Celeste clone, but grappling a wall causes you to bounce, and you can control if it's the type of bounce that lets you climb the wall or the type that boosts your speed in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is one of those games that requires beating old levels well enough before you can unlock later levels, which might just be my least favorite progression method ever since you're not always gonna get the best time or avoid dying enough or find all the coins on your first try, meaning you'd eventually have to replay those levels just to beat the game normally. The boss also has some trial and error in its attack pattern.

A simple, linear 3D platformer where you attack by throwing bombs that explode on contact. Level design is decent, but some parts can be overly large considering how slow the player's movement speed is; one of those two things should definitely be changed. Also, when waiting on the moving plungers to move out of your way, don't wait right next to them or they'll push/pull you anyway.

The lengthy intro/tutorial has this annoying sound effect for the flying triangle, and the tutorial for grabbing keys with your bubble-shot was missing the button prompt (thus making that part kinda unintuitive). However, if you make it past that, you'll find another decent Celeste clone.

This is a single-screen "kill all the enemies" 80s-arcade-style platformer, the same genre as Bubble Bobble, et. al. It's fine for what it is, but it does start to overstay its welcome by the demo's last few stages.

This game is very unpolished. The game will fade out, but smash-cut back in while the camera scurries to adjust, and when there is a visual-obscuring transition, the game tends to give you control and set the stage before you can really see what's going on, which can lead to cheap hits if you're not expecting it. Plus, enemies have an annoying tendency to respawn just by moving the screen slightly off of their spawn point and back on, so you'll discover that you're often better off leaving enemies stunned instead of finishing them off. Also, the first level is quite bland, and while the second level picks things up a bit, it's still not all there. In fact, there's one spot where one of the vertically moving blocks moves toward a gap in the ceiling, maybe making it look like there's a secret up there, but if you actually go there, you'll practically get stuck and have to fiddle your way out.

So, why am I recommending it? Simple: the whole game is here, and the other levels are much better designed than the first two. Yes, the store page says there are only two levels in the demo, but simply beating the second level (at least on Normal mode) sends you to the third level, and so on. There's still some notable lack of polish, like how the final boss's blood-wave attack goes outside the boss arena, meaning you can get hit by it after respawning from death, but I enjoyed my time with it overall. Also, while the game does have a lives system, it gives you more than enough to beat the whole game on your first go, especially considering you'll get some extra ones during your play-through.

An okay little platformer that starts off linear, but then after a bit, the path splits and it becomes a mini metroidvania. The map is broken, and the first lava hall is enough of a difficulty spike to be the hardest part of the demo, but I had fun with it.

A screen-by-screen platformer where you have to push a switch to make a bomb drop, then you have to bring that bomb to the exit to blow up the lock so you can go through. Level design is pretty good considering the only hazards are stationary spikes, but the premise does mean you'll often have to loop around and effectively do the same level twice in a row in order to beat it and move on to the next one. It also doesn't do a great job at teaching you which floors are slippery and which just give your character the game's default momentum. Also also, if I'm seeing the trailer correctly, the only thing the paid version adds is hard mode, which appears to be the same as normal mode except each level has a time limit.

The beginning of this game is aimless, to the point where I almost gave up and wrote it off as an adventure game, but if you stick with it, you'll get some fairly well-designed platforming.

Decent 3D platformer, though I'm not a huge fan of the Majora's-Mask-style time limit: the option to make it visible didn't work, so I'd end up being in the middle of a platforming segment when the audio switched over to the "time's almost up" theme, and of course, I wouldn't be able to reach the next shortcut to activate it before I got booted back to the hub, forcing me to use the previous shortcut and redo stuff I had already done. I'm also really not a fan of how you have to hold the run button to charge it, then release to start running for however long you charged it for, but at least the demo ends shortly afterward so you don't have to deal with it too much. That said, like Bombun, the rest of this game could have used an actual run ability.

The grapple mechanic is done well, but the enemies are very basic and the level design--while not bad in and of itself--doesn't exactly pick up their slack, and also there's only the one level, so it can be a bit boring. Still, it shows promise, and the boss at the end isn't too bad (except for its spinning-blade jump which is too sudden IMO). Oh, and it's kinda annoying that hallways are slightly taller than the screen height, like what lazy GB ports of NES games do.

I'm normally not a huge fan of momentum-based platformers or exploration, but this game's tight level design and fun combat helped make this an enjoyable experience anyway.

The main gimmick with this game is that you have a ghost following behind you, matching your movements, and pushing a button teleports you back to where the ghost is. I don't remember seeing another game do this, and it's executed fairly well here, but the demo is short and the vertical-wind segment requires maybe too much precision to get past, though.

Honestly, the only reason I'm recommending this one is for the game Coyote Time, a solid platformer that I cannot for the life of me find separate from this compilation. Its gimmick may take some getting used to since you can't jump once your meter runs out and you start falling, but it has decent level design and even has meaningfully-different backtracking, which is something even many paid games struggle to accomplish. The other two games in the demo are a boring idle/clicker and a WarioWare clone that seems to be $6 separately, so I guess you could try out that last one, too.

Boss rush, with each boss having multiple phases that are fairly-well-choreographed and maybe lasting a bit too long overall, but still fun.

In contrast, this bullet hell has stages that are super short, only lasting around 20 seconds or so. However, you do have to sit through the several-second fanfare after each level, which can get annoying. The optional tutorials are fairly detailed, even including beginner-friendly stuff like dodge tactics, but also including not-so-beginner-friendly stuff like "score 200,000 points on this level before you can access the rest of the tutorials" (I beat all of the demo's main-game levels before going back for that tutorial level).

Also, the dev has gone on record saying that the stars you earn for doing optional objectives will be required to unlock later levels, and earning stars on harder difficulties does NOT give you their counterpart stars on easier difficulties. When I asked about that last detail, I was told they're waiting on more feedback, so if you can, please try out the demo and give them some more feedback.

Kinda like Space Harrier, but you only have to move in front of enemies to lock-on and auto-shoot at them. You also get a choice of one of three random upgrades every 20 seconds, so there is some Vampire Survivors influence here, but don't worry: it's still somewhat skill-based since you have to avoid the projectiles shot at you; it's not like Vampire Survivors where victory is entirely determined based on what upgrades you get. That said, the game does overstay its welcome after a while, only having one or two real enemy types, and the demo's only boss is very easy and kinda bland, so I'm not sure how the full game will hold up.

This one's kinda like Starfox 64 except there's only one mediocre level with poor draw-distance, and apparently, hold-button-to-charge shots are on a different button than normal shots.

I think these might be my last Next Fest puzzle game recommendations; I just don't have the patience for this genre anymore. Ever since I played games like Baba Is You and Patrick's Parabox, getting stumped doesn't make me think "wow, this is a challenging puzzle!" so much as it makes me think "okay, what unintuitive nonsense got quietly introduced this time?" There were probably some legitimate puzzle games I passed up--both this time and in Next Fests prior--but the only way to know for sure that a game isn't like that is to know what the solution is, which kinda defeats the point if you're not the one to solve it on your own.

But even if a game isn't like that, I've noticed that a lot of puzzles aren't so much the type where you can work towards a solution, but moreso you either see the solution or you don't, and a game that exemplifies this quite clearly is:

Click-and-drag a row or column to move all blocks in that row/column, and if they hit a wall, they get teleported to the other side of the arena. The mechanic is introduced fine, but it can be hard to keep it in mind as the game progresses. Also, all levels have a move limit of around 3 or so, which means either they'll be very easy or you'll have no idea.

I almost didn't recommend this one because the main game's puzzles are all very easy and kinda boring, and the lack of a second music track doesn't help. However, some of the optional puzzles are pretty tricky.

All the levels in world 1 are quite easy, but you'll still find yourself having to redo levels if you don't pan the camera up to see how current chains will affect the rest of the level--in particular that they'll be blocked by where the ceiling currently is rather than continue destroying chained blocks throughout the level. World 2 gets a bit trickier, but the first level of that world only stumped me because it's the first time the game makes you save a bomb until after you've cleared the target tiles in that area and the ceiling moves ahead (dev did say that an extra tutorial would be added here to address that, though). It definitely feels less like a puzzle game with visual-novel cutscenes and more like a visual novel with puzzle intermissions.

The beginning of the demo isn't too promising since it has a bunch of very easy levels at the start, but it does start to get trickier after a bit, and when you get to the split path, the left route gets quite challenging (not so much the right path, though). Finding hidden levels was kinda annoying, though.

Top-down turn-based boss rush game where you attack by launching yourself at the enemy and ricocheting around. Kinda fun, but the unpredicable nature of the ricochets makes it hard to get out of an inopportune spot or reliably avoid getting hit, and the demo only has a grand total of two bosses with zero arena differences, so even before the demo ends, it starts to get samey. Plus, one of the last levels in the demo makes you use the bow instead of a sword, and on top of this weapon requiring gathering and reloading ammo, you find out that this weapon has a 50% chance to deal ZERO DAMAGE. Yeeeeah, I'll stick with the swords, thankyouverymuch.

An Undertale clone where you don't have to worry about placating the enemies; battles are just the shoot-em-up minigame segments. The overworld has some sokoban-style puzzles, and apparently, the full game is gonna be free, which is nice. Maybe I should've waited and made a post about the full version?

A promising Zeldaclone with okay level design, but I wasn't a fan of how the light is used in combat: first, before you get a weapon, you have to wait for moles to move out of the way and then shine the light on them to stun them (too early and they'll be stunned IN your way, forcing you to wait even longer); then, during the first boss, AFTER you've gotten a weapon, you have to shine the light on its eye for a sustained period before the light causes it to pop out of a hole and become vulnerable to said weapon--except it doesn't always pop out of the hole it was just in! It can pop out of a hole on the other side of the arena, then move into another hole before you've gotten over to where you can hit it. Plus, you can't hit bats while they're flying, unlike actual 2D Zelda games. It also has a chest that requires a later dungeon's item to get, which is a pet peeve of mine.

Oh, I also wasn't a fan of how you have to use the spin-attack to activate certain switches, but it did make more sense when I learned that this was a Playdate game trying to justify that system's crank control.

A simple avoid-em-up with decent music and relatively fair hazard patterns. Even if you do get hit, you can take a few before you die, so I was always able to beat each level on my first try, so I'm not sure how the game fares in regards to checkpoints.

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

When I first booted Garden Story, I got the impression it would be a pretty average, generic little game. And while I'm not completely wrong, it turned out to have a lot more charm than I anticipated.

The basic gameplay loop of Garden Story is a mix of exploration, combat and resource-gathering. You use these resources to improve your village, which in turn unlocks better tools that make combat and resource-gathering more efficient. And it's in this interplay that you'll get hooked. At first you are overwhelmed by the amount of resources, the difficulty of the combat, and the number of locations available to you. Slowly, it all becomes familiar and trivial, and by the time you're getting used to your surroundings, the plot forces you to go to the next village and restart the process from scratch. It's a surprisingly effective loop, and I blazed through the game in a few days while having a lot of fun.

None of these gameplay modes is particularly deep. Resource gathering is mostly using the right tool at the right object, sleep for the object to respawn, repeat. Backpack and storage limits prevent you from doing too well here and forces you to keep coming back for more. Exploration is fun at first, but once you've mapped the areas, it is mostly gone, but the game gates you out of enough areas that you always have a new carrot to pursue. Combat is simple, but different enemies require different tools to deal with and prevent you from zoning out. The use of estus flask for healing and staming management give the whole thing a Souls-lite flavor, and some bosses can even be difficult the first time around.

There's light gardening and base-building and crafting and daily missions and library-cataloguing and upgrade trees for your weapons and for your healing and for your repair box, and NPC favors, and just a lot of modern systems that games throw at us, and I think that's why I dismissed this game at first. But having 100% it, it does a pretty good job with all these systems and is well worth buying at full price in my opinion.

I mean, its a deck dueler, but i havent played Slay the Spire, so I cant compare it to the touchstone deck dueler. I enjoyed it alot tho. Theres a couple achievements behind DLC, which is irksome, but whenever that goes on sale I'll prolly completionist this

Some neat mechanics, but its basically just a fancy VN on top of a point and click adventure

Disappointing game. As a former Maniac McGee/Day of the Tentacle player, I had hopes for this. The art style is quaint, at first, but gets boring quick. The puzzles are not engaging. The story could have been pretty good, but its very railroad and the ending basically resolves offscreen.