NEXT FEST 2025 - Chill game to look forward to!

STEAM NEXT FEST is upon us! It is a delightful time to discover some fantastic games to come, a true treat for any Indie games enthusiast. I love this event, truly - shining a much-needed spotlight on some future gems in the making. As usual, this is going to be a bit of a marathon run for me. As for now have about 20 game demos to try, so starting today and for the next few days, expect a little demo dive sampling 3 titles at a time every single day until I run out of steam! Today, a more peaceful episode with a few more relaxing games to enjoy. Let's roll!

NEGATIVE SPACE

Holy dang, I did not expect this to be so cool! Okay, so, hear me out - Pacifist Rougelike deckbuilder. Yeah. Instead of fighting monsters, crafting deadly spells, or an arsenal of weapons, we are space explorers, and we gather and empower our crew to boldly go where no one has gone before. All wrapped in unique, almost gooey, drawn by a child in wax crayon aesthetics. It's so much better than I could have hoped it to be! The system is devilishly simple, yet clever. Each 'opposition card' is either a celestial object or some minor crisis on our ship. Our deck consists of our crew member and various gizmos we can use to buff their Effort points. With limited energy per day and only a handful of days per expedition, it is as much a logical puzzle as it is a deck builder.

It's about efficiency. You need to plan a little, make sure your deck doesn't bloat out, but also have enough bits that gel together well. Maybe you go into a few elite crew members and build around that. Or instead go for a few select loners and engineers and then fill the deck with gizmos to buff'em up. You can also make a team of specialists that keep drawing new cards as well as refreshing your energy, so that you can play way more cards per day. Like in every solid roguelike of this type, you also have passive items with a variety of abilities that modify your run, shop to buy new bits and bobs for your deck, and upgrades for your cards. Lovely!

Oh, and the planets and various crises do not just sit there idly with a score to conquer, oh no. Plenty of them, as difficulty rises, offer a variety of nasty modifiers if you don't deal with them quickly enough. They might demand particular cards to be played, increase energy costs, sap strength from your crew, or even force a random card each draw to be shuffled back into your deck. Or spawn new cards, or grow a shield! Identifying the most threatening objects for your game plan and dealing with them quickly is the fun part that tests how efficient you can be while the game tosses logs under your legs to jump over. It is god damn great.

HER TREES: PUZZLE DREAM

What an enchanting little demo. This game has its own atmosphere; the black and white drawings are scribbly, rough, but full of spirit. It is a little hard to describe the aura this game gives - with its soft sounds and puzzles relying on visual trickery, it casts an eerie but soothing vibe. It's haunting, but not in a discomforting way. More like... Like a walk through a gloomy, fog-covered magical forest. Nothing is dangerous; no monsters are lurking in the bushes, but everything has this ephemeral feel to it. Admittedly, the puzzles were a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I really appreciated their intimate artistry, the presentation, and the idea behind them. But on the other hand, they were rather trivial - none of the little puzzles cast in the demo took me longer than literally a few seconds to figure out. Usually, the first thought about the solution was the correct one.

Of course, this doesn't mean this little game might not open up some challenges later on. The little tree that acts as our 'map' for the puzzles indicates that the full version will offer dozens more! It is hardly unusual for a puzzle game to start easy, to get the player's mind properly adjusted to what kind of cerebral tinkering will be needed ahead. I just hope that the later puzzles will indeed require a little bit more coal added to the brain furnace, because if all of them are as simple, the game might turn out to be a pretty little experience with little substance to go around. But hey! Fingers crossed to see some sizzlers later down the line in the full release.

UMAMI

I'll be honest - I never believed that a title like this could suck me in. It's a straightforward, simple as hecc title. You get a tiny, cutesy scene, a nice, phat dish to recreate from magnetized wooden blocks, and a handy reference of how the final product should look. It's the most rudimentary of block puzzles you can think of! I was therefore assured that I'll get bored after a few minutes tinkering with them, drop the game, and forget about it.

But, to my delightful surprise, that was not the case. I finished both DEMO challenges and instantly craved more. I don't even think I can explain it well, because what I wrote above still stands. It is a very simple game. There isn't really any demanding difficulty, no sleuthing of any kind, it's... piecing together a scattered image. Puzzles 101. And yet, and yet... I think what does it for me is the extraordinary level of detail and charm. The dishes are fantastical, cartoony, yet they look so god damn GOOD. Glistening, detailed, thick, and fun to look at. Every scene is themed, every backdrop slightly interactive, and it matches the colors of the dish, adding a bit of visual noise to the assembly. This might sound like a negative, but not in this case - it adds a tiny sprinkle of challenge here, making you really take a look at each piece, find the tiny details that match. Even starting your approach is a bit of a hah, strategic decision. Each dish has some obvious centerpiece bits that stand out, giving you an anchor to build around.

UMAMI proves that even the simplest concept can work exceptionally well if they are executed with great care and meticulous precision. It's cozy, it's casual, it's sweet and relaxing. I can see myself enjoying a single puzzle per evening, after a long day of work, until I complete the full game.