Next Fest 25|1 Day 0
Micro-reviews for Day 0 of Winter Next Fest 2025, exploring Lily Fantasia, Sandustry, Is This Seat Taken?, MultiWindows, Play Twice, Beat Garden, and Nekograms
Another Next Fest starts tomorrow! As always, I'm planning to go through a bunch of indie demos and post some micro-reviews so that you can try interesting, lesser-known stuff; without having to sift through everything. As some games posted their demos early I picked out some to kickstart the week, and provide you with some early options.
Highlights: Lily Fantasia, Sandustry
Lily Fantasia
A fantastic rhythm game that can be best described as "playful". No matter what your score is at the end, the songs are a good time, and move around the screen in a truly unique way. There is a lengthy Visual Novel story mode segment too, if that tickles your fancy.
Playtime: 1h
Is This Seat Taken?
This game provides a simple premise: Put everyone in a seat they'll like. Some people are easy to please, satisfied with a specific row, or a window seat. Others will be more complicated, wanting to sit next to a particular person, or not sit next to a kid. Through these many interactions a puzzle is born, sometimes with more than one way to solve it. A very enjoyable experience.
Playtime: <30min
Sandustry
Sandustry is exactly what it sounds like: An Industry game like Factorio, but played inside a sand simulation like Noita, where every pixel has different properties and interactions. Your goal is to mine sand and build machinery to squeeze gold out of that sand, to buy more types of machinery to expand the chain of production. It's a little slower than I'd like, and early game requires a lot of scooping of sand from one place to another, but if the combo sounds interesting then it's definitely worth giving a go.
Playtime: 1h+
Nekograms
Nekograms is a lot like playing two simplified sliding puzzles on top of each other. The cats slide right and left, and the pillows slide up and down, and your job is to align the two. The concept is fine and the vibes are chill, but the game never really goes anywhere difficulty-wise. Each level — though adorned with a new collection of kitties — feels very similar, to the point where by the end of the demo I could just solve them based on vibes alone, with no thinking required. This is a natural result of the game's limitations, and it will get resolved very swiftly if there are other gameplay elements introduced in the other words then this could be a fun little puzzle game, but if it's just 120 levels of the same simple sliding, it's gonna get repetitive.
Playtime: <30 min
Play Twice
An extremely short demo (2 min) that presents the idea of a sokoban (block-pusher) you need to solve twice. This means that even if solution for either one is trivial, making both solutions work at once can require some engineering. Sadly, the very limited number of levels makes it extremely hard to judge if the idea will be used to its fullest potential, or stays on a more of a gimmick level the demo presents.
Playtime: 2-3min
MultiWindows
A very special, though also a very janky platformer-puzzle game. The game allows you to open as many windows of the game as you want, some of which might have slightly different properties. Maybe this one has a wall and this one doesn't, or perhaps this window lets you jump while the others don't. All this requires you to constantly manage the location and layering of windows, on top of controlling the player character. There is some clever puzzles here, but also you can tell that the engine was not designed to be played like this, leading to top-tier jankyness if you try and do things in a wrong way.
Playtime: 30m
Beat Garden
The demo is pretty straight forward, and took only 6 minutes to complete. The game revolves around arranging a music line so that the notes - each of which has a different effect - create the precise plant needed. It is a very simple premise, and one that paradoxically gets easier with more complex plants, since there is less room for special rules to cause you problems. It can still become a good game, remains to be seen what the full version will offer.
Playtime: <10m
Everhood 2
Finally, something I've personally been really looking forward to: the sequel to Everhood. If you don't know what Everhood is, it's an adventure game where enemies groove to the rhythm of funky music, the screen dances with all manner of visual effects, all while you break the boundaries of space, time, and memory. It's a grand ol' time, and while the demo is rather tame, it seems to promise more of what made Everhood so great
Playtime: 30-90min
