NEXT FEST 2025 - Three more cool games to not pass on!
- Hubert Spala
- 17 hours ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 8 hours ago
NEXT FEST is wrapping up, but I am a bit behind, since I realized it is on with some minor delay. And so, I still have quite a few Demos to enjoy in my line-up! So expect a few more of those posts to get published before we come back to our regular schedule... Starting up with a review of a time-sink final boss - BALL x PIT. But for now, let us look into another three promising games that managed to impress me! And my hopes are that I can convey why, so you give them a try as well. Let's roll!
AETHER & IRON
I like to believe that every one of us has this tiny hole in their soul that a certain game left in them, and now we are on an unspoken quest to find something to fill it with. For me, that game is DISCO ELYSIUM, the greatest achievement in storytelling since Ugg and Ogg shared their first grunt countless millennia ago. Disco is old now, and yet only now we are getting promises of games to come that will try the herculean task of matching its greatness. Just shows how much work making a game like that is required! Anyway, I am waxing lyrical here because AETHER & IRON seems to be scratching that itch quite well, even if not completely...
It is an interesting mesh of genres. You have exploration of locations on floating urban islands in retrofuturistic art deco. You have turn-based vehicular combat about tactical positioning and smart use of resources. And a well-written, well-acted narrative about a down-on-her-luck smuggler from the slums, trying to scrounge up a name for herself. Our protagonist! With skill checks in dialogues, well-written conversations, and intriguing world-building that managed to hook me in from the start. It would be so easy to fumble such a complex assortment of systems, but the AETHER & IRON demo shows polish that turned me from intrigued to invested!
I think the best way to describe the feeling of the game is that it managed to feel like diving headfirst into a noir movie set in a retrofuturistic, slightly fantasy setting. Like... Metropolis has a saucy date with Treasure Planet on a backdrop of daytime Gotham. With great voice acting, superb art direction, and tight pacing, it was a pleasure to play, and I sure as heck want to play more of it.
JUST A SHADOW GAME
There is a sense of self-aggrandizing pretense to this game that I, initially, found off-putting. It feels like the devs believe they struck gold and that this is going to be their Magnum Opus. The tone, however, quickly shifts when you look at it more through the lens of the game narrative and even its meta-narrative. It is, after all, just a shadow game - with a strange entity directly challenging you to engage with its story, its puppetry and shadow theatre. There are layers here we can only briefly glimpse with the Demo. It has this whiff, this strange scent of games made by Daniel Mullins - pieces of digital art performance that pretend to be one thing and then flip everything over its head... Only to do it again, defying the expectation of a twist to come.
But that's a bit of deep speculation. It might be the case, it might not, but fortunately, either way, it might not even matter much. Because JUST A SHADOW GAME is also a pretty darn clever roguelike. It is a deck builder, yes, but cards are just half of the equation - strategic placement of your structures, proper timing for their activation, managing sparse resources of souls and sacrifices... There's tactical depth here that I quickly began to appreciate. Cards are interesting, combat is peculiar in a good way - refreshingly strange. Imagine chess if the pawns moved on their own, but you control how they spawn on the board via a deck of cards.
If I had a serious nitpick, it is the opacity of the cards' rules. What I mean by that is that the text written on the cards can sometimes feel a little lacking in explanation of when the damn card actually does. It happened more than once that I picked a card, tried to play it, and then had no clue what it actually wanted from me. Some of the costs and systems are a bit too obfuscated for my liking, and a better handling of user experience is definitely needed to polish this plausible gem to a shine.
MONSTERS ARE COMING!
That was cool. Yep. That's all I have to say.
Okay, fine. Look! A Roguelike! How very daring. But since recently I've played quite a few of those and they were all interesting, with fresh ideas and sparks of genius, I am hanging my jaded coat on the hanger for now, and look at MONSTERS ARE COMING! through newfound glasses of "Let us find out what cool new thing this offer". And I am happy to report that this one has some juice in it. The very idea of having sort of two 'characters' to play at once is already a little fresh, but it turns completely original when one of them is your ever-growing, moving township. It lumbers with a lazy pace down a dangerous path, lobbing shells, spitting fire, and casting a dome of frost at the relentless hordes of shadowy creatures. While it does so, you - a daring explorer and a chosen hero - run all around it to fuel its voracious need for resources. Wood to stoke its furnaces, stone to repair its walls, and gold to purchase new structures and upgrades.
And you are not harmless little scamp either - with sword, guns, and other tools in hand, you fight back the hordes yourself as well, covering up your rolling fortress, making sure its blind spots are taken care of, or helping it push through a particularly nasty spawn of shadowy menace. It works all too well as a game dynamic - it is never too frantic to get lost and frustrated, but it is also never too slow. Always trying to keep you on your toes, make you react accordingly, knowing where you can strike out further from your keep to gather some crucial resources for future survival and the escalating chaos.
Comments