire turret pops out of the floor for a short time and spins while spraying fire.

Naturally, all of this is in a context where you are fighting off waves of enemies to defeat the arena, and to make things more chaotic there are numerous enemy types even just within the one faction that I faced in the demo (in my sub-one-hour with the demo I wasn’t able to get passed the first boss…). That faction is called The Warriors and they are a Mad-Max-inspired baseball gang. In a fantastic bit of conceptual follow-through, their enemy types reflect this mechanically.

You have batters, which will bat your ball back at you, turning it into their projectile to damage you until you either hit it back or avoid it long enough that its glow turns from the enemy’s red back to your friendly blue. The batters can also hold out their bat and do a tornado spin move, which can travel toward you and control a lot of distance with sheer size.

There are also these little outfielders who are small and weak, but can catch your ball and hold it for a bit while keeping their distance before tossing it back out into the field at a uselessly slow speed. Their main purpose from what I can tell is just to waste time to give their allies a chance to close in and overwhelm you. Your ball is your only method of damaging enemies, so without it you’re only left with your bat which can only wear down enemies’ stun meters to stun them in a pinch.

You also have these runners that can move quickly around the arena and hit you with damaging slide attacks that cover a decent distance.

The most menacing enemy type though are the catchers, because not only are they physically large, strong and durable, but they do live up to their name. Alongside the batters, the catchers are the only enemy type that can use your ball against you, catching it and then quickly throwing it back out at a high speed directly toward you as a projectile. As with the batters, you need to either try to hit it back or avoid it until it turns back to blue.

With all of the variety in pinball gimmicks and enemy types it helped the runs feel relatively fresh from run to run and bodes very well for what the remainder of the full game will have in store.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper roguelike it there wasn’t some character build aspect of it, and while I’d say this was not the demo’s strongest point, there is some good stuff here for them to expand on and/or tweak even post-release.

Between runs you have access to two shops, one that sells and upgrades your own character stats, and one that sells and upgrades your equipment. These upgrades are all permanent.

The personal upgrades center around upgrading your health and speed in various ways, whether it be how quickly you move, how quickly your bat swings and dashes recharge, what your max health is, etc. Interestingly, all of these upgrades are not active at once. They all have an assignment cost to them which also rises as you upgrade them, and you also have to upgrade your max capacity to improve it.

The gear shop and upgrades work pretty similarly, except I think these will have a more visible, qualitative effect on your builds because you can actually buy different furyballs and bats, all of which have different properties. Your third gear slot is where your recall glove lives, which grants you your Recall ability. While you can upgrade it, there are also additional options that you can purchase, though I believe these were all locked and invisible in the demo so I don’t know what those would be.

I find the design choice to force you to pick between your permanent upgrades is pretty interesting because it makes them a part of the build-making thought process, which in turn varies up the potential play styles that much more.

In terms of in-run upgrade options that expire when the run ends, you get Modules as rewards for completing certain arenas. As with many other roguelikes, when you complete one arena it will provide you with two options for moving on, each defined by its reward. One potential option is one of numerous Modules, but there are also options for temporary in-run and permanent currencies, safe rooms with healing items, max Fury upgrades, max health upgrades, and others.

When you obtain a Module, the game will provide three options for placing it on a four-slot track of sorts. This track determines on which interval of bounce the Module will actually activate. So for example, if you place it in slot 1 then it will activate on the first bounce, then ever 4 bounces after when the track’s position resets. If you place it in slot 3 then the Module will activate on the third bounce and then every four bounces after that when the tracker’s position lands back on it. This is a strange system that I don’t quite know how to feel about… if this is supposed to provide an opportunity to somehow strategize around this then I’m not seeing it, but it could very well be that my brain isn’t built for this way of thinking.

What I do like about that system is that certain Modules can fuse combine their effects by placing them both in the same slot, effectively opening up a bonus slot to benefit from one additional Module.

While I would not consider them game-breaking by any means because of how unique and fun the game is overall, I do have a couple personal criticisms.

Maybe this is just a “get gud” situation but I did feel like the upgrades you have access to in the demo aren’t particularly strong and don’t make me feel a sense of progression at a rate that I would like. After spending just short of an hour with the game I couldn’t really make an admirable dent into the first stage’s boss in any of my 2-3 times that I was able to get to him in the first place. With that said, I’m not wired for the average roguelike formula, even a good one, so this is a highly subjective take.

I also wish the cooldown on the bat was just a touch faster. I found myself on my occasions just a hair away from being able to hit the ball as it was flying around only for my bat’s cooldown to be not QUITE ready in time. While there are many ways to help you harness this game’s chaos, I feel like the exact fraction-of-a-second timing that the ball makes it back to you is still mooostly out of your control and so having the bat on whatever cooldown it was at in the demo felt like an unnecessary impediment that did get frustrating occasionally.

Finally, as I’ve said in the past, I’m not the kind of person that can stick with a roguelike if I don’t have some sort of character and story progress to act as a throughline to keep me invested as I grind away at the game’s loop. Unfortunately this game doesn’t have anything of the sort at all, and especially with how great these characters look I would have liked some evolving character interactions and some sense of an actual story beyond a highest-level premise. This far more than anything mechanical in the game made me feel the grind even in just under an hour, so in terms of things to improve for my own preferences I would say this would be top priority. Still, for people who aren’t looking for that in their roguelikes they will find a ton to love here because it really is so creative and unique. The value of a game providing an experience that you can’t get elsewhere should never be dismissed because of one or two criticisms, so I’d recommend anyone that thinks that they even MIGHT like this game to at least give the demo a chance before choosing to ignore it.

Ok dear readers, so, I was originally going to start this article with the line “Bunderkin: The Ocular Eclipse is a video game adaptation of a very charming kids’ cartoon that does not exist” but um, after looking into the studio a bit… I mean that line isn’t wrong because the show does not actually exist… yet. As it turns out, this game was not just made in a vacuum, and Studio Zubio appears to be making it alongside an animated series centered around the same world and characters.

Gonna be honest, folks, I’m feeling preeeetty validated right now because before I found that out, this is what I wrote:

Like damn did I call it or what.

Genuinely though, the world and its characters immediately feel so well-realized that as soon as you first step into the village it feels like stepping into a setting that has existed for decades. The look, animation, tone, voice-acting (what little there is in the demo), writing and music are all on par with high-quality children’s cartoons. Round and squishy, but not so wholesome as to flatten out any sort of personality or unique character. In fact, it has those in spades, and does actually get spooky toward the end once the game’s central premise starts setting in. It’s overflowing with creativity and charming as all hell.

Also, just because I couldn’t figure where else to mention this but I do want to mention it… To look at this game I was so sure that it was European because it just has that sort of visual vibe to me, so imagine my surprise when I saw that the studio was based in Utah, in the U.S! Total shock.

Anyway, in this game you take control of Beedee – a kid caught in a situation that will feel very familiar to you if you’re an original Naruto fan. Tell me if this sounds familiar: The protagonist is a boy whose parents are not in the picture for an as-yet unexplained reason. Because of some fundamental nature of who he is (in Beedee’s case he is a “bunderdragon” – a green reptilian rabbit creature), his village ostracizes him and treats him like some sort of jinx or bad omen. Some of the older folks are even terrified of him. Because of this he’s become a little troublemaker who doesn’t pay any mind to any sort of authority, though he is ultimately good at heart and pretty harmless.

Of course I say none of this with any sort of derision – Beedee is a great little protagonist. I really just mentioned Naruto because it’s an easy point of reference with a ton of similarities, but Kishimoto-san didn’t invent the trope and certainly doesn’t own it. Not only that, but Beedee’s status as an ostracized troublemaker frames this game’s genre perfectly and creates what will surely be a satisfying character arc over the course of the game as he gradually accumulates more and more friends.

Speaking of its genre, while the game has all the hallmarks of a character platformer like so many Crashes and Spyros, Beedee can’t even jump! That is because it’s not a platformer at all, but a stealth game. Think less Ratchet & Clank and more Sly Cooper. You can tip-toe, crawl on your belly, dive into and “swim” through tall grass, speak with NPCs and climb up onto ledges that you can reach from a standing position. You can also press up flat against certain walls to traverse narrow paths.

When solving puzzles you can also push and pull blocks and have a slingshot that can take multiple ammo types. In the demo you just had your basic acorn shots and a more limited fire shot that is used to burn weakpoints in ropes. From the look of the UI there will likely be more, too.

There are also a couple slightly more complex mechanics. The first of these is that you are able to press up against certain low walls and boxes to take cover, then peek around to get a better look while risking being caught. One cool addition to this is that, if there are any other nearby similar hiding spots, you can point yourself in its direction and do a targeted dodgeroll to get there faster, darting efficiently from cover to cover.

The other complex mechanic is a tightrope walk. First you find a vertical pole that you can climb, then once you’re at the top there will be a small base for you to stand on and choose which direction’s rope to follow next. Once you proceed you’ll start getting pushed around by wind, needing to constantly maintain your balance by holding the shoulder button (on a controller) of the opposite direction that you’re leaning to right yourself. You will naturally start swaying in alternating directions as you walk so it’s important not to overcompensate or you will lean too far and fall.

Despite the game’s childlike appearance it is not mind-numbingly easy and does take the sort of patience that you would expect out of a linear (in the stealth sections) stealth game. I failed several times during the demo, particularly in the final dungeon-like section. Thankfully the consequence of failure is not harsh – you don’t get sent too far back, rarely losing more than a couple minutes’ progress at most.

There is one additional mechanic that the final game will have but was not explored in the demo, and that is masks. There is a whole UI page dedicated to presenting like 20+ empty slots for the various masks that you will collect. In the demo you only got two and neither had any sort of special ability or utility. One interesting thing that they did reveal about the game though is how the villagers’ treatment of Beedee changes contextually. For example, when he is not wearing any sort of mask nobody wants anything to do with him, treating him with varying levels of dismissiveness, fear or outright hostility. However, when he’s wearing his first mask – a homemade one made in part with smelly mud – the villagers immediately get a lot friendlier, though they do comment on your smell in various, generally nonconfrontational ways. Then when wearing the demo’s last mask, which hides your identity without being stinky, everyone is perfectly pleasant and treats you like anyone else.

I wasn’t initially expecting that out of this game so it was really cool to just encounter it organically.

The game mainly takes place in the village and a short area surrounding it, though the demo hints that you’ll be able to travel at least a bit further out. The game’s premise (per its Steam page) implies that it won’t extend that much further though, as we will be following a three-day time loop. Aside from just enjoying time loop stories in general, I like this direction for this game in particular because it allows the dev team to be constrained in the scope of their world, and from the demo I feel like they did a good job of this. It felt big enough that you could get to memorize it before long without it feeling boring or repetitive, plus the final sequence of the game takes place in an expansive underground network of stone tunnels that are not found in the usual areas of the map, so it is possible that there will be more hidden areas like that too.

Something else that really helps is that as you progress in the demo, the world state changes in subtle ways. The NPCs all have dialogue that changes over time, and every one of them is named with their own unique character model, and so you end up getting a feel for each of their different personalities as you go. New NPCs will also show up from time to time, which often brings access to new sidequests, some of which will unlock gated stealth areas not accessible at other points in the game. The most fun guide to the world state though was a giant balloon for the village’s once-in-a-generation Eclipse Festival that gradually got more and more filled, until finally it was ready to be anchored down and released to float in the air.

One more huge aspect that will keep these environments feeling fresh is that the game’s Steam page also promises that each day in the loop will be very distinct, describing them like this:

Day One: Festival preparations fill the streets as excitement builds for the upcoming eclipse. Day Two: Something begins to feel wrong as townsfolk start behaving strangely and acting out-of-self. Day Three: Chaos erupts as the Oculi outlive their natural cycle and the town descends toward a creeping apocalypse.

Story-wise the premise is nice and simple. The town is putting on their Eclipse Festival to welcome the Ocular Eclipse, a lunar event that only occurs once every 50 or so years. Because it happens so rarely most villagers have only heard about it second-hand, including what their roles should be in putting the festival together. Though strangely, you also hear a lot of buzz about how the last time the festival happened, everybody was able to be their full, unbridled selves for a night with the catch that none of them actually remembered it the next day.

As I mentioned before, things actually get pretty spooky, too. Children start going missing, you start to spot weird cultists sneaking around town and hanging around its outskirts, mumbling to themselves and seeming weirdly jittery.

Even as Beedee starts noticing these things he can’t exactly rely on anybody else to help him, and in general he is more focused on sneaking into the festival anyway, partially because he’s genuinely curious and partially because he’s forbidden from doing so. After spending nearly the entire demo trying to get in but constantly being foiled by the village’s police and a busybody girl named Vye, through hijinx and coincidence he ends up getting mixed up with a cult plot to overrun the village with a swarm of newly hatched oculi – little floating squid creatures that take over the mind of whosever head they rest on – toward some unstated purpose. Beedee’s traveling through the underground dungeon, attempting and failing to prevent the release of the oculi, and witnessing them be set free is the event that ends the demo, and with it Day 1 of the time loop.

Again very much despite its cute appearance, because Beedee is basically just a kid with no magic powers or anything, that last dungeon sequence where you have to sneak around a bunch of possessed cultists actually felt pretty tense without the game ever relying on any sort of violence at all. There didn’t have to be any sort of explicit brutal threat for me to feel anxious sneaking around those caverns all alone knowing that nobody would be able to get to Beedee in time to save him, even if the villagers would want to to begin with.

All of this made for a very compelling experience that sold me immediately and then kept finding more ways to delight and impress me as it went. I think fans of stealth games, or even just games with very charming aesthetics, should check this one out because I suspect there is a strong chance they will come to love it too.

One last note that I’ll make in a sort of funny-in-a-sad-way is that just like my first review of this batch, DekaDuck, Bunderkin also needs to rely on a Kickstarter to be completed. As of the time of writing (July 1st, 2026) this studio has a project page on Kickstarter which has not yet begun its campaign. I would encourage everyone that has read this far into my review to click through the link to their page and “Follow” the project so you can be notified as soon as the campaign is live. Given how much work they have already put into this thing before their campaign has even gone live, the fact that they have already executed on their design ideas so effectively in the demo, and that the scope of the game feels appropriately restrained given the size of their team, I personally believe that they have what it takes to see this thing through with the funding. Here there is tangible, widely playable proof of a game with a clarity of vision of all parts of the project far ahead of them asking for money. That all being said, I believe they have earned the benefit of whatever doubt people may have given the rocky history of video game Kickstarters in general, and the opportunity to help a game that is trying to do something so seldomly seen today is a worthwhile risk.

Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiozubio/bunderkin-the-ocular-eclipse

Steam page:

“Gather your allies. Eliminate Angels. Transform into a Magical Girl. Slay God. Kernel Hearts is a multiplayer co-op roguelike action RPG about four magical girls and their attempt to save a world drowning in ashes.” The devs’ own synopsis on Steam gives the broad strokes pretty well but WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT DON’T LEAVE YET!!!

Okay look. I get it, I’m not a huge roguelike fan either. I need a strong sense of progression in my games and so anything endlessly repeatable and/or that relies mostly on an intrinsic sense of high score chasing or time chasing whatever are just not my thing.

BUT!

This game’s got the juice. I promise. Let me give you the hard sell (EXTREMELY FIGURATIVELY – Idon’tknowthesedevsandhavenevercommunicatedwiththemandamnotbeingpaidfortheseopinions), and there is no better place to start with my kinds of people than its non-mechanical elements. Let’s start with the setting as a whole.

Kernel Hearts takes place in a post-apocalyptic future Earth, albeit one transformed by a now long-standing war between humanity and God and His angels. The most harmful of these transformations is the appearance of the “ashfall,” an ever-present deluge of ash that falls from the sky, creating an atmosphere that is toxic for most people as well as causing a creeping supernatural memory loss. To protect themselves, the last remaining people on Earth must wear masks when they go outside.

In the hopes of ending this cursed existence and putting a stop to the war, mankind has been dispatching teams of Magical Girls into the Tower for decades, however this has met with little success. Left with no other options, however, mankind has been forced to continue to endure this struggle against all hope.

At the point in time that we join the story, most of the Earth has already perished from the war and the last remaining bastion of mankind is the town of Babel, which resides near the base of the Tower of Babel, the home of God and His angels. The golden age where Magical Girls and the supplies to support them were plentiful is long-since in the past – these days they are precious, desperately protected commodities. This is also an age where most named NPCs sport visible scars (physical and/or emotional) and cigarettes, testament to a lifetime of battles fought and losses endured. Everybody has more than their fair share of tragic stories, but also a purpose that pushes them to always take one more step forward.

Despite the somber setting and overall tone, it is also far from humourless as you may be able to guess from the piece of promo art that I decided to use at the head of this article. Even the most dower-seeming of these characters are written and drawn skillfully enough that they feel like more than just another Edgy Sad Soldier At The End Of The World™ – they are well-rounded and feel like people who still have something to hold onto and fight for. Despite the long, hard-fought battles, they haven’t yet given up or given into despair, and so they still treasure and nurture connections with each other, goof around, smooch around, and live lives worth living. Admittedly I’m the sort of person who often turns away from post-apocalyptic stories because to me they mostly feel overly edgy and cynical, featuring characters who nearly to a one have essentially already given up on trying to be happy. The sort of take that Kernel Hearts is playing with, on the other hand, is the exact kind that I can easily fall in love with. As a result, despite all, this world still manages to feel very warm and lived-in, even as it also feels desperate and nearly – but not quite – hopeless.

There are many subtle and unsubtle connections that one can make between this game and, specifically, Neon Genesis: Evangelion and NieR: Automata, but I think this idea of the importance of cultivating connection and finding value in the beauty that still remains in the world are ones that will probably end up being the least-discussed. Tragically, I would say, because in all three stories’ cases they are so integral to what make them special, and what set them apart from so many other post-apocalypses.

Now that I have spent 550 words lecturing about the setting (oops), let’s talk characters.

Starting where the game did, the first character worth talking about is a man known simply as The Creator. Despite the grandiose name he is a human, albeit an incredibly important one. The reason why he is the first character that we as the player meet is because our actual first player character, Fernet, starts the game newly awoken from unconsciousness. This is because, due to the now-rare and precious nature of Magical Girls, they must now inhabit cybernetic bodies so that even if they fall in battle within the Tower, their minds can transfer into a new frame. What does this all have to do with the man known as The Creator? He is the one who created this system, and is the only one remaining who continues to maintain and improve it. Personality-wise he is intelligent and professional, and not especially expressive, but there is a nevertheless a warmth underlying that demeanor. He is, ultimately, here to take care of you, and even cracks a smile now and then.

Next up is our first player character: Unit-001 – Fernet, the “Prodigy Tactician.” As you might expect, she is the pink-haired one in all of the promotional material. The game’s personnel file describes her as Argentinian, with a strong personality and, amusingly, a case of “main character syndrome.” Gameplay-wise she is the balanced sword wielder whose magic centers around summoning. She is able to maintain multiple summons at once and so the game advises that mana management is important when playing her to keep her at her full potential. At the beginning of the game she holds an interesting place in the cast because despite being the team leader, she is also the most recent to have died and come back, which means her memories are the most recent to be reset, which in turn means that she needs to rely on the others to re-teach her everything that she needs to know. While Magical Girls don’t lose all of their memories when they die, they do lose a significant chunk of their most recent ones and tend to need to be reminded of various things, including who the rest of her squadmates are.

One extra layer is that she is the first one to be returned into The Creator’s latest version of the Magical Girl frames – a version that notably allows them to retain all of their memories on “death.” This means that going forward, Fernet will not need to worry about losing her memories when she dies. This setup is a very clever narrative device because it explains how these characters can keep dying and returning to fulfill the game’s roguelike format, justifies why Fernet needs to learn about everything fresh to efficiently introduce the player to the world and its big concepts, all while explaining why Fernet would no longer need to keep relearning about these things every time she dies over the course of the game (which would become taxing and irritating to players’ patience before long). Even better, this sets up a cool dynamic where we as Fernet are the one who need to be retaught and taken care of at the beginning of the game, but then as the story progresses the others will no doubt end up dying, and because they’re not yet in the new special frames they should all end up taking their turn in needing us to teach them in a cute little reversal.

The next member of Fernet’s squad and thus next playable character is Unit-002 – Spika, the “Sword of the East.” Described as a child of post-war Japan, she was born alongside her twin Isukiri, both with only one eye each. They were raised with an iron fist and unlike most Magical Girls, were not trained to wield firearms or magic, instead relying solely on a katana. Gameplay-wise Spika is a rushdown character with wide, sweeping attacks. Her stand-in for spells use her vital energies to do cool anime samurai things like launching exploding spirit orbs and blade beams. In the demo she is unlocked after defeating a certain boss (which I did not do personally). She is the most introverted of the team, but is sweet and seems to have a real weakness for cute, fluffy things.

Next up is our third squadmate slash playable character, Unit-003 – Laika, the “Crimson Demon.” Described as a prodigy born in the USSR who has deep knowledge of magic. She wields Damocles, her 100kg greatsword, alongside her hemokinesis which “was the fear of the western block.” The playable character with the maximum complexity rating, she is able to switch between her Damocles-wielding stance and a faster hand-to-hand fighting stance. As you might expect, Damocles does big damage but also leaves Laika more vulnerable than the other characters. Her spells appear to be good for crowd control and logistical support, such as shredding enemy shields. Tragically not playable in the demo. She is practical – a consummate professional. Terminally deadpan but deceptively patient, helpful and has yet to succumb to what seem like deeply set nihilistic tendencies.

Our final squadmate and playable character is Unit-004 – Dolce, the “Deadly Performer.” For her I’m just going to straight-up quote her description straight out of the game because the devs were cooking: “Italians have the gift of beauty, wherever there is science they give birth to art. So, when a charismatic and gorgeous Magical Girl was born, instead of a solider they made a Star.” All of her gameplay data was still kept confidential in the demo, and needless to say she is also unplayable.  )))):   She is easily the most outgoing and expressive of the group, and very kind. The only extravert on the team aside from Fernet herself.

I went into this demo fully expecting Laika to be my favourite, but honestly coming out of it Dolce really surprised me and turned out to be a real contender. I ended up loving the entire squad both individually and as a squad with hints of real chemistry.

Straying further from our playable roster we come to the only other named character in the village, Rhea. Alongside her pet dog Haru, they are the last two remaining members of the Lost and Found guild. She works to retrieve and return people’s lost things. She is abnormally resistant to the memory loss effects of the ashfall and so she decided to, uh… found… the Lost and Found Brigade, because people would commonly forget items, even ones that they cherish, due to the amnesic effects of the ashfall. The brigade eventually turned into the Guild, and they ended up becoming more scavengers and treasure hunters, locating and bringing back outside supplies into Babel. I found this to be a really cool bit of incorporating a character and their motivations directly into the game’s cool world lore! Things like this are what makes cool lore feel truly impactful as opposed to just an interesting entry on a wiki or whatever. I really liked this a lot.

Straying even further now, into the Tower itself, we move on to Tofu & Toke, the proprietors of the Relic shop. I’ll get more into Relics and the shop itself later but for now – Tofu is the one that really runs things here. He is a scarred-up and rugged wolfman who has clearly seen more than his share of action in the past. He is direct but always respectful, and has a streak of dry humour in him as well (continuing this game’s trend of avoiding making even the more rugged characters completely humourless). Toke is the second of the set – a small human child who helps Tofu run the shop and has seemingly become his charge for reasons not given in the demo. He is silly and precocious, and has a good rapport with Tofu even if they get on each others’ nerves.

1,300 words spent on characters later (oops) we reach our final guy – Daiki. A mysterious elevator operator within the Tower that serves as your exit to progress further in. He is very friendly and carefree, almost suspiciously so… (I don’t actually know what his deal is because they don’t explain it in the demo, I’m just side-eyeing him real hard based on pure instinct.)

Much like in Hades, after a couple failed runs the named NPCs will have new dialogue, which does a great job at maintaining a sense of forward progression for me despite the roguelike of it all. As I mentioned before this really is so so important for me as I habitually ignore most roguelikes because I just really can’t stand the idea of not feeling like I’m making any meaningful progress from death to death to death to death to death. If a game is going to force me to replay the same stages over and over again then I do need it to meet me halfway and let me at least have a sense of progression in the story and/or character relationships. (I’ll reiterate that this did only progress once or twice in the demo, however I feel like it is implying that this will continue to happen throughout the full game. Maybe not every single time because they aren’t exactly a Supergiant-sized studio, but at a reasonable clip. This is, of course, pure speculation on my part.)

Next let’s bridge the gap from non-mechanics into mechanics (I KNOW IT’S LONG ALREADY OKAY) smoothly by just quickly mentioning that there is actually a relationship-building mechanic in this game. I don’t know if these can lead to literal romantic relationships, so this is probably best thought of as being somewhat akin to the social links from Personas 3 onward. In this game you can raise named NPCs’ “Bond level” by collecting a certain number of a type of item during your forays into the Tower and handing them in, at which point they will rank up and you’ll be treated to a cutscene where they tell you more about themselves, and in doing so grow closer to you. In the demo I only experienced this once with Rhea, but it was enough to sell me on these devs’ pitch on it. Their writing is quite strong so that naturally goes a long way toward an almost entirely narrative feature like this.

Now finally we come to the actual “action RPG” and “roguelike” parts of this game.

In terms of Fernet’s game-feel I’d say the closest analogue to how she controls would be NieR: Automata. You can double-jump, grab onto platforming ledges, and perform a dash that converts directly into a sprint. If you perfect dodge you can perform a high-damage counter that I think you are invulnerable during. Offensively you have light and heavy attacks that can be mixed into different combinations to perform different combos.

You also have two spell slots that you “fill” by purchasing them at moon shrines, which you find while exploring the Tower’s maps. The currency that you use to buy spells is the most commonly-found and disappears after the end of a run, so there is no reason at all to horde it. Likewise, spells that you purchase disappear after a run ends so you don’t have to be too precious about which ones you choose beyond what sort of build you want to aim for. Also, as I mentioned briefly during the character descriptions, it appears that these spells will be character-specific, with most of Fernet’s options being various summons.

Game-feel aside, the overall flow is more similar to Elden Ring: Nightreign or Risk of Rain. I say this because you have to make the exact same types of judgement calls during a run, namely: how much time do you spend going around gathering resources, equipment and items versus gunning it straight to the exit and risking being underpowered for the boss and following stages? In Nightreign the primary time pressure was of course the deadly closing circle, and in Risk of Rain the game’s difficulty setting itself increased in real-time. In this game you have a Sin meter that gradually fills over time. As it gets close to the final 10%-15% you can start to see signs of change in the sky – namely a giant flying Biblically accurate angel ominously watching you from on-high, well outside of your ability to attack it. Once the Sin meter completely fills all Hell Heaven breaks loose and the angel just rains down an endless supply of exploding energy orbs until you either escape or die. Very probably die. Thankfully, very much unlike Risk of Rain, your Sin meter starts from empty at the beginning of every stage, so you don’t have to worry about your progress carrying over between stages or runs.

(I’ll give a bit of a disclaimer here and say that the one time that my Sin meter completely filled may have been a run when that Biblically accurate angel would have been my boss for that stage..? So it’s hard for me to say for sure based on my own experience whether the specifics of the Sin meter filling are specific to the boss that you’re set to face, or specific to the stage that you’re on, or just always the same each time.)

The maps themselves are quite large so as tempting as it may be, you really don’t want to push your luck too far, especially after the first map. And you will be tempted, because the maps are designed quite well. No matter where you are there are always several points of interest within eyeshot, whether those be environmental features, shops or resources. This is a testament to not just the game’s technical side – I encountered less visibility issues with draw distance in this demo than I did with BOTW back on the Switch – but also a testament to the game’s overall design and layout of its maps, as well as the visual design and VFX on its free-floating currencies and shops. Everything is immediately identifiable from a distance, which is especially important in a game with such an impactful time constraint. It provides you with the information that you would need to make quick judgements on your destinations and priorities in a way that, if it was not done properly, could easily lead to this experience having a lot of frustrating, aimless wandering. The ultimate version of this is the location of the exit, which periodically emits a burst of blue light to broadcast its position like a lighthouse.

Like any self-respecting roguelike this game has many a way to power yourself up during a run. I’ve already touched on spells, but another type are Mementos, which you get by spending blue currency to open Blue Coffins. This attracts waves of regular enemies to you, which you then have to defeat to earn the coffin’s prize. Themed as a lingering ability of the perished Magical Girl within, these offer various types of powerful but conditional passive buffs.

To give you an idea of what to expect here I’ll list some examples that I encountered in the demo:

Nakshatra’s Lust – Your combo finishers apply Divine Searing in a small area, which inflicts a stacking DOT effect that increases in damage with the number of stacks.

Airys Revenge – Summons a fairy familiar that will follow your attacks with its own large, powerful beam attack.

Aegis Last Wish – Killing an enemy grants you a shield stack, each one blocking a single attack.

Teressa’s Envy – Your attacks have a 50% chance to inflict Heavencrawl, which infects enemies such that they will take damage based on their MAX HP after accumulating 100 stacks. Obviously made for taking down the big boys.

Rino’s Punishment – Consuming an item summons a Hellgrasp on an enemy, reaching up from the underworld and damaging it.

Once you obtain a Memento you can also get the option at future coffins to level it up instead of obtaining a new one.

You can also find giant chests which also summon a wave of enemies to defeat in order to open it. These yield Relics, which are weaker passive traits than Mementos but also do not cost any type of currency to trigger. A couple examples of these from the demo are below:

Spellblade Rune – After casting a spell, your next attack deals a lot of extra damage.

Plastic Gems – Picking up an item creates a copy of it if you have the space.

Token of Strength – Gain +5% ATK.

The last way to gain power is to just find consumable items in the environment, like Heart Seeds which provide a powerful one-time heal. You can hold up to four of these at a time.

One last type of helpful thing that you can find in the maps are what I’ll broadly call “helpful environmental features,” which are specific to each map. For example, in the first map there are catapults placed all over that you can climb into to shoot yourself a large distance very quickly. In the second map there are these hidden sandpits that you can walk into that will drop you into an underground layer of the environment. This can be a good or bad thing depending on how strapped for time you are because they do contain helpful things like anywhere else on the map, but the only way to get back up to the surface is to find glowing jump pads. All of these map-specific features really make the prospect of progressing to new maps very exciting beyond the sheer “progress” aspect itself.

The last thing about the maps that I’ll mention is a really unique feature where these momentary hostile events can trigger at random. One example is a curse that darkens your screen around the edges, narrowing your line of sight. Another sets off a rapid series of telegraphed explosions under your feet that force you to keep moving regardless of what you had planned for the next 10 seconds or so. These are great, engaging little ways to add a bit of spice and break up the pace of a run without feeling too annoying or unfair.

Reaching the end of a stage means finding Daiki and his fancy, extradimensional elevator. This will bring you up to the stage’s boss arena which is a separate space from the rest of the map. I actually found the first boss to be a pretty fair difficulty – I was able to beat it on my first try, but not without exhausting all of my healing items or winning with only one or two hits from death. The second boss is significantly harder and actually requires you to have a strong handle on the game’s controls and some sense of a build. I only challenged it once during my time with the demo and got it maybe halfway through its health bar. He certainly felt achievable, just not without more practice or a strategic build, which is what you really want out of this type of game.

Once you defeat the boss you get a results screen showing a bunch of different stats. I imagine once you’ve spent some real time with the game this screen will give you a good gauge of your performance so far and how to plan your time in the next stage, but naturally only having played a couple hours of the demo I wasn’t at that point in my journey yet.

After this screen you get sent to a safe room between stages, the only one in the demo being Camelot, the Relic shop that Tofu and Toke run. Safe rooms also provide an opportunity to chat with your NPC squadmates, as well as Daiki and the proprietor(s) of the safe room itself. Naturally the proprietor(s) have a Bond level, meaning that they are open for the social link mechanic. Leveling up these NPCs’ Bond will also improve the quality of their shop’s offerings.

From here you can also access the Playroom, meant as just a casual space to safely mess around in if you’re playing multiplayer, with silly little mini-games, a tennis court and a jumping puzzle.

In terms of the game’s aesthetics there is a lot to love here. Firstly, its 2D art used in its character portraits and splash screens during cutscenes is a gorgeous anime style with character designs that feel lush without being complicated or ostentatious. Some of them in particular will, let’s say, do a lot for a lot of diverse tastes (though the trailer shows this off much better than the limitations of the demo). Its colour palette of desaturated warm tones really lends this world a warm, nostalgic feeling, like being huddled around a campfire together at night. Because of the anti-ashfall masks that most people in this world need to wear, even the random unnamed NPCs look very cool and distinct.

The 3D models may not be absolute peak quality, but Kernel Hearts definitely proves that sometimes the true strength of a game’s visuals comes from what you choose to do with what you’ve got rather than how hard you can push a GPU. I don’t know if the devs used any pre-built assets in their game (to be clear: not a crime, especially for a small team), but whatever the case may be, everything feels custom-made and cohesive. The skybox in the village of Babel is an especially stunning view of the apocalyptic, swirling mass of clouds and ash, a frozen tidal wave in the sky surrounding the inescapable, twisted form of the Tower that emerges from it like a monster poised to make the final, decisive world-ending blow to mankind.

The music of Kernel Hearts is also wonderful. Between the game’s trailers and the demo itself we are treated to a few genres, including city pop and electronica. Not just catchy, this score has a lot of heart that makes the whole project feel oddly life-affirming. This is in no small part due to the vocal tracks, which play not only during boss battles but also as the second stage’s theme. Cooler still is that across the available songs I noted lyrics in at least three different languages, those being English, Japanese and what I believe was French. I found it very cool that they have so many languages represented, and I’d guess that throughout the full game we may encounter more, too.

Ok people, we’re 4,500 words into this thing and I still haven’t explained everything there is to talk about (did I talk about the game’s permanent upgrades system that works like NieR’s plug-in chips and its UI explicitly references Evangelion? Nope!), but we’re going to have to stop eventually so let’s see if I can land this thing…

An incredible amount of time, skill and love has clearly gone into making this game and it shows at every turn. Its world has so much cool lore and a tragic yet welcoming tone. Every room, every environment is so thoughtfully designed and laid out that you’re immediately able to buy in. The setting is powerfully established right away, drawing you in with the familiar and keeping you immersed with everything that makes it unique. Kernel Hearts has the potential to become a formative piece of media for a lot of people who actually manage to learn about this criminally unknown and underdiscussed game, and I’ll be right there beside them.

The extent of my manic praise might seem very preemptive and overwrought given that I only experienced a very small slice of the full product through a demo, and maybe it will indeed turn out to be that way once the full game releases. In defense of my unbridled excitement, I will say this: not every demo that I’ve played has gotten me this excited, and as of the end of this Next Fest that brings me to over 90 demos in 2.5 years. I believe the fact that this game was able to elicit this reaction from me to begin with is an indication that there is something happening here, and while any speculation naturally holds a certain margin of error, I do think that is enough to at the very least avoid dismissing it outright.

(All this and the demo didn’t even give you access to their full Magical Girl “Devil Trigger” forms!)

The year is 1970 and the country of Vera Cruz – a Latin American nation ruled by a military dictatorship – has opened its borders to the world and its journalists in a show of international goodwill. Vera Cruz has become impoverished and the current administration sees this as an opportunity to secure funds from this setting’s world bank entity.

You play Alice Verissima, a young but world-weary journalist working for the Berland Gazette as its foreign correspondent. Setting the game’s mood quite effectively, it opens with Alice leaning back in her chair looking unimpressed as she reads a letter from the government’s National Press Secretary that lays out the administration’s conditions for allowing her to do her reporting on the Marshal Pancreas Nagaroto Public School. These conditions are as follows:

There must be an interview with the school’s best student, Sonia Gouvea.

There must be an interview with the school’s principal, Janaina Gouvea.

There must be a photo taken with the school’s best student, Sonia Gouvea.

The letter emphasizes that this is a matter of diplomatic importance and urges her to comply.

As a matter of the game’s own perspective on this letter, it disappears from screen for a moment and then reappears covered in red ink containing Alice’s own corrections, editorializing and doodles.

It is at this point that “proper” gameplay takes over and the game’s first-person perspective asserts itself as you step outside the waiting room to head to your first interview, revealing that you are already at the school. I personally take this to mean that Alice was given the letter upon her arrival, probably as a coercive tactic by the government knowing that any self-respecting journalist wouldn’t just leave the site once they’ve arrived, in the hopes that it would all but force them to write a puff piece to make the country (and by extension the administration) look like a competent provider of its people’s needs.

The game has a style that I’ve come to really enjoy through the years of playing these demos, though of course I first encountered it back when I played the Danganronpa games, well before I started doing these reviews. The art styles themselves couldn’t be more different, but the overall art direction is the exact same as the first-person sections in the Danganronpas: the environments that you travel through are made up of 3D models designed, lit and coloured to fit in with the overall look of the game, while all of the characters that you encounter within it are stylized as 2D paper cutouts that perpetually orient themselves to face you.

A visual feature that is unique to this game is the fact that all of the NPCs have an interesting, semi-anonymizing quality to them. They all have this unifying design element where they are completely coloured red aside from certain small things like hair, eyes and some props. Their clothing is more implied than actually drawn and none of them aside from the main character are drawn with a mouth. It is very striking and an interesting way to distinguish Alice from everyone else.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression though – despite all of the distinguishing details that these characters don’t have, they still managed to be very distinct and look very expressive. You could never confuse one for another and their state of mind is always clear.

In terms of gameplay there are two phases: 1) information-gathering, and 2) assembling your article.

In the information-gathering phase you are playing through fairly standard adventure game activities. You walk around the environment talking to people, occasionally collecting the odd item to use it to progress shortly after. You can also take photos at designated times.

A fun detail is that the requirements laid out in that letter from the government essentially serve as your mandatory objectives that you must do to progress in the game. Of course, you wouldn’t be a very good journalist if you stopped there, which is where the exploration comes in. By speaking to NPCs and exploring parts of the environment that are outside of the administration’s parameters, your can follow a series of sidequests that lead you through an alternative narrative to the government line.

At any point after you complete the bare minimum of the government’s mandates, you can choose to end that stage and move onto the second phase of the game, which is assembling your article. This is presented as a series of discreet choices, with the first being which headline you would like to use to frame your story. Naturally, if you only did the bare minimum then your only option would be the one that is favourable to the government’s propaganda, but if you dug deeper then you would gain a second option that runs counter to it. In the case of the demo’s school stage, the mandatory option is one that frames the school’s best student as the representative example of how the school is so great at teaching. The alternative narrative is one that takes others’ opinions into account and presents a school that fails the majority of its students while only a select few succeed.

The second decision to make is which photo to use, with the mandatory option being one of the school’s star student in a classroom and the alternative one being one that you would have taken at the end of the line of sidequests, showing a group of the government’s fascist soldiers secretly burning a pile of “illicit” books on school grounds.

After that you can choose up to three quotes that you had gathered during the stage to help bring context to your story. Given that you would have spoken to a variety of NPCs with a variety of opinions, the group of quotes that you choose will help strengthen whatever narrative you want to build about the school.

Once you’ve locked in your choices the next screen will show that day’s paper, including an excerpt from a story or two that you can read for more insight into the state of the game’s world, its geopolitics, and Vera Cruz itself. The game also assigns you a satisfaction rating on behalf of the country’s ruling dictator, General Galba. There is no clear indication in the demo of what affect this rating has either immediately or over time – I of course strongly hope that it does have some sort of effect because if that’s not the case, it would almost defeat the whole conceit of the game.

The demo’s school stage isn’t especially big or difficult, but does a great job of setting up what this game is, essentially serving as a full vertical slice tutorial ahead of the game’s full release. With that in mind I do hope that the full game will require more deductive intuition and reasoning skills than the demo did, ideally providing a bit more nuance and more options for the potential narratives you can create with your stories, because this first story was lacking in nuance and was about as subtle as a gunshot. Naturally I am not trying to imply that the game should present any sort of advantages to fascism (as if such a thing could exist), but the two options presented in the demo were just so obvious and black-and-white that I was admittedly left wishing it had a little more to say. One last note about the demo is that it is difficult to tell if the game’s story will have any sort of overarching narrative across all of these individual stories, or whether it will ever become more character-focused as opposed to being more or less an episodic series of anti-fascist morality tales. It certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world if that didn’t end up being the case, but after finishing the demo, even though its overall structure and aesthetic were cool, I did come away from it feeling like it was missing something.

DekaDuck is a very solid 2D platformer that is specifically designed in the footsteps of the classic Megaman games. Bearing more than a passing mechanical resemblance, it also adds some twists that good ol’ Rock couldn’t quite manage to do himself.

Just as a real quick one, he does indeed have a charged Buster Cannon-type primary gun with three levels of damage, counting the default pew-pew. To reach the highest damage tier you need to charge for maybe 2.5 seconds. In addition to obviously doing more damage to enemies, another use for the tier 3 shot is that it’s the only one capable of breaking crates to reveal the delicious delicious crate innards within.

So we all know that Megaman can jump, but can he… double-jump? He can’t, you say? Well I guess that’s the first proof that Deka is the superior lifeform, because he can!

Replacing Megaman’s slide is DekaDuck’s forward dash. This dash travels roughly twice the distance of the slide, can be done in the air, can boost your jump distance if you jump mid-slide and can be stopped short by pulling back in the opposite direction on the stick. In exchange for these conveniences, your usage is slightly throttled by introducing an energy meter that it consumes. The meter refills on its own after about 1 second so while it isn’t spammable, this limitation also doesn’t feel excessive. It’s a nice balance.

The biggest difference between both games though is DekaDuck’s main mechanic, which is his 8-way rocket fist. Rather than a projectile attack, it’s instead a way to grab things from a moderate distance. This may sound like more of an ignorable quality-of-life feature, but this game has effectively made it into its core mechanic by giving it several pivotal functions.

The first function is one that somewhat goes against what I just said – while the rocket fist is not itself a projectile, it does grab enemies so you can throw them as projectiles. This is maybe its funniest use too because it renders your primary weapon mostly redundant. This is because a thrown enemy is at minimum the same strength as a fully-charged shot, which I know because a single thrown enemy is able to break those breakable crates that I mentioned earlier, while also having the benefit of taking a second enemy off the field because you’re holding them in your hand and they die on impact when thrown. By contrast, your fully-charged shot is consumed by the first object that it hits and so is never able to take two enemies out at once. I personally feel like this is an odd choice and that perhaps a better balance can be found by enabling the fully-charged shot to penetrate through enemies and the environment, even if that comes with a slightly increased charge time.

Another fun aspect of using enemies as projectiles like this is that each enemy type in the demo had slightly different projectile behaviours when thrown. The little yellow round ducks are thrown in an arc and explode like a grenade, the bats travel an unlimited distance straight forward, the spring-frogs bounce off of the first thing that they hit allowing them to deal damage twice. This is a great way to make the different enemy types feel distinct and keep the throw mechanic feeling fresh.

My favourite use of the grab mechanic though is that most enemies have a secondary function while held. As two quick examples, you can slow-fall if you hold the jump button while holding a bat. Grabbing a spring-frog will actually have you ride it rather than hold it, allowing you to have an extra high jump and travel safely across spiky floors.

These secondary functions do not consume the enemy in any way, allowing you to keep hold of them and throw them when ready.

Another totally different function that you gain access to while holding an enemy is that if you double-jump and then throw an enemy directly downward, you effectively unlock a triple-jump. Rather than being an unintentional little quirk of enhancing gamefeel, the devs designed the game to use this mechanic, allowing you to access secret screens located on platforms that you couldn’t without it. If you’re a collectables-inclined person this should entice you, because similar to the K-O-N-G letters in the old Donkey Kong Country games, DekaDuck has a series of coloured gears to collect which are often held in these secret screens. And yes, the collection UI does make it clear when you have missed one, which can be a tiny bit annoying because there is generally no way to go back and get it without restarting the stage. Keep in mind that this is a straightforward, linear 2D platform and not a Metroidvania. There is very little backtracking that can be done here. As the demo only has one stage to try, it does not make it clear how conveniently you will be able to restart/retry a stage or go back to a certain checkpoint, or if this will be possible at all without fully shutting your game off without saving.

One final note on how this game works is that, while the demo featured none of these, its Steam page says that you will be collecting more tools and weapons as the game progresses. Thematically this isn’t as cool as absorbing abilities from defeated bosses so Rock has the edge here, but nevertheless it is great to know that Deka’s capabilities will indeed expand over the course of the final game.

As you might expect, this game’s story is pretty basic, serving simply to keep you engaged as you move from one stage to the next. With that said, the writing does its job very well and the characters are plenty fun. It centers around this game’s Dr. Light stand-in, the egotistical Dr. Less – a seemingly black market scientist who is wanted by the Galactic Police – and the disembodied head of his daughter’s pet duck, Deka, who he grafts onto a robot body to be his man duck of action, perhaps ironically working as a bounty hunter. Also part of the cast is Aiko, a Galactic Police Officer who is pursuing Deka and the gang. She is competent, somewhat of an airhead, and a cute-as-hell bunnygirl. Not featured in the demo are Dr. Less’s tiny daughter Petite, and Ekos, an edgy horseman cyborg who works as a literal arms dealer and seems like he could end up either joining the team or becoming a rival for Deka.

DekaDuck features a fantastic art style that combines the visual identities of classic Megaman, Megaman X, and Sonic the Hedgehog post-Sonic Adventure. Big shapes, bright colours and exaggerated proportions abound here to create a very cartoony and expressive look in its character portraits and comic-style cutscenes that are reminiscent of the Saturday morning cartoons of 20-30 years ago. It is easy to imagine this game getting its own show or comic, and for these characters to cross over with the Megaman and Sonic Archie comics.

In terms of the gameplay assets, the stages and backgrounds are all done as 3D models that compliment this game’s art direction nicely. The character models themselves are so good at mimicking the look of high-quality 2D sprites that even now I find myself with a kernel of doubt lodged in my brain, questioning whether they might actually just be 2D. Either way, they look fantastic.

One last thing to mention about the art is that the game’s Steam page proudly proclaims that everything is hand-drawn and animated, which I only mention because I don’t think we can ever celebrate enough the intentional effort and expertise of human beings in direct opposition to the anti-community mindset of entitlement, laziness and hyper-individualistic clout-chasing inherent in the use of genAI that could only be considered acceptable by people who fundamentally do not understand or value the necessity of literal humanity in the art-making process.

As a final note, this game is currently seeking funding on their Kickstarter to actually complete it. So if you think this game sounds interesting and think that it should exist, or would like an opportunity to contribute directly to a Brazilian-made game, you may want to consider donating some money to make it happen. As of the time of writing on June 27th, the campaign has 12 days remaining (making its deadline July 9th) and is a hair passed halfway to its goal, requiring $23k CAD more to be successful.

Here is a direct link to its campaign page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andreyin/dekaduck-fast-paced-2d-platformer

"DATE: 01/17/3728 Time: 1523 DESIGNATION: 09272024 UNIT: Paladin CHX-01

Today marks my first week in the CHVLR program, and is the day of my first deployment to the field. My SCS was installed three days ago, and I’ve run a few training simulations, but it’s the first time I’ve even been in the cockpit.

The Colonel says there is no other choice. The enemy is here and I have to stop them.

Paladin initializing. Systems green. Forrest McCoy, signing off."

So keeping up with my new apparent schtick of talking about story-focused games, let me tell you about CHVLR!

You're gonna die.

So, CHVLR is a solo-journaling game in the same overarching vein as Ronin, albeit in this world you are a mecha pilot fighting an enemy of your own imagination and of course for your own reasons. Where Ronin uses dice, CHVLR uses a standard deck of cards and a Jenga tower (or, if you're a normal person who doesn't randomly own a stacking block tower, an online d100 dice roller) to determine scenarios, moral questions, etc. via the deck while the block tower acts as a sort of "health bar." You slowly pull out blocks from the tower at certain prompts or add them back in until you either manage to somehow make it through the game alive, or more likely the tower crashes and you face your doom. You can of course play without the tower to make sure your character doesn't die, but I feel like that takes out some of the sting and glory out of it.

As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem

BUT who is also invested in antiquities

The Nu Tabletum

This was recently partially translated and it’s incredibly fragmentary, but it’s a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer’s home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically “smooth things over”. They are taking an oath.

He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.

Give that Wolf a Banana