Stuff I wishlisted during Next Fest
Here is a subset of the games I added to my Steam wishlist during Next Fest. These were all things I had straight up never heard about before.
The King is Watching
Really tremendous little resource-management roguelike where you build a little grid of production facilities in a castle, but can only mark some of them as "active" at any given time. You do this by moving around a bounding-box that represents your "gaze" or "attention" as the king. Your ultimate goal is to produce units who can fight off the waves of enemies walking toward your castle from screen right.
It's a super interesting and weird little challenge... and I was also very impressed by the art!
Castle V Castle
Man, I dunno if I really wrapped my head around this one, but maybe that's the reason why I want to play more of it... it's a little 1v1 card game where you generate three resources every turn - magic, bricks, and swords - and play cards every turn to transform those resources back and forth into one another. You spend them to kill your opponent's castle. Both castles get taller or smaller onscreen as they near death, and a little guy comes out with a sad little sign if you're about to die. Very compelling!
There seems to be a deck that you can learn the contents of... but as far as I can tell, you can't actually see the deck anywhere? That's okay, I suppose, because it seems quite small, and the games are fast, and in about 20 minutes I really did feel like I was beginning to figure it out... but I haven't yet!
I really like the art. Very spare. It nostalgically reminds me of some aesthetics I used to see a lot in flash games. The music is also pretty fun. Extremely stark and spare, too, and very rhythmic. For some reason it made me feel like I should be playing my cards VERY FAST!
Sandustry
It's that dust-based Java web game from years ago... as a conveyor belt factory game! You play an anonymous little pixel guy who builds conveyors and machinery to essentially pan for gold in muddy sand. You dig to get sand... you soak the sand in water to make wet sand... you then put the sand in a "shaker" to separate the sand into gold and "slag"... slag burns to create burned slag... burned slag can be dropped a high distance to separate it into "spores" and even more gold... the spores can be moistened and planted to create flowers, which can be burned for petals and even more gold...
Every production process connects to another which generates even more gold but frustrates your organizational instincts in weirder and weirder ways. I spent more time on this demo than on ANY other this weekend... like three hours. It's precisely my kind of factory-ass resource manipulation game. I LOVE resources, and conveyor belts, and turning various things into gold. I will be buying this day one for sure.
Didn't get any screenshots of this one because screenshotting didn't work in it for some reason?? Oh well, take my word for it... my conveyors were cool.
Is This Seat Taken
Simple little puzzle game about deciphering those puzzles where various people want to sit next to various other people in a group setting. Each level introduces new twists... there's a small car to begin with, and then a larger car, and then a bus, and then a rock concert. Characters have preferences relating to loud sounds, stench, specific seat partners, standing versus sitting, sitting alone or with a conversation partner, and so on.
It's just cute! Very simple and chill and cute. I liked it.
Promise Mascot Agency
Massive amounts of personality. A management game where you play a yakuza driving a kei truck around a dying Japanese town, assigning various "living" mascots to jobs. The mascots make mistakes and then you have to play a card game to save their buts. Deranged stuff, completely unique, very weird. I was so impressed.
I could not stop screenshotting this game.
The player's base includes a rotating love hotel sex bed that you can lay on to trigger various side conversations with the mascots working for your agency. The conversations have titles like "Selling your soul" and "Gaze out to sea".
From the Paradise Killer folks. I'm so impressed that they managed to follow that game up with something equally as bizarre and unique.
Things I am now thinking about
- Holy FUCK there are a lot of card based roguelites out there. Good job, everyone... a lot of your games are cool as hell... but if you aren't already mostly done with your card based roguelite, I don't know what to tell you. It's gonna be so hard for all you folks, holy shit.
- Even stuff that is not a "card game" is still rolling "hands" of things for me to choose between. Everything that is not a card game is, secretly, a card game.
- Even fucking Promise Mascot Agency is a card game. It has a card battle system which is kind of a puzzle game maybe... but it's a card game. What is happening!!!