Steam NextFest - Feb 2023

Highwater

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000960/Highwater/

Takes place after a climate catastrophe and all the rich people are fleeing to Mars. You play as a character who's trying to sneak in and stow away on a rocket.
Made an incredibly strong first impression with an original vocal track and cool vibes of driving around a flooded city on a shitty life raft, and took a sharp nosedive for me when it A) revealed itself to be a middling, weirdly tough tactical combat game and B) revealed some really on-the-nose writing (there are literally billboards from the capitalist society saying "FOMO" and "BUYER'S REMORSE" on them).

Mindhack

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727210/MINDHACK/

Visual novel where you play as a Mind Hacker who psychically hacks into the brains of "scumbags" to remove the "bugs" that drive them to do "bad things". The game presents this act on a scale somewhere between real shady to actively harmful. Great style, kept thinking "wow this music slaps" while playing.

Radio the Universe

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1053900/Radio_the_Universe/

Sort of Zelda-y top-down combat and puzzles. Some Signalis vibes, but hewing way more closely to Dark Souls, etc. Incredible UI treatment (I genuinely love the little gyro balance bar that appears any time you land from a jump), but it's extremely punishing and probably a little too cryptic for my tastes.

Archmage Rises

https://store.steampowered.com/app/506480/Archmage_Rises/

Procedurally generated wizard simulator. Looks like it generates a whole-ass fantasy world and then plops you in as a youngun with magic potential. It seems like once you get strong enough you might stop shooting magic missile at wolves in the forest and become a real-ass archmage working on some kind of grand strategy / 4X layer of the game, but I obviously didn't get that far.

Wandering Sword

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1876890/Wandering_Sword/

Blatantly aping Octopath's aesthetics, but that's not a bad thing. I got bamboozled thinking this would be wuxia, when it turned out to actually be xianxia. Fuck.
Jank translation and real iffy menus, but it's a demo. Every NPC has their own character sheet for the grid-based tactics combat and it seems like you can invite anybody into your party, which is sort of spinning the invite feature from Octopath into a more major element.

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1164830/A_Long_Journey_to_an_Uncertain_End/

Play as a ship AI traveling to different planets and assigning crew members to various odd jobs so you can gather resources. The persistent timer counting down to death is that your ex is chasing you across the galaxy, and they really think that's a great hook. Makes some cool diversity choices (custom pronouns, etc.) and it seems like each crew member has some stuff going on but I wasn't really feeling it.

Lightracer Spark

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2094270/Lightracer_Spark/

Some kind of narrative 4X-ish RPG thing? I actually thought this was really interesting. You play as some kind of sufficiently advanced alien intelligence that studies civilizations and grows from doing so.
The demo chapter presents a planet whose late-stage crypto-capitalism created a rampant AI that is going to inevitably destroy them, and presents you with the options of: A) mining as many valuable resources from the planet as possible before it goes up in flames, B) preserving the gene banks of the dominant species, or C) running a thought experiment of trying to push them towards co-existence with AI. Didn't go as narratively in-depth as I'd like since it was still tutorializing the mechanics (which were, ah, a bit confusing to me, even with the pop-ups) but I genuinely want to see more.

Book of Hours

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028310/BOOK_OF_HOURS/

You're meant to be the new Librarian of the mysterious Hush House... if you can get there.
I had a lot of trouble "clicking" with the UI on this one, but once I managed to figure out a bit, I was pretty into it even though I scarcely got into the first town area (ain't even at the library!!). It's got some serious Fallen London/Sunless Sea vibes in how it works, where you have various categories of "items" that each have flavorful and evocative attributes that determine where you can or can't use them. Some lovely writing here and I can't wait to check it out when it is (or, more likely, I am) in a state where I can understand what I'm doing.

Dark Envoy

https://store.steampowered.com/app/945770/Dark_Envoy/

Caught in between a MOBA and a CRPG and doesn't quite do either genre justice, though the effort to make a more interesting gameplay experience is admirable. Has you make two characters at the start - a brother-sister pair - to be your main protagonists, but their dialogue is so quippy and snarky that it genuinely seems more like they're flirting with each other than sibling ribbing.

WitchSpring R

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1958220/WitchSpring_R/

Cute little JRPG about a pie-loving forest witch who crafts and mines and fights. One of those situations where it's got just the right amount of jank in every aspect to be endearing. The unfittingly enormous thwack sound effect when you hunt rabbits made me crack up every single time, and the little Monster Rancher style mini-games for training your stats are a fun quirk. Not sure how much substance it'd have in a full game, but I had a great time playing this for an hour.

Affogato

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1983970/Affogato/

As a barista/sorceress, you and your goth demon GF help solve people's problems.
This feels like an obscure PSP game out of time. It's got Persona-like town exploration / stat-building mechanics, VA-11 Hall-A-like coffee-making VN segments, and a weird little battle system they call "reverse tower defense". You summon units and send them down a track while they attack towers along the way, and it gets surprisingly hard to manage their health and your resources. I ended up busting out Cheat Engine to fight the boss, no clue how I would have done it otherwise.
Also, while the writing is adequate anime faff 99% of the time, it has a reference to the first Avengers movie that I saw coming 10 seconds before it happened and it felt like I'd been kneecapped with a 12-gauge.

Virtue's Heaven

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1929860/Virtues_Heaven/

Metroidvania with a distinctly Game Boy aesthetic and really snappy movement mechanics. It's got some fun, self-aware anti-capitalist flavor to the writing, and its equivalent of Hollow Knight's equippable charms are pretty interesting.

Amarantus

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1941100/Amarantus/

Visual novel where you play as a young revolutionary recently radicalized. I liked this a lot! The rhythm of the dialogue is great, with solid characterization all around, and the character sprites having movable eyes really adds a lot of expression to the limited number of images.

Sea of Stars (Demo on Switch)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1244090/Sea_of_Stars/

For a game clearly trying to be like Chrono Trigger, it feels way more like Super Mario RPG. It looks lovely, but the pacing feels off to me, like everything's a little too slow; the world map speed in particular feels glacial. I appreciate that fewer encounters means they need to be accordingly tougher, but at least in the demo dungeon that meant I was hoofing it back to the camp point to heal after almost every single battle. Maybe I just suck at Timed Hits.

Cook Serve Forever

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1928090/Cook_Serve_Forever/

More Cook Serve Delicious, but with way more streamlined controls. Maybe too streamlined? I think the restaurant plate-spinning metalayer was part of the core gameplay loop, so stripping it out makes this feel like a pick-up-and-play phone game. That's not necessarily bad, but not really for me either.

Phantom Brigade

https://store.steampowered.com/app/553540/Phantom_Brigade/

Mecha X-Com. Mechs-Com. You know. Highly polished (since I guess it comes out at the end of the month!), you can paint the individual pieces of your mechs, and it's got a cool gimmick where you can see what the enemies are doing next turn. The writing is borderline comical since it's all about "reclaiming our homeland" from an extremely vague "enemy", but I guess it's just an excuse for cool tactics stuff.

A Guidebook of Babel

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1467920/A_Guidebook_of_Babel/

This reminds me of Ghost Trick, The Sexy Brutale, or even Zero Escape, where you're jumping back and forth in time to trip the right flags to progress the quest. It's got a unique aesthetic and some cool, surreal narrative stuff going on. Could be really cool!

Lakeburg Legacies

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1584940/Lakeburg_Legacies/

A resource collecting game with a big focus on matchmaking your villagers together to get some kids. Really dumped me into the deep end on the UI front; it took me a good couple minutes just to figure out how to make sure my first villager wasn't homeless. Not really for me either, I think; I like matchmaking my units in Fire Emblem because they all have unique personalities rather than being randomly generated.