NEXT FEST 2026 - #2
- Hubert Spala
- Mar 2
- 5 min read
STEAM NEXT FEST is ongoing, and with it, the usual deluge of games to try. Usually, I'd be vehemently dedicating my time to play as many as I can, but damn - spring is here! And with glorious sun and singing birds, it is hard for me to stay glued to the screen. Strolling takes precedence! Taking in that sunlight like a starved houseplant. Nonetheless, I still managed to roll through a few titles here and there, and I am happy to share my experiences, so here we go!
ZERO PARADES: FOR DEAD SPIES
I don't want to be too unfair towards ZA/UM, but it is hard to ignore the whole drama behind how the company's finance department ousted the original creators of the best game ever made - DISCO ELYSIUM. It was a big thing back then, and I cannot shed the feeling that what we are being served here is a corporate husk, a Skinwalker pretending to be the "true" successor to that once-in-a-lifetime experience. But, again, I don't want to be unfair - I am sure that within the company there are still plenty of skilled developers and artists who tried their absolute best to make something special.
Problem is... it isn't. ZERO PARADES doesn't even pretend not to be a DISCO clone, and I am not using that phrasing as a positive. Everything here smells of repetition. We did this before. Basically beat for beat. The entire first hour feels like I am playing a Soviet-era bootleg of an original. A pale shadow, an imitation. "DISCO ELYSIUM from WISH," was my thought. Not because the game is bad - anything that imitates the best game ever made will be at least good by default! Fantastic art style, great atmosphere, solid writing with a few moments that already made me smirk, chuckle, or ponder. So there's value, there's quality here...
But throughout the demo, I couldn't hold back the sour taste in the back of my throat. This is just a lesser version of the original. Lesser how? We don't know the full story. Maybe it's bigger! Maybe it's more robust! Maybe... but it tries way too hard to be a clone to stand on its own legs. Everything is grating here to some small degree. The narrator voiceover tries SO hard to be like the original that it's almost comedic. The writing steps on the same beats as before, so even that doesn't have any whiff of originality to it. Our protagonist - Hershel - is trying so hard to be quirky and strange, but in all the wrong ways; not being written as her own persona, but as a Harrier stand-in, and you feel it in your bones. It's enforced quirkiness. Hammered into the character because "she must be as deep and wacky as the drunkard policeman."
Add to that some questionable system choices, like the whole anxiety and delirium bit that punishes you for exploring more unusual dialogue options, and we get what seems to be a very good game that just lacks a single original idea behind it. It is, for now, a DISCO CLONE reskin, a homework rewritten by a more brilliant student. Well, at least ESOTERIC EBB is around the corner...
WANDERBURG
I love this goofy game so much. It's a game's game - and what I mean by this is that it reminds me of early PS2 era gaming. With arcade games that don't need any pretense for existing other than pure fun factor. Narrative? Unnecessary. Complex systems? Who has time for that! It's just a pure fun engine; plug it in, jump in, and have a blast. WANDERBURG is a roguelike, sure, with all the usual trappings of the genre - each run can be different, each build of your walking mortal engine unique in its way. You have different captains to lead your rolling fortress, starting weapons, and artifacts to polish a build. You know the drill.
But what makes the game stand out is both its sense of whimsy as well as tight controls with that heft behind them. Let's start with its whimsical nature - because, damn, who doesn't want to play as a castle on giant threads or wheels that terrorize a colorful medieval realm with cannon shots, a ram, and a team of archers on the walls? Especially when you run down a village and have a bit of a chuckle when all the little houses and windmills suddenly kick off the ground and try to run away on their own tiny wheels. That's goofy, that's silly. That's hella fun.
And then you have your combat, facing giant strongholds on titanic threads, rumbling ominously through a tight arena. Entire regiments of archers try to shoot you down, garrisons spew lancers on wooden horse-bikes, and little ramparts with mortars and spikes and mines try to chase you down, protecting their realm from your transgression. And you, in turn, will gobble up the villages, fill your holds with stolen sheep, and expand your machine in size and heft after each boss. You start small, nimble, and fast. And soon you can become a monstrous behemoth of wood and stone, bristling with weaponry to take down armies. Fantastic stuff.
LEXISPELL
What if WORDLE and BALATRO had a baby? That's a good shorthand to start talking about LEXISPELL, a game by MrEliptic, who recently brought us a pretty damn good HYPERSLICE. And what a pivot it is! Instead of high-octane, twitchy arena combat, we dive into a much more chill world of letters and scoring points by typing words. Quite a change of pace, if you ask me. Anyway, you might ask, what makes LEXISPELL worthy of talking about? It's not like we are having a drought in the genre of word-driven games. Or BALATRO-likes, with the chase of score times multiplier to beat a point threshold. If anything, we have quite an overabundance of exploiting that core game loop, yeah?
The obvious answer would be because it's good. And yeah, it sure is! It has a soft blend of a few mechanics that make it stand out from the crowd a solid bit. First, the cauldron. Your letters drop into it, merge with their clones, and grow bigger. The pot fills with rocks and other random crap, symbols, and gems and such! You want the cauldron to always be pretty heftily filled because only then do you get enough letters and symbols for smashing out big words for a big score. But you cannot overfill it because then you are given a short time limit to hit some word, which might steal from you a precious round!
Then, of course, you have the rogue elements. Scrolls modify your scoring based on a variety of additional rules. You can buy a selection of scrolls that empower different strategies, or try to focus on one - for example, making sure that if you land a big word, your score is going to ramp up the wazoo! Then there are single-use items to help you tweak the odds in your favor as well as passive runes that modify the cauldron drops, giving you a bit more control of what kind of letters and symbols will fill up the pot proper. Everything is packed into a very clean, very soothing interface and vibe - it's seriously relaxing, without ever growing dull - a little achievement on its own. If you enjoy word games, this one is definitely going to be one of the better offerings coming our way.
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