19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions June 2026 Edition - Day 6
Day 0/Day 1/Day 2/Day 3/Day 4/Day 5
Okay so if my count is right today I'm ending at 37 demos done. That combined with bad sleep and apologies if today's entries are rougher.
Duskfade.
The world of Duskfade is a world of loss. Over a century ago, they lost the clockmakers, who could supposedly control the flow of time itself. In the wake of disaster, most of the human population has disappeared. And for our hero, Zirian, he and his sister Alyra lost their only remaining family, their grandfather. In the depths of grief, she locks away for weeks on end, tinkering with the clockwork technology her grandfather left behind. Before Zirian can get her to leave, their house is rocked by an explosion. A massive clocktower erupts from the center of Tick Town, and time itself stops. With Alyra trapped within the clocktower walls, and monsters appearing through the land, Zirian takes up his grandfather's sword to free the flow of time.
There's pros and cons to wearing your influences on your sleeve. On one hand, you have a built in audience that knows what you're going for. On the other, they'll be carrying expectations that may or may not be fair to hold against you.
Duskfade's entire visual identity is built around Kingdom Hearts, with a clockwork theme instead of a lock-and-key theme. It's visible in the character designs, the enemy designs, the attack animations, the environments, the fixation on stained glass, it's all there. But Duskfade is not Kingdom Hearts. It strips away most of the RPG mechanics and lifts its game structure from then-contemporary PS2 platformers like Jak & Daxter. It's a much smaller scale interconnected world, with a greater focus on platforming between the fights.
This is smart. No matter the passion and resources, it's unreasonable to expect a small team to make something of the same scale and depth as Kingdom Hearts. But it leads to a game where your first impression is what's missing as much as what's there. There's no real-time menuing, no items, no leveling⌠all of these things might be a plus depending on your tastes! It feels more focused after all. But that leads to the question ofâŚ
What even is Kingdom Hearts?
Aside from light.
If KH is a vibe, consider it checked. It's got the incredibly homey traverse town. It's got the cheesy yet earnest voice acting. It's got the orchestral score with a bouncy battle theme and a woodwind forward town theme. It's got so much stained glass and floating debris. So much. It's even got the right balance of the childlike and the eerie.
If it's a combat system⌠Duskfade is definitely more Kingdom Hearts 1 than anything else. You won't see the complex combo game or action commands from KH2 onward. We do know that you'll get more moves and tools based on what's in the demo, but it's probably not going to be as expansive. It does make up for it in enemy design, though. I played on the Master Clockmaker difficulty, and even the smallest basic enemy was an aggressive threat. The demo's boss had a real fun take on projectiles that the player could manipulate. My main complaint is that, while potions are capped, they launch instantaneously. Finding a spot to play a heal animation is a fun dynamic in action games, as evidenced by Estus flasks.
My main complaint with the platforming is that it can feel restrictive. Not in terms of your moveset, but in terms of what the environment allows. No swimming. No ledgegrabbing unless it's the specific painted ledges we sent out. No standing on slopes. No standing on incidental jutting bits of level geometry. It's all sensible restrictions, but the boundry breaker in me is chafing whenever I find another figurative or literal invisible wall.
I will say one thing. The character's sword is based on the minute hand. If you do not give the player a two sword mode that uses the hour hand, I will send you many sternly worded letters. At your house. Delivered by hand.
D-Topia
Utopian/dystopian puzzle adventure.
You are no. 46, the newest resident of D-topia. It's the most successful district in the utopia project, a grand experiment to induce "The greatest happiness in the greatest number of people." Knowledge of our genetic code and the system's AI work in tandem to craft you the perfect life: from your job, to your meals, to your lover. And you've been chosen for a special role: Facility Mechanic, otherwise known as a Facilitator. You have the privilege of seeing all sides of D-topia, as you work to mend both mechanical and human problems.
Despite the title of "puzzle adventure," this game is primarily a narrative game. So far, the puzzles are pitifully easy exercises in block sliding and number matching. It feeling boring be the point: It's explicitly stated that people don't need to work here, but the system creates make-work to keep people feeling fulfilled. All adults are required to work in The Factory, but it's a workday that only lasts until the afternoon, and they have the choice of bringing along entertainment and doing nothing, just like you can skip all the puzzles.
The bigger part of the game is going to be narrative choices and relationship management. You'll meet several characters with relationship meters, and can give gifts to increase affection, eventually inviting them to hang at your place. There are other systems like apartment decoration and item collection, but all these things aren't in the demo.
Normally this sort of story is all about the crushing of the human spirit and the suffering behind comfort, a-la Omelas or Brave New World. There IS a backside to D-topia, but that doesn't seem to be the game's primary aim. Unless there's some massive twist, this seems to be a world of a genuinely successful utopia. It's curtailed choice and agency, but most everyone seems genuinely happy.
And yet, it's still based on an illusion. Spoilers but it's a first hour spoiler:
When you take on your first repair job, you're instructed to enter "block view." Here it's revealed that the bright apple and spotless Apple aesthetic is the result of algorithmic visual curation. When turning block view, you see the bright white walls replaced with cold sheet metal, and the sleek floating robots replaced with boxier versions firmly planted to the ground with metal stands.
But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean it's entirely fake. The happiness it generates seems to be real. Is it worth it to push back, to demand "truth," if it puts genuine utopia at risk?
The demo is mostly just premise and tone, but it's got me interested. It's gentle but cold, and leaves plenty of room for contemplation. I just hope they go...anywhere at all with the puzzles.
Sojourn Past
Bullet Hell Hyper Light Drifter.
You are a moth flying through the night sky with your fox spirit when a mysterious force knocks you out of the sky. With damaged wings, you search for your companion on the dangerous surface.
I will admit that I ended this one early, and it might be due to my own exhaustion more than due to the game's fault.
The game is clearly influenced by Hyper Light Drifter, from its visual style, to its combat, to its dedication to minimal word usage. I never got far in HLD, so I don't know how much is "new," but the game's big selling point seems to be bullet dense enemy patterns.
The first thing that caught my attention was that your character's dash didn't seem to have invincibility frames. For melee attacks, you need to preemptively dodge to get out of the way, and bullet patterns needed to be micro-dodged or avoided using the game's other big gimmick: the dagger teleport. You throw your dagger, and then call it back or instantly teleport to its landing spot. It seemed like a really unique dynamic!
Then the first upgrade you get is giving your dash invincibility frames.
Now the dagger felt extraneous and only super useful in overworld exploration. Which creates its own problem. The pixel art is beautiful but it creates distance and height ambiguity, where im not sure if im supposed to dash across a gap, dagger teleport across a gap, or not be able to cross at all.
One of the reasons why I was excited for the lack of I-frames was that teleport dashes/dodge rolls tend to be band-aid design for bullet hell. You don't need to fine tune attacks to make sure everything is properly dodge-able. You don't need to fine tune movement so the player properly weave around them. You don't need to fine tune hitboxes. Just dash through it, dummy.
Here it's kind of neccesary. The arenas arent big enough for natural dodging and crowd control, and everything hits hard, so you need to seriously abuse i-frames and the bomb system, which lets the player clear the screen of bullets and stun enemies. On its own, that's fine. Within the context of the other systems, it feels like another band-aid.
This is going to sound elitist and curt. I've enjoyed both types of games. Still, you can tell when a dev's primary "bullet hell" experience is Touhou or CAVE versus when its Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon.
So I got frustrated and quit. Honestly might be skill issue on my part but I'm tired.
Chainsaw
Mass Murder RPG.
Isaac is a serial killer. He wasn't always one. It's not like he was born this way. It's basically a coincidence that he's torn apart over a dozen people with a chainsaw. It's not like he's the only one acting up, what with the infection going around. Besides, it's not like he isn't doing it for a good cause. The world is gonna end. How does he know? You told him! When you connected on the other side of the screen, of course. Now he has to gather 13 apostles to prevent the end of the world, starting with Mark, a rabbit office drone, who spends his days off as a knife wielding vigilante.
This game is amateur hour, both derogatorily and affectionately.
Its an RPG maker game with a very simplistic battle system, with backgrounds that are either simplistic sprite art or low quality photos. Said sprite art frequently has layering issues or is otherwise hard to read. The battle system is simplistic, the only twist being a rudimentary ATB system. The game was written in Brazilian Portugese, and the English translation is passable but off, with a couple text boxes left untranslated.
Honestly, I sometimes love this kind of work: a passion project where you can see the learning process in real time.
Aesthetically the highlight of the game is the character designs and non-sprite-artwork. It's clear this was an artist first project.
Writing wise, there's definitely flaws. Not sure how much is the base text versus translation. But it still has a charming directness to it. Yes it has a "I'm so fucked up and also the world is so fucked up" energy, but it doesn't wallow in it, and plays it for comedy at points. I wouldn't be surprised if Chainsaw Man was an influence. Mark is basically male furry Kobeni.
It still feels very unrefined, with a couple of⌠head scratching decisions, but it is setting up a semi interesting mystery. At the start you think its doing the whole "player as god" meta thing thats kinda getting passe. And it is doing that. But a character near the end says thay Isaac loons like [player name] who is currently in the hospital, so theres at least one more layer going on.
Will I be getting the full version? Dunno. Was I charmed by it? Yeah. Would I recommend it to others? Only if you're a very certain type of person with fond memories of RPG Maker Jank.
Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch)
Incredibly Australian Puzzle Comedy Horror.
Janet DeMornay was once a daytime TV star, selling her own magical crafts on the shopping channel. When an onscreen demonstration goes wrong, causing direct mental and physical harm to her viewers, her television career is cratered. But that's okay. She's found a new career in real estate, where she can run her magical experiments in peace. And lucky you, you're her newest tenant.
This game is, by the developers own admission, a resident evil game with no combat and all puzzle rooms. So it's an adventure game fixed 3d camera angles. And I think you'll get if this game appeals to you based on that description alone.
We all know the Jordan Peele quotes comedy and horror being functionally the same thing, but in this case it feels like these two aspects are getting in the way of each-other. One of the jokes about Janet Demornay is that she built her career around "magic paper mache." Thus, a lot of her house is also made of that. It gives a nice excuse for the devs to have things be simple bumpy models with a messy paint layer on top. It's part of the joke. The thing is, it also tries to have scary imagery at times, but that just leads to "What if paper mache statues were gory and fucked up."
The voice actors are doing a good job with what they're working with. The two tenants we see so far are reacting more with exasperation than with terror that their door is randomly disappearing. When one starts bloodily coughing up their own oven knob, their first response isn't "are you okay" but "Who the hell is fucking with our oven?! It doesn't even work!" While the comedy is getting in the way of the horror, the opposite isn't true at all. Janet's perpetual TV persona shtick was great too.
The puzzles themselves were⌠survival horror puzzles. So just figuring out kind of inane supernatural logic. Less a thing to logic out and more a thing to just get through. We only got a small slice, and it was always confined to a single room when it happened. I'm not sure if I want the puzzles to get more engaging and multi-phase, or for the puzzles to minimize to make room for dialogue.
This will be a hit or miss project for a lot of people and I'm not sure where I stand on it yet.
Desolus
Time Travel Black Hole Architecture Puzzle.
The city of Desolus is falling into ruin. It's not just its towering buildings that are falling apart, it's the very space time around it. Rifts are opening around the city, tying together different points of decay. The only way it can be saved is to harness its ancient technologies and fix the time space continuum.
I did not like this game, but that's because I fundamentally misunderstood what it was before starting. The steam page said I would be able to explore a ruined city. The key word here is "explore." I am not exploring. I am following a linear path of puzzles.
Every puzzle I faced had a similar structure. You want to move to the next room, but there's something blocking your way. In order to get past it, you need to send parts of the ruins back and forth between the dimensions in pre-set rift points. The second area had you unlocking doors by turning off glowing nodes, but to get there you needed to building parts back and forth to unlock them. Each one felt like something I can stumble into the answer for by just brute forcing. I assume it'll get more complex, but it was really slow to ramp up.
I don't know about the full game, but neither the demo nor the steam page gave much background on why we're here or what's going on at a plot level. It was just moving through admittingly beautiful buildings and manipulating them. I appreciate the effort the devs put into making this space look impressive, and I'm sure they're proud of the animations they made when deforming the surroundings. It just feels like that's all the game has to offer.
Echo Weaver
Time Loop Metroidvania.
You are the last Weaver. What that means? you are not sure. Why have you woken up in collapsing facility full of monsters and corpses? No idea. Why is there an AI stuck in your brain, presenting itself as a pizza cat logo? They're just as confused as you are. What you do know is this: you're stuck in a time loop, and every second is precious. Solve this place's mysteries, escape, and survive.
Finally a game that can justify its use of the term "metroidbrania" without me wanting to curl into myself as much.
The metroidvania genre was already a good fit for a time loop game, since so much of it is already about expanding map knowledge and routing. We've already seen another successful example of that with Ultros. The loop in this one works differently than most time loop games, though. You are on a timer, but it's not set to any specific amount. Rather, you have a short period at the start, and extend it by killing enemies and finding blue crystals in the environment, creating incentive to fight where there otherwise wouldn't be. You can also spend loop time to heal yourself.
Even then, the game is not exactly combat focused. Your only weapon is a throwing glaive, and it functions more as a puzzle tool than it does a combat tool. You're not even sure how to access it for a good half of the demo, and the high tension moments so far have been fleeing.
The word "access" is important here. Like the Outer Wilds before it, you start each loop at the same point, with no standard "upgrades" carrying over. The best you get is knowledge to access things faster. There's only one point I found where something permanently changed between loops, and it wasn't something relating to your own character's kit.
The demo doesn't show too much of the story, but I do like the Warhammer 40k inspired space apocalypta. It kind of clashes with the cartoony art style, but not critically so.
This is hitting right where I need it to.
Mym's Sword
Zelda 2 inspired free form action adventure.
You are a little blue dog named Nora, who stumbles into the ruins of Solomon and finds a cool sword. Like anyone with sense who finds a cool sword, she decides to go on an adventure, daring to uncover Solomon's other ruins. Sure, there's whispers of ancient evils and grand conspiracies, but all that pales in comparison to the simple joy of swording a swing.
The most noticable thing about this game is its control scheme. Despite its NES stylings, the game is designed around dual analog sticks. Left stick moves the character and right stick points the sword. You have full 360 control, and can either stab by sticking it out or swipe by making curving motions.
Aside from the consistent switching between side view and overhead 2d, this sword system is what ties this game most closely with Zelda 2. In that game, the inclusion of crouching and standing stabs created a surprisingly engaging "fencing" system, lining up hits on smaller enemies and aiming for weak points on larger armed ones. Mym expands this dynamic with a lot more finesse. It takes some getting used to, and other sword wielding enemies will kick your ass for a while, but it feels feels really unique and skillful.
This isn't the only influence with classic Zelda. The game seems to be aiming for something incredibly open. After you leave the first dungeon, someone just tells you "Hey, there's four more dungeons in each direction." and then you're off to the races. There are several directions that are blocked off with purple blocks, but I'm not sure if that's a progression lock or a demo barrier.
I'm getting a good sense for secret hunting here. A lot of NPCS are popping up with hints on thins you can possibly do, and I've already spotted a couple secret entrances. This game is classic classic design... for good and for ill.
It's freeform to the point of confusion, and the enemies are really punishing. For some like me that is exactly what I'm here for. I'm also expecting others may bounce off of it. When you die, you drop your sword, and have to do a corpse run without a weapon to retrieve it. There was a point where I was repeatedly dying while failing to reach my sword, with seemingly no alternate way to get it back. I can see it being a deal breaker if that experience goes particularly bad.
Buyer beware, but if you're the right type of person, this will be a GOTY contender.
Our Wonderland
Gore Fantasy Horror VN
When Iggy Maxwell was 11, he gathered his friends to perform a ritual he found in an old book. They find Wonderland, a magical world for children which grants their any and every wish. Their days in Wonderland were the happiest in their lives, but as they grew older, the portal eventually closed, and they all slowly began to forget. 20 years later, Wonderland is calling to them again, wanting to grant their wishes once more. But the wishes of adults are much more dangerous than the wishes of childrenâŚ
Before I start I should mention that this demo is for a remaster of a previously released game. I have absolutely zero knowledge of the original or any changes that might have been made.
The general aesthetics and concept is "what if an idyllic storybook world was fucked up." On its own, that's kind of passe, but there is some thematic intrigue with the contrast between nostalgic childhood and failed adulthood. With the characters and imagery on display, I can see this getting its hooks in people. I am not one of them.
The art style is not to my taste. I will give the author kudos for how expressive the character faces are, especially when trying to sell a sense of unease, but something about it is keeping me from taking the horror completely seriously.
So far, from what I experienced, the game is a singular true route with a series of brutal bad ends. And while you need some Horrible Things Happening to establish the contrast, their bluntness and immediate payoff just made it feel kind of cheap and fleeting. "Well, time to load the previous decision I guess." I didn't feel any pressure at selection points.
Now, if I went deeper, would I have found those longer term consequences? Maybe. But the game had kind of worn me out.
The interpersonal drama is the most promising aspect, but there was a long stretch that was just "Iggy and his friend Genzou run into a Wonderland monster while wondering where their other friends are." By the time they did meet up with someone, I was fed up. This might just Next Fest time pressure biting me in the ass again, though.
From what little I've searched around googling, the original release seems like it was successful enough, so Kudos for the author to getting all this done. I am probably not going to bother with the full version, though.
