By TNT Dragon in Next Fest — 28 Feb 2025

Next Fest 25|1 Day 5

Micro-reviews for Day 1 of Winter Next Fest 2025, exploring Nebulock, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, Savara, Monaco 2, Castle Craft, Deep Sea Sweep, Ultra Mega Cats, Taming Yore Dragon, and PROJEKT GODHAND

I thought Day 3 was gonna be peak but no, today's better. A ton of good titles, and though most have some flaws, they all were worth their time

Highlights: Nebulock, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, and Savara

Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping

If you've never heard of Duck Detective, and you have an inkling of interest in mysteries and/or goofy games, then just go and play this demo. And if you know what Duck Detective is, this is more of the same silly narrative about solving a mystery with less stakes than a broken pier. A title full of love and tomfoolery

Playtime: <30min

Deep Sea Sweep

I meant to play this yesterday with the other oceanic games, but it slipped between the cracks. Shame, cause it's actually a really solid platformer that mixes free 2D movement as a fish, and jump-limited platforming as a fish carrying sunken treasure to a submarine. Not quite sure what's going on there lore-wise, but gameplay-wise it's a good little platformer, with some hidden sea-crets if you like treasure hunts

Playtime: ~15min

Castle Craft

A voxel game where you build a castle to defend your king from forcess of darkness. That might sound generic, but there is a lot of content here, to the point where it's hard for me to judge without putting many hours in the demo (2 was not nearly enough). I do think the game could used some better guidance so that you avoid making bad resource management choices, and I'm not a fan of the AI voicelines peasants have, though that might be cause the only ones present are when there is no food and they complain about starvation. Still, game is pretty good, and I think your best bet is to just click the link above, look at the Steam page, and see what you think

Playtime: 1h+

Taming Yore Dragon

A game about battling mental dragons of anxiety on your way to help a real dragon (likely also with anxiety). It's a very casual experience, filled with a narrative about self-introspection and a therapeutic view on mental weight. Feels a bit clunky at times, but it doesn't harm the game that much given it's themes.

Playtime: 20min

Ultra Mega Cats

Another roguelike, this time a third person shooter themed around cats vs everything else in a mechanical sandwich. I enjoyed the punny humor, though the character voicelines playing with every skill may be a bit much. There was also a lot of random frame drops, and the first boss was a 12 minute bullet sponge, so it didn't feel particularly interesting. The game's fine, but needs some ironing out before it gets cat-egorized as a meowst play

Playtime: 30min+

Savara

A roguelite that has the heart of Hades and the blade of Lies of P. It's charming, and enjoyable, and even though the Hades inspiration is very clear, it is also doing a good job at being its own thing. At first I found the enemies hard to read, but that slowly disappeared as I learned their attack patterns and subtle tells. Strong recommend

Playtime: 40min+

PROJEKT GODHAND

This game describes itself as an "ultimate tool assisted bullshitting keyboard destruction rhythm game" and... that's not wrong? It seems like there is actual strategy and rhytmic skill involved in the game, but the actual gameplay is essentially "press buttons roughly when timing is correct, and it'll be fine." It's more fun than it sounds, but also doesn't hit the same satisfaction as rhythm games typically do for me

Playtime: 25min+

Nebulock

A bullet hell with incremental upgrades. It's minimalistic, and the bosses are made up of blocks you can destroy to take out their weaponry. Very good balance of bosses getting exponentially harder to beat, while you get exponentially more powerful to beat them.