Next Fest 25|3 Day 7
Micro-reviews for Day 7 of Autumn Next Fest 2025, exploring MineMogul, Game With Balls, Painkiller, Moonlight Knight, Swiftrace Canyon, The Bar Souls, and Moonsigil Atlas
And the final day is here! A bit earlier than usual due to personal commitments, but I've been grabbing extra reviews all week to ensure it's as filled with goodies as the others. And it means you have all the more time to try them!
Highlights: Moonsigil Atlas, MineMogul, Swiftrace Canyon
MineMogul
An automation game where instead of mining stuff on the surface, you go straight to the source and set up your machinery in the mines. Efficiency! All the items are also physics-based, so you have to set up chutes and manage throughput of your belts not by abstract numbers, but by how much of a physical item can fit without spilling. If you ever played Hydroneer this shares a lot of the DNA, but without all the excavations and water pressure stuff. Really well made, and hopefully will be expanded beyond metal plates through EA and release
Playtime: 1h+
Game With Balls
Game With Balls caught my attention as being a rare case of a game designed specifically for a Steam Deck, utilizing its gyro-controls. It also has literally hand-crafted levels, as your goal is to guide a ball through what is essentially a photo of a real-life course. I've had my friend test it, and the consensus is that while it does work, it is rather plain, and lacks re-centering of the gyro, which might've caused the momentum to feel a bit off. It's fine, but more of a curio than an intriguing title
Playtime: 16min
Painkiller
Sometimes I want to look at something from the bigger budget zone, and this is a reimagining of the Painkiller that released over 20 years ago, as a Co-Op vs horde FPS. Not sure if that lines up with the original, but it does work decently well, and it looks like it might be a bit less grindy than Vermintide. Though it comes out soon enough, so you might as well wait for more reviews to flood in
Playtime: 1h+
Moonlight Knight
Moonlight Knight('s demo) is visually a copy of Hollow Knight, down to the funky shape of grass. But that's where similarities end, because the grass can be used to spread wildfires, you have a machinegun fireball, and a hookshot; as well as spells that can clone you or slow down time. It's much more of a top-down hack'n'slash than anything else. So while visual creativity may have been low, and balancing seems to have been omitted entirely, the demo wasn't that bad
Playtime: ~20min
Swiftrace Canyon
A mix of racing and speedrunning that expects you to both be fast, and to plot out your own path between markers in any order. The movement is surprisingly good and the game actively keeps track of not only your best time, but your best time for each different order of markers. Positively surprised by the quality, but I really hope they do a fixer upper on the very raw UI, and maybe some visual upgrades to the world too
Playtime: 20-30min+
The Bar Souls
I'm not sure why this game says it's a souls-like, because it's much more of a boss-rush kinda game, with single-digit numbers of enemies between bosses. It has an interesting gimmick where after each death your weapon disintegrates, and you get given a new random one. Some are just slightly different ranges and damage stats, but sometimes you get a bow instead of a sword and the fight is completely different. Very cool, if it wasn't for the disintegration animation playing every time you die (and it's agonizingly slow)
Playtime: 20-40min
Moonsigil Atlas
A roguelike deckbuilder where your cards don't have energy, and are instead restricted by sigils you have to carefully arrange on the limited space of your moon. The starspawn monsters look great, the whole aesthetic is phenomenally done, and the core mechanics have a lot of finesse to them, where both positioning and order matters, in multiple ways. If you like deckbuilders I highly recommend you give it a go
