NEXT FEST 2025 - The Final Cool Games!

And so, the NEXT FEST is over. What a beautiful time for gaming, and for the Indie scene enthusiast! So many demos, and so many creative ideas. Of course, even if we managed to cover 15 demos over the span of the last five days, that is merely a drop in the ocean. We will continue our weekly DEMO DIVE fun, every Sunday, until the next NEXT FEST greets us at some point in the future. But for now, to wrap it up, I would love to finish with the last 3 of the festival I've managed to try out today and yesterday, and share with you my impressions. Let's roll!

CONQUEST DARK

This is the most ambitious survivor-like I have ever seen. It is so much more advanced than its grand primogenitor of the genre, grasping the boundaries of inventing a new genre of its own. It's astonishing, really, the level of polish already presented and the depth of the systems in play. CONQUEST DARK, on the surface, is a blend of many mechanics and features from across the genres, with its core component being that of a survivor-like bullet heaven. You are pitted against the growing hordes of monsters and slowly, bit by bit, aim to become a hilariously overpowered engine of death and destruction.

But if this baseline loop is the raw spire of rocks and mortar, the surrounding systems are all the complex set of corbels, windows, arrow loops, and crenelations. You don't pick a pre-existing hero, but craft one throughout your run, picking from an already robust library of equipment, items, runes, and abilities, both passive and active. The options on display are staggering, and mind you - this is a demo! But this isn't even when the complexity ends. Your progress through the variety of arenas isn't just a linear ladder, but a rather open map, with options to tackle, guilds and factions to work with and locations to unlock that will act as your passive progression between the runs.

Another thing I must applaud is the polish of the execution. Everything looks superb, but that's not even what I mean. The key thing for a game like this, for me, is the ability to inform the player of everything with utmost clarity. And CONQUEST DARK manages that expertly. You will know everything before making any decision. How your numbers grow, what abilities do, how leveling them impacts them, and your overall stats. It goes beyond that too, as each arena tells you directly what upgrades and unlocks you're getting for clearing them. This lets you plan your route accordingly, giving you options to work towards unlocks that suit your playstyle better. It's impeccable. Did I mention that moment-to-moment combat feels good too? Polished, polished, polished, this is the operative word here. A superb level-up of its genre, and a must-play for any fan of this kind of game.

KNIGHTICA

I never was a big auto-battler follower. I know there was a time some years ago when they were all the rave, taking over the mobile spaces by store and seeping into PC gaming, with force. But by now it feels like the fad faded, and while the genre found its place, I no longer hear about some legendary titles in that space. KNIGHTICA might be a thing to change that.

It is a superbly crafted auto-battler where tactics are all about clever planning, good spending, and a sprinkle of luck. With your commander defining your key passives and abilities, you aim to manage your units on a tight field of battle to spread synergies left and right. It's a brutal race against rapidly ramping enemies, which grow stronger - by a lot! - stage after stage. Your role is to squeeze the absolute maximum of what's offered to you, making good calls on all fronts. Who to level up, what enchantment goes to what unit, and how to place them to maximize buffs, offense, and defense. It is all handled with superb cleverness behind the scenes, and never scares away with overload of complexity.

It helps that the game art style is delightful. It's colorful, chirpy, and a little whacky, but it all manages to be quite a cheerful vibe while retaining astonishing clarity - something I cherish in this kind of game. Everything is perfectly color-coded, and every synergy, interaction, and power gain is conveyed with complete transparency. This really adds to the sense of control you have within the gameplay. It is a pleasure to play, too, with great animations, cute designs, bold colors... Great stuff all around.

And the promised content looks superb! It is a Roguelike, of course, with progression through stages, artifacts, spells, and powers to ramp up your strength... But all rogue's live or die by the amount of stuff they allow you to fiddle with. Here we will have many classes, countless units and many, many unlocks to further randomize our runs and grant us a greater pool of toys to play with. Looks extremely promising, plays superbly well, and in short - I want it now.

9 KINGS

Another astonishing banger, holy dang. 9 KINGS is a micro-city builder where the rapid pace is, excuse the cheap pun, king. You slam a card, get a card, and go into an automatic battle, in which you still play an active role by shooting stuff out of your castle to tip the scale of the conflict in your favor. Its gameplay is tripped of complexity, and yet retains just enough of it to be extremely engaging. Because you have only a few decisions to make, each of them is more impactful. Picking good cards, solid upgrades, and wise placement, all matter. Deciding on a strategy is equally crucial. You can go wide, spamming new units on every free field, you can go tall, loading up your one special unit with every upgrade imaginable. You can expand your domain to fit in more power-ups, growing your strength, income, and capabilities.

The roguelike component is so well crafted - the runs are swift, with a no-nonsense approach to your time. And the systems in place are deceptively simple but clever. Knowing your King cards are half the battle, allows you to plan a bit ahead of time. But whenever you defeat an enemy king army, you also get a pick of a card from their deck, allowing for great diversity and powerful combinations. At some point, I win a run with just 2 demons and a bunch of reviving Imps, because the demons got so insanely juiced up that they wiped everything while being impossible to kill! Awesome. This is the kind of thing you want to see in a card-driven game. Another minor thing I liked is the commitment to the bit. Number 9 ain't no joke here. 9 Kings, each having 9 unique cards and 9 perks, starting on a grid of nine squares, lots of cards giving upgrades by the order of nines... Nine reign supreme here. Fun touch, to be sure.

I do have, however, two gripes with the title for the moment. First, it feels too easy. I blasted through the first 3 difficulties with contemptuous ease, finishing a run on the first try each. While I don't mind some rogue's being more casual, this seems to be a bit too breezy. And second bit is the lack of clarity, sometimes. Especially when leveling up an existing unit or structure, it seems there's no preview of what that level-up will do, which makes it a bit of a blind bet at first. But those are pretty minor and easily fixable - hope they will be addressed in the final release!