It’s Next Fest 2025, which means there are so many demos out there that are trying to get eyes on them! I may just be an ordinary garden-variety Pocha, but I still wanted to say a little bit about every game demo I checked out! These are in the order I played them, with no other system of rating in place. I'll continue to update this as I play more games, and all header images are taken directly from their steam pages!
Ratatan - I cannot WAIT for this game. I am a massive Patapon fan (the PSP was honestly amazing for unique game experiences like Patapon and Loco Roco), so I’ve had my eyes on this for quite some time. The demo did not disappoint! While I’m a bit tired of how prevalent roguelikes have become, all of the classic Patapon love that I was hoping for is on display here. The music is catchy, the rhythm/strategy gameplay is strong, and the character design is fantastic as always! Playing the demo to Ratatan made me mad because it’s not the full game. Release date NOW!
Kumakichi&Nyanzou Birth ☆ Destruction God DX - I checked this out because I love bears and found it to be a cute little game! The idea is that you walk around a map smacking stuff so it explodes, and the more you smack, the more you level up. The more you level up, the more items become smackable. Your goal is to wipe the entire stage out so you can move onto the next one. It was undeniably a repetitive game, but I could see this being a fun little mess-around game while you watch something on a second screen!
Metal Eden - The next project by the devs behind Ruiner, a game I enjoyed very much, Metal Eden is an FPS with a sleek presentation and a fun gameplay loop. The game is also gorgeous, though apparently that’s caused some people to have some issues with running the game even on PCs far better than mine. I can only say WORKED ON MY MACHINE (I say that not to be dismissive but to acknowledge that I can’t comment on that)! My only complaint so far is that the main narrator character in the first stage talks like he studied r/atheism for a personality. There was a line that was something along the lines of “I would love to flex the muscles of optimism, but I find they’ve atrophied.” GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.
The Horde Wants You Dead - Do you remember “This Game Has Zombies In It?” This game immediately hit me with those vibes. TGHZIT meets Vampire Survivors, The Horde Wants You Dead is simple in presentation and gameplay loop, which is perfect for what it wants to be. I immediately took to the game and found myself getting hit by the “just one more round” bug! I didn’t try out multiplayer, but I can tell you right now that if this game is priced right on release, I’ll be trying to get my buddies online for a few rounds while we’re chatting.
No, I’m Not A Human - I can tell you right now that this horror game is gonna be POPULAR. The art style is disgusting, and I mean that as a positive. It immediately sells its fantastic atmosphere and even playing the game in a brightly lit apartment on a warm summer day, I found myself getting a little uncomfortable at time. The idea is that you’re surviving a deadly summer by hiding within your home, and Visitors (basically Alternates from The Mandela Catalogue) have begun climbing out of the ground and killing people. At night, people knock on the door looking for refuge and you have to choose who to let in and who to send away. During the day, you talk to those people you chose to let in and run tests to try and determine if they’re human or Visitor. Once you let a visitor in, people start dying, and it is STRESSFUL. It’s already great, and it has the potential to be something really special.
Mala Petaka - A classic doom-style FPS (quite literally made in GZdoom!), this game is fast, stylish, and HARD. At least it was to me! I got my ass SLAPPED on stream and eventually had to move on just because I was brick walled in that moment, but the game is lightning fast and tightly designed! If you like Doom, check this one out! Also the soundtrack goes CRAZY and does this really cool thing where every level opens up by telling you the name of the song and the artist who composed it. As an audio person, that made me really happy!
SOLSTORM - Listen, I suck absolute CHEEKS at bullet hell shoot ‘em ups (shmups), but I also think they’re fun as hell! So when SOLSTORM showed up on my feed, I had to add it. Shocking no one, it is a bullet hell and so it gave me hell. The aesthetic is really pleasing, with the enemies being made up of things like bats and skulls and your controllable character being a little ghost thing that reminds me of a Chao from Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s got some interesting mechanics, too! This is one that’s not for me, but I can see shmup lovers having a lot of fun!
Dead as Disco - THIS GAME GOES CRAZY. A rhythm game that challenges you to do reactive counter-based combat Arkham-style whilst a great soundtrack helps you time your movements, Dead as Disco’s demo was compact and immediately engaging. I am desperate for the full release of this game. There wasn’t much to the demo so I don’t have much to say, but check this one out! It’s stylish, fun, and if they can figure out how to add a Beat Hazard-style mode where I can play to my own music, this is going to steal a lot of my time once it releases.
Mina the Hollower - The next game by Yacht Club, Mina the Hollower reminded both my stream chat and me of Link’s Awakening. It’s Yacht Club, so you know there’s gonna be quality here! There’s also some pretty intense difficulty, too. You’ve got three different weapon types to try out, and the stages are well built. The platforming can be a little rough due to the quasi-top-down viewpoint, but I still liked it overall!
Kitty Loves Birds - I’m gonna be honest with you: When I saw this pop up, I thought it looked like a mobile game I would have downloaded on my iPod Touch back in 2012. That being said, I do love me some kitties and platforming, so I said “why not?” What I ended up playing was a handful of levels of a surprisingly competent platformer! You play as a kitty that uses birds as jump-renewals to navigate your way through stages, looking to collect a big coin per stage to unlock other kitty designs and otherwise complete stages. I can't say it's something I'm in a rush to get the full version of, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the time I spent with it.
Jetrunner - The gameplay of this game is a blast for people who love time trials! It centers around parkour platforming with a little bit of fps gunplay to hit targets and unlock the finish lines in each stage. Restarting when you make a mistake is instantaneous, which helps to encourage chasing lower times. It’s a really fun gameplay loop! That being said, I feel bad admitting this, but the writing and voice delivery of the framing narrative is rough. I ended up playing the game with my own music because listening to the way the dialogue is both written and delivered was just too grating for me. This is just my opinion, though, so I strongly recommend trying it out yourself, because the gameplay is fantastic!
UNBEATABLE - This game is stylish as all get out, with a unique art style of what appears to be paper cutouts for the characters and a 3D world for everything else (think Paper Mario), great scene framing/character designs, and some really good music. The problem is that the actual rhythm game constantly has this mechanic where the rhythm game will randomly switch which side of the screen notes come from. I found that when the notes would flip from one side of the screen to the other, the screen would actually shift to focus on which side was receiving notes did nothing but disorient me. Combine this with the fact that every note input makes the screen zoom in to show the impact and I am in hell trying to keep track of anything on the difficulties above normal. The story mode also drags its feet, with minigames like drinkmixing stretching out the time between actual rhythm game moments. Maybe it's just my personal tastes, but I found these to make the whole experience drag. I'm totally cool with story modes in rhythm games, but this one felt like it existed as a separate game from the rhythm stuff instead of as part of it! Still, demos exist for a reason, and I think that a few tweaks could make this rhythm game sing.
Okko The Exiled - Now this is some classic ass side scroller! Great pixel graphics, fun character designs (PanPan please I am begging you for a chance), a solid mix of exploration and combat that takes no time to grasp, and just enough challenge that I couldn't just mindlessly progress whilst still not being annoyed by ultra difficult bullshit. This one's got a lot of potential, so I'll be keeping an eye on it!
House of Necrosis - What do you get when you take the mystery dungeon franchise and infect it with the T-Virus from Resident Evil? House of Necrosis, a game that replaces Shiren the Wanderer with a member of the special forces who finds herself in a big spooky mansion fighting against all kinds of horrific monsters in a turn-based set up. If you’ve never played a mystery dungeon game before, the idea is that all of the enemies on the floor only act when you do. You take a step, they take a step. You attack, they get to attack. This means that you’re able to take stock of your situation and consider your moves before you act, but it also means that one bad step can doom an entire run. The demo alone was already grabbing me, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what else they do for the full release!
Lurks Within Walls - This game is hell to look at, and I mean that as a compliment. One part dungeon crawler and one part turn based RPG, all wrapped up in a first person perspective horror game with monsters designed by the incredibly popular artist Trevor Henderson, Lurks Within Walls puts a new spin on getting jump scared by the sight of an enemy on the field. There’s a lot of strategy in these battles due to variables like hit rates, status effects based on where you choose to strike, and limited ammo for your best weapons. This can be a bit of a double-edged sword. The strategy means I’m engaging with every fight with more focus, but it also means that even your most basic enemies can be rather difficult to deal with, and with how sparse supplies are (at least in the demo), I found myself struggling to survive by the end of my run. Still, this game rocks, so give it a shot if it sounds up your alley!
Tormented Souls 2 - Continuing my discussion of horror games is Tormented Souls 2. Do you long for the days when your scary gaming experience came with tank controls, dutch angles from a camera you can’t control, and limited saves? This is the game for you. It has a few issues such as some rather wonky model moments and a couple of design choices I’m not a fan of like how combining items isn’t just a matter of clicking “combine” but instead requires you to select the first item, examine it, and then click the second item which will now have a combine button which changes your cursor so you can now mouse over the appropriate part of the first item that would allow you to combine the two items into one (also why does she have jiggle physics?), but the controls are tight and the game is GORGEOUS, Tormented Souls 2 brought me back to playing the original Resident Evil remake on my gamecube back in the early 2000s, from the gameplay, to the atmosphere, and all the way into having a character make me backtrack and explore the available map over and over again until I got frustrated enough over missing the item I was meant to find to progress that I saved the game and turned it off for a while. Does that sound like fun to you? It certainly was to me!
Tax-Force - I absolutely adore the 2000 AD Judge Dredd franchise. But how could I not? Look at him? That sick helmet, the jaw line, the raw power on display–Judge Dredd kicks absolute ass. So when I came across Tax-Force in on the Next Fest page and saw a protagonist clearly meant to invoke his vibes, I knew I had to check it out. This game’s got some pretty cool concepts! It’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up centered around the idea of taking down billionaires and making them pay their fair share, but you also get to control how they do that. This influences everything from character stories to overall game progression. It’s a game that beats you over the head with its message, but I like the message so hey! That being said, this one is very clearly still a work in progress. I had quite a few glitches where I would climb a ledge, fall through it, and have to restart (except for the one time I was able to jump around enough to fall through the world and get back where I needed to be?), character portraits don’t always load in, and it crashed on me at one point. Still, that’s what demos are for, right? This is a beat ‘em up worth putting on your radar!
NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound - Holy HELL this was an amazing time. When I initially saw that The Game Kitchen, creators of the Blasphemous franchise were behind this, I was worried that the slower, more methodical gameplay style of that series was going to bleed into Ninja Gaiden. Rest assured, that’s not the case at all. NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound has everything you would want from a new side scroller in this franchise. Gorgeous art, an absolute JAM of an OST, tight gameplay that turns battles into a fun back and forth, and ballbusting difficulty that had me wanting to loudly spew evil out of my mouth at 1:00am. The Game Kitchen is doing fantastic work on this and I’m super excited for the full release! Now if I can just stop GETTING MY ASS KICKED OVER AND OVER AGAIN BY EVERY LITTLE THING YOU STUPID MOTHERFU–
BALL x PIT - Since the release of Breakout back in the 70s, the children have longed for the satisfaction of breaking bricks. Ball x Pit (or is it just Ball Pit?) is the newest entry into the world of Breakout-type games, and this one is here to put an incredibly fun spin on it. Every run in BALL x PIT puts you up against a never ending hoard of brick-shaped enemies, and you’ve gotta slam your balls into them as fast, hard, and often as you can to wipe them out before they get close enough to kill you. ….What? …..WHAT? Anyway, it’s a roguelike, so you’re starting every run fresh (outside of permanent stat upgrades you can slowly gain), leveling up, and upgrading your balls with various elements and effects to take down increasing hoards of enemies. In between runs, there’s a city builder mode where your goal is to get resources to help create upgrades and other perks to make the breakout runs more successful. It’s a fantastic gameplay loop, with different upgrades, playable characters, and levels to spice things up. I might’ve pulled an all nighter on this one if it were the full version, so hopefully it grabs you, too!
