Next Fest Demos and Friends

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #197. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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What’s left when we’ve moved on.

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It’s demo time! This month I was broke, so I spent time playing free things only: good news for me that it was Next Fest. I’ve collected my thoughts about eight demos from the weeklong festival that I tried, each one of which drew my interest in some way. All of these ran at least passably well on Mac or Steam Deck; many of them have relaxing or simple themes but subvert them early on to become more complex. At time of writing, many of these are still up; go play some cool stuff for free!

Titanium Court

After the release of Consume Me last year, no one will be surprised that AP Thompson’s upcoming game Titanium Court has excellent music. What’s interesting is what that music is deployed for: bringing the story of an early modern drama, the pixel graphics of a chalk box spilled on the ground, and match-3 gameplay together into something cohesive. And it is cohesive: the demo sets you up as the ruler of a fairy court who wages war by moving the field around her castle before defending the castle itself. This gameplay could easily be set up as a content loop for dailies or something like that, although I saw no trace of that in the demo. Instead, each loop I failed (because I am, uh, not very good at this game) had its own dialogue and scenes, which pulled me forward into the next endeavor.

I have to admit Midsummer Night’s Dream is my least favorite Shakespeare play, and the graphics gave me a bit of a headache after a while. Still, I look forward to the full release of this with more excitement than trepidation.

Petal Runner

Out of all the games on this list, Petal Runner is the one I most want to play right now. Petal Runner is not a creature collector but a creature deliverer. With the graphics of an early Pokémon game, the combat of Undertale and the puzzle-y level layout of 2021’s Eastward, Petal Runner also has mostly great writing and, even in the demo, a compelling though not-too-serious story. I’m most worried about the combat minigames becoming repetitive, but since some of them challenged me even in the demo I’m looking forward pretty completely to the full release.

The Eternal Life of Goldman

This demo had a few things working against it, because it was not optimized for the Steam Deck I was playing it on (this will be a theme). These included permanently-on volume and a run button that wouldn’t stop in one direction, as well as a somewhat blurry filter that seemed to be an artistic choice but ended up giving me an eye ache and made it hard to tell what was and wasn’t jump-on-able. Apart from this, however, the artistic direction, which looks like a watercolor children’s cartoon, was charming and the building design in particular stood out to me.

The game has the narrative frame of a story and directions are communicated through dreamlike means including a stretchy ghost and a cryptic NPC. Some things were extremely clear; others took trial and error. While a Celeste-like generous instant restart is appreciated, there were a few rooms in the demo that grated because I needed a few tries to understand what to do. Between that and the stylistic stuff, I don’t think I’ll be playing the full release of this one.

Dosa Divas

Dosa Divas heard that I was enjoying picking plants in Elden Ring and said, “Hold my beer.” A beautifully vibrant world where two sisters cook with their giant robot Goddess is threatened by a mega-corporation providing meals on demand. Convenience food vs home cooked meals is a great concept for an RPG, and the fights, which use a shield-breaking system like the Octopath games, were engaging without being too tough and enemy lines like a lawyer giving up by saying “I plead the fifth,” (or even just saying “Aiya!” when surprised) made me smile.

I find the simple ingredient gathering mechanic calming, although I worry about the cooking minigames becoming repetitive over time. I also found some of the scene changes pretty jarring, which could be down to this being a demo. Despite these issues, I was totally charmed by the design and stylishness and could see myself getting easily sucked into the full release.

Zero Parades

I didn’t realize a Jenny Holzer epigraph could summarize my anxieties about this game. I didn’t bat an eye at, for example, a de Régnier quote in Dragon’s Dogma, nor more relevantly at the many basically-Marx quotes in Disco Elysium. And maybe I’m projecting a little bit; I live in Brooklyn, where I and everyone else I’m sure can pull out “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” at the drop of a hat. So why does the directness of that epigraph bug me? Because I couldn’t tell why it was there; it came across more referential than descriptive to me, less “this hints at what this game is about,” and more “this is the type of game to have Jenny Holzer quotes in it.”

This summarizes the approach of this demo: the narrative and the game’s main character wearing their heart on their sleeve. With respect to the main character, I actually think that’s great. I found her responses in particular well written and the visual and environmental design stunning, as is the detailed and clear UI. However, they didn’t dispel my worry that Zero Parades is looking over its shoulder a bit too much, narratively speaking.

Thrifty Business

I was kind of suspicious of a thrift store game, as someone who grew up going to the Gift-and-Thrift and believes in my heart that nothing there should be more than $3. Would this be a true thrift store or a vintage reseller simulator? Thrifty Business is more the former, centered around earning community points for getting customers good deals, finding what they want, and holding events in your charity shop space. The decorating half of the game is excellent, moving thrifting into the 21st century by buying boxes of unused stock online – something I begrudgingly accept in the name of “accuracy” and “smooth gameplay.” However, I was less into the “selling” half, which is mostly standing and waiting for someone to buy something without an indication of what would make them do so. If you enjoy decorating your house in Animal Crossing, as I do, you will enjoy at least half of this game very much.

Wax Heads

I absolutely loved the demo for Wax Heads, and it’s not because I worked in a bookstore where I loved giving recommendations. One reason I liked it is something simple, yet undeniably tough, it does: features songs that feel natural and realistic. You serve customers by walking around the store and finding their best recommendation – not necessarily what they want, but what they need. In the first chapters included in the demo, you’re trained as a store employee and complete a few “levels” of this loop, which were bite-sized enough to finish in just a few minutes. Between the music and the art, whose details are a love letter to crawling around music stores looking for a deal, I’m sold.

Hozy

Hozy made me think about what interior design games represent, which isn’t its own fault; it caught me at a time I’d just replaced my vacuum and was thus acutely aware of how much appliances cost. Its decor design, which is sleek and makes the homes feel ultra-realistic, sometimes felt to me like it came directly from an Amazon wishlist, which led the first of two apartments in the demo to feel a bit generic. I enjoyed unboxing and decorating as much as I always do, and the final rooms you can make are full of reactive elements including sunlight and leaves streaming through windows. Since it runs on Mac, I wish the repetitive motions for painting and rotating felt better with a trackpad. However, apart from these annoyances I enjoyed Hozy and found it clears the bar of feeling like a sandbox to decorate rather than an arranging puzzle with only one solution.

Honorable Mentions: I didn’t have time to get to the demos for All Will Rise, a courtroom deckbuilder about fighting corporations, nor Crosscode developer Radical Fish Games’ new RPG Alabaster Dawn. I also had to skip the demo for Witch’s Bakery because of startup issues. When it rains it pours; I hope to try out some of these in the future.

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Emily Price is a freelance writer and digital editor based in Brooklyn, New York, and holds a PhD in literature. You can find her on Bluesky.