The Book of Buja

Developer & Publisher: I.J. White Release: TBC

I like to note where devs come from just to highlight how widespread and diverse the gaming scene is these days. In this case, the developer is a solo independent from America.

The Book of Buja plays like a 2D Zelda, and by this demo it's shaping up to be a pretty good one. Jury's out on if you get equippable items but there are ones that augment what you do, such as the boots that let you jump over 1-tile gaps in the demo, which help keep things simple, and the little optional puzzles in caves for extra hearts are decently clever given how simple the moveset to work with is.

It feels pretty good to play, you can jab fairly fast (though enemies have post-hit invuln which is a little annoying), movement is very orderly and the grid-based environment (though not your movement) helps keep combat and moving smooth and quick. The music's pretty good, the story set-up is rather intriguing and I really like the takes on sprite art and animation here, it hits on the dichotomy of NES games like Ninja Gaiden with their very elaborate cutscene sprite art versus the simplified in-game ones. A promising little game, this.

Break Wolf

Developer & Publisher: RE Atelier Release: Q4 2024

By their site, RE Atelier hail from Korea. I am of the age and sort that seeing Break Wolf's visuals triggered that scene from Ratatouille in me, where the critic flashes back to his childhood, and for me that flashback was to my childhood and early teenager hood where games and animations and comics with this sort aesthetic (all white and black, with some key colours for emphasis here and there) were not infrequent on Newgrounds or among webcomics and stuff. How fitting it is, then, that Break Wolf is an RPG Maker 2003 game, with the pleasing crunchy sound effects and resolution that implies.

Supports modern Xbox controllers flawlessly though, there's no fucking excuse for others.

Break Wolf delighted me; it's about some criminal super-evil org trying to make combat mutants out of people via Genetic Science, the place is all clinical and industrial but slathered with blood, there's frequent gore, the overt obvious antagonist is pointlessly edgy, your partner is a big titted medic girl drawing from more than a few 90s/00s anime heroines whose names are lost to me but whose faces I know and there's a romance with her with sex scenes, the works. This is a very particular kind of aesthetic that is now, in its own way, retro, and discovering Break Wolf was a treat.

It helps that it's both pretty good and knows exactly what it's about. Combat is simple and real fast, it mechanics are neat (healing is limited by "Protein Points" from feeding the healer girl meat, invariably depicted as steaks, lying around; your attacks grow stronger as the fight goes on but so does a Contamination meter that triggers damage-over-time, etc), the art and animation are delightful. This dev has quite a few such RPG Maker 2k3 games on Steam, and I may well crack into another to see what's up.

Some of its mechanical ideas are particularly interesting (there's a Lives system, where hitting 0 HP fills you back up but you lose a life, which has interesting implications for how the game may go), and hell, it's just well executed all-round, considering its engine limits. It handles full-screening, resolution, controller support and more better than much more elaborate games on modern engines in these Steam Fests do!

CONERU -DIMENSION GIRL-

Developers: HIKE Inc, Eallin Japan Co.Ltd Publisher: HIKE Inc Release: 2025

HIKE Inc and Eallin Japan hail from, surprisingly, Japan.

I've been following the original artist for a few years now on Twitter, having stumbled across their account (though they've spiralled out into a few now for various 3DCG creations), and it's surreal seeing them go from posting stills and little animations about their OCs to developing a whole game and having various other ventures as well. That's happened a few times on there, I've seen artists go from regular posts to being serialised and syndicated a few times.

Coneru is a 2D side-scrolling platformer that actually has some Kirby vibes about it (I have not played a Kirby game since Triple Deluxe, before you start), in that you don't absorb enemies but your powers cycle around as you find stuff and choose to swap up. It feels pretty good to play, though it's crying out for its dash to be useable in mid-air. It's very vibrant and detailed with the carefree and slightly madcap style of this little world the artist's made, and besides progressing by beating enemies, your goal is also to find things like manga volumes in the level to share with Coneru, the titular dimension girl, who's stuck inside your robot frame. The loading screen subtitle is "2D action date" and there's a lot of little dialogue choices in conversations with Coneru when you find stuff, it's precious.

Speaking of, she's always sitting there in the bottom left, making sounds or saying stuff and reacting to taking damage or finding things. It's precious, we've been long overdue seeing the modern revival of having Doomguy's face on the UI in Doom.

There's some interesting systems, like Coneru's support projectile changing to some new random thing, from a big shuriken to a comedy JPEG of a moon that fills most of the screen to big lollipop, or checkpoints that you can use her power to drop lightning on and change your 'stat spread', trading HP for attack power and such. The map is big and sprawling but it didn't exactly give off Metroidvania vibes, it's just big open platformer game screens.

That's kind of what Coneru reminds me of most; SNES era platformers and games in general, when things were often more madcap and there was more willingness to put work into something purely aesthetic to make your game stand out. That doesn't happen as much in this age of Youtube videogame design essays, "Game Design Schools", the complete and total fear of all forms of friction or things not purely and rigidly functional (in developers and more than a chunk of players alike), and Unreal Engine 5 games struggling to display basic images without hideous smearing, ghosting and tearing. It really should, though, I am long tired of "proper", "good" game design in favour of actually good games.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Crystal Breaker

Developer & Publisher: TERARIN GAMES Release: 27th November 2024

TERARIN GAMES hail from Japan.

Crystal Breaker rather perfectly encapsulates the zen experience of shmups, I think, at least if you came to the genre from console and arcade shmups and not Touhou. You fly a spaceship through screens of enemies arriving in patterns, you hold down the Fire button always, shit is exploding all the time, a pleasant lady's voice says words followed by "BONUS" for everything you do or don't run into, shoot, kill or dodge, and a fucking great music track is just blaring away all the while. When you're done the screen floods with rolling number totals and yells about score as a girl smiles at you.

All it needs is the ever-present howling hum of DDR cabinets and wails of other players and it'd perfectly summarise an ideal arcade experience. As it is, it's ideal for just lost in and playing some good ass pure shmup time. Interestingly, getting hit doesn't kill you, it just inflicts a score penalty (that likely grows worse as you get hit more, see that x next to my damage count up there), emphasising this is all about min-maxing score more than anything.

I will happily partake, myself, at some point.

PLUG IT IN

Developer & Publisher: unSAME Release: 2024

uNSAME Studio hail from America.

This is a delightfully charming little puzzle game with lovely vibes about fitting plugs into sockets. You can rotate the plugs to suit your needs and don't have to give one shit about wires (which annoys the fussy part of me), you just have to make sure all sockets get filled and that each plug can sit in the socket it's going to.

The nuances from weird shapes, orientations of the sockets themselves (the three-prong ones up there, for example, may be rotated so the bottom prong is to the right or left, for example), and tricks like being able to fit two-prong plugs in three-prong sockets as long as the holes and prongs line up offer quite a bit of variety, and the potential for a lot of trickery. The soft visuals and delightful music make it a great thing to just zone out in. The sort of thing I put a podcast on in the background and just work at like a rubix cube or something.

Rogue's Hexagon

fuck this level, man Developer & Publisher: Aaron Ziganek Release: 2024

If I found the right guy, Aaron Ziganek hails from Austria.

Rogue's Hexagon first deserves applause for being a game with Rogue in the title that isn't a roguelike/roguelite ("rogueslop" as I'm increasingly fond of calling them).

It's a puzzle game about sneaking your little rogue to a golden coin and then to the level exit without being killed by the guards, using throwing knives with various types of power found in the level to dispatch guards or make quick escapes.

This one has some real good aesthetic vibes going on; there's no text past the title, no explanations or dialogue or anything, just an opening set of levels to display the basics to you and leaving the rest to your discovery, interpretation and figuring. With the moody lighting and good sound-scape, it's got a real atmosphere.

It's also a bastard: many levels have optional goals shown through symbols on tokens next to the clear one (a waving racing flag). Rogue's Hexagon takes the daring path of explicitly making these not always align with each other, usually requiring multiple playthroughs of a level for each clear condition, instead of trying to find the one solution that threads them all (though that can be done for some). For example, a level whose optional goal requires killing all enemies with poison (doable only by the provided poison throwing knife), but there's also a second goal of not using any knives.

That level comes after the above, Level 11, whose optional goals are, by my understanding, Clear In 11 Moves/Don't Be Seen/Don't Backtrack, and trying to do all three of those will drive you mad. It may very well be possible, but I couldn't fucking figure it out. Hell, I still don't know how to do it without being seen.

It's a real good'un, looking forward to it.

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We now come to our second tier of games, those I liked but was not enraptured to write a lot about or specifically highlight. I liked them all, some a fair bit, but they may have issues or just weren't as pleasing as the prior set.

Cyclopean: A Lovecraft-inspired dungeon crawler hearkening back to the Old Ones, by which I mean the rightful and real old ones, Ultima and Wizardry. Rad, I am tickled by such games, but this is still very early days. It's a game jam project slowly expanding, so worth a revisit down the line when it's more fully formed.

Knights In Tight Spaces: I played Fights In Tight Spaces in one of the first Steam Fests years ago, and never got around to it. It was cool as hell with a smart idea, using its card-based turn-based combat to emulate choreographing a secret agent's fights with terrorists and ninjas. This is that but with a fantasy theme, and new mechanics like magic attacks and control of multiple party members. It's just as rad.

Little Big Adventure: Twinsen's Quest: A loving remake of the 1990s French adventure game, which I never played but have heard often of. You can tell by the art style, honestly, it's neat to see the visual throughline in French art like this through to stuff like Ubisoft's Beyond Good & Evil. It's rather charming but the demo is rather glitchy, the game releases soon so I hope this is just an older show demo.

Nivoz Running Canned: A third-person shooter that bucks standard control schemes for a curious one where you have to turn with LB+RB/L1+R1, and can't aim directly, being dependent on homing attacks or moving your little roomba buddy near enemies to make a direct shot at. It's got a lot of curious ideas, has hilarious comedy jazz and silly cutscene animations, and is a bit of a buggy mess but the character and charm show through. I champion it, the standardisation of control schemes for a lot of things is useful in many ways but has drained the excitement out of a lot of games. Nivoz Running Canned has immense "strange Dreamcast/PS2 game you found on a rack one day" energy, and makes me long for the days of unique control schemes like the pre-PW/5 Metal Gear Solids.

Senseless: A step platformer emulating (fairly well!) the visuals and display and general capabilities of a ZX Spectrum game, with obvious fudging for resolution, better controls and smoothness. Deeply charming little thing, but its map doesn't work for controllers so I eventually got lost and called it. But I'll definitely come back for it; not too much more to say!

Reach to Tsukuyomi: A simple but decently slick 2D platformer with nice controls, good game feel and cute sprite art. It has a better grip on hitboxes and the reach your attacks should have in a 2D game than the two Soulslike boss-rush games I played and didn't feel a buzz from, though it is a pure classic platformer. I'm delighted by it, I'll be back.

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

And now, finally, a curio and some data follow-up:

This is Chimera Capsule, an auto-battler with (not real money driven) gacha for units that either generate resources or go clear dungeons. Super Auto Pets with other types of idle games built into it, basically. Art looks pretty neat, doesn't it? What makes it a curiosity?

Well, it's that it doesn't exactly look like that, it looks like this:

It's a multi-window game! The different chunks of idler game are given their own small windows (480x256 pixels) and just ping a notif when they're done or have something needing attention. I'm not the most fussed on idle games (I prefer idol games), but games that use multiple windows like this are quite rare indeed. The idea is you can multi-task more easily by separating them up.

There's just one problem.

You get to see how the sausage is made a little here, but can you grasp the problem? Perhaps you will when I note that this isn't even the full size of my screen, nor anywhere near its full resolution.

On my big fucking TV and shiny 1440p Windows resolution, these windows that can't be resized are unusably small. It's kind of tragic, but it highlights a recurring thing, particularly of quite a few games this Steam Next Fest; a lot of them have absolutely tiny forced resolutions and window sizes, or at least start with them, and more than a few struggle with fullscreening; Book of Buja isn't fullscreen, it's a maximised window, for example.

Is it me? Is everyone just on 13-17 inch laptop screens that only sometimes go over 1080p, am I the freak? Or is getting games to full-screen actually a remarkably tricky task?

Now, the other point, about data. Last SNF I went a bit crazy while amassing a particularly huge pile of games; I also counted and recorded the names of every individual roguelike that Steam showed me around the other games. Any game that was visibly a roguelike, or described itself as such, or used the tags for "roguelike" or "roguelite" got counted.

This isn't an indicator of quality or anything of the sort, just a count. At the last SNF, hot on the heels of the Summer Games Fest 'E3' presentation streams where various organisations assemble lineups of trailers to present, there was a bit of a debate on Twitter about how prevalent roguelikes are and whether people are "right" to be tired of them or whatever. I simply wanted to demonstrate that regardless of what you thought, there are so many of these fucking things that you absolutely can't blame someone for being sick of them.

I did the same thing again, deciding to cut off my search for actual demos when I got to 100. I then decided to push one more "page" (when you scroll to the bottom of the big list of games on the SNF page on Steam and hit "show more"; there are 50-52 a page, thereabouts, or were for me). For my trouble I got 2 more games and 14 more roguelikes.

I decided to be fair and also count some other kinds; namely, Metroidvanias, Soulslikes, and "cozy" games (if they used "relaxing", "wholesome", "cozy" or "chill" as a descriptor/tag/in the name), as those are also big trends in indie games at the moment. I used the same criteria; if it was in the description, tags, name or if I could visibly clock it as such from its screenshots and rollover trailer, not from going into each and every individual game's page. This is the "from the back of a galloping horse" test, basically.

To the 114 roguelikes, I got shown 5 Metroidvanias, 20 Soulslikes and 24 wholesome games.

Here is the new list.

Now yes, this is dependent on what the algorithm throws up; there's way more than 5 Metroidvanias this fest, Steam reports 67 with the tag in the SNF pool:

I have played a fair amount (~18 hours) of Rabbit and Steel this year, one of the very few roguelikes I actually like, so that's tilted the algorithm at least a bit. How much is debatable; recent time in Warhammer 40K Darktide (~15 hours), Dokapon Kingdom (~8) and Baldur's Gate 3 (5 in the last fortnight, ~43 tops), or the ~180 hours of Helldivers 2 from earlier in the year don't seem to be tipping the scales much any which way despite the overlaps shared (turn-based combat, gore, multiplayer, RPG). Also, Steam's algorithms aren't the sharpest around and aren't always the best informed - it tells me to wishlist things I have wishlisted or that I might be interested in games I've bought and played, sometimes.

But it's indicative, I think, of how these things truly do outnumber any other sort of game and how yes, it is undeniably fair and right (it would be anyway, but if by chance you were feeling indignant about it) to be sick of how often they come up. I think Steam's algos generally favour things selling well or being popular, only occasionally deferring to relevance to preference and so on, so perhaps that causes an upswell in this genre being recommended so often and in such numbers.

Pair that with show-runners for things like Summer Games Fest obviously biasing towards them and also vying for DLC or expac announcements for existing popular ones like Dead Cells, and over-exposure isn't just guaranteed, it's plainly observable. The showrunners for those streams are awful tastemakers and also often don't know how to run a show so they'll bunch them together or pair up very similar ones, which just makes things worse.

In my June 2024 post, I also noted that many of them are using a practice of getting lovingly animated nice-looking trailers that then cut to a game that looks nothing at all like the animated segment except in like character design, and it's like everything in the industry is trying to make people sick of these things and resent them and whoever makes them.

And just to drive the point home, let me answer the important question you probably have about the pair of roguelike lists I made: no, there isn't a single game shared between them. The roguelike lists are both 100% unique end-to-end, meaning across two Steam Fests I saw about 70~ things I was interested in, to 251 unique roguelikes.

There are too many of these fucking things, and they shouldn't be centred or staged anywhere near as fucking much as they are. And these are just the ones that I saw, myself.

You don't even know the half of it.

The next Steam Fest should be in February 2025, a frantic time. I hope for a better harvest then, and I don't know if I'll continue my tracking and accounting of the rogueslop plague, but we'll see what my mood is then. These posts will all be on here from now on because I can't be fucked with more platform-hopping and fussing about features and themes and so on. Tumblr's a blogging platform, or claims to be, it'll have to do.