Next Fest 26|1 Day 0
Micro-reviews for Day 0 of February Next Fest 2025, exploring Croak, Worming from Home, Feed the Scorchpot, Dragon Khan, The Artisan of Glimmith, Scuttle, Nonolith, In Falsus, and Tiling Forest (Tiling Town Demo)
Demo season is back! And so are my bundles of micro-reviews to maybe give you something to try or look forward to. While starting strong there might be some slower days this week, but will do my best!
Highlights: Croak, Tiling Forest
Croak
A lovely platformer where you use your frog tongue to bounce around the walls and make your way through the levels. The cartoon visuals are charming, level design is solid, and the medal system lets you have fun whether you're a casual or speedrunning perfectionist
Playtime: 30min+
Worming from Home
As an accountant, your job is to fill in spreadsheets to make numbers go up. The catch is that you are a worm in a human-sized environment, and have to put great effort into every keypress, and your whole body into moving the mouse across the screen. It's a whimsical title with a bunch of little gags, though hard to say if they'll hold up in the full game length
Playtime: ~1h
Feed the Scorchpot
Balatro meets Catan, themed around feeding a dragon. You roll dice to gather resources, add flavor using special recipes, and try and reach an ever-increasing goal using various tools and buildings. I can see this being fun, though the runs I had felt a bit imbalanced. I think it's a game that benefits from experimenting across many runs, but the demo has a static seed so figuring out strategies to get your pot cooking may take a few retries of the demo
Playtime: 30min+
Dragon Khan
Dragon Khan is mainly a Hack'n'Slash, with some parkour platforming sprinkled in between fights. It has potential, but I think the devs need to more strongly focus on a single vision for the game, since its identity feels a bit nebulous beyond the genre. Also some performance stutters and bugs here and there, leading to a very raw feeling
Playtime: ~30min
The Artisan of Glimmith
A grid-based puzzler about cutting an area into smaller shapes to fulfill variety of rules. It's stylized as if you're creating stained glass patterns, leading to some pretty final results and occasional confusion when similar colors are present. Very good nonetheless
Playtime: ~30-40min
Scuttle
Scuttle is a simple rhythm runner, in which you click to the beat to make your crab scuttle faster as you run laps across the level. The demo is quite short and doesn't fully explore the potential the game has, but aside of some minor glitches and jank I can see this being a fun time
Playtime: ~10min
Nonolith
Level-based sandbox that lets you manipulate the environment above your head. At first to just build platforms and make a path forward, but soon you learn that you can create patterns of blocks that will start behaving like cells in Conway's Game of Life, doing their own thing to hopefully help you traverse around. Neat concept, even if at times it felt like its holding itself back
Playtime: 30-60min
In Falsus
Sound Voltex but using mouse and keyboard instead of a special controller. Between highway rhythm with slightly unusual controls and following the path with mouse movements; I found this a really enjoyable time, and that's without considering the great style, and all the elements barely present in the demo. Should be good stuff whenever it releases
Playtime: ~40min+
Tiling Forest
Brilliant puzzler from the creator of Maxwell's Puzzling Demon. You have tiles, and your goal is to fill in areas to get new tiles. Each area is a new tile, but you won't always have enough tiles to finish an area, instead requiring you to unlock future ones before finishing the one you're in. Very quickly this flips the formula from figuring out how to solve something to figuring out if you can solve it in the first place, and between the pacing, the level designs, and some mechanical reveals - it's fantastic
