Steam Next Fest February 2025 Impressions
In recent years, Steam Next Fests have given numerous players the opportunity to check out a wide variety of games of all shapes and sizes, letting unsung developers attract attention as they put the effort into getting their games ready for launch. The latest edition was held within the last month, and some of the RPGamer staff was able to devote a bit of time. Please note that this article is by no means intended to be a selection of the best on offer; there were many more titles that we would’ve liked to check out and be able to include!
Bagdex
Bagdex is a monster collecting game from Brazilian development team Caramelo Games. The game seems interesting, as it mixes the basic monster collecting features of the genre, base building, and competitive battling multiplayer. At least, that’s what it says on the tin. However, the demo is only for combat so it’s hard to glean too much from it.
To be fair, the developers do sign post that the demo is only a combat demo, but even with that, I was a bit underwhelmed. The combat itself was basic fare involving elemental damage: Element A is strong against Element B, Element B is resistant to Element C, but Element C is strong against Element A. The small teams of three “Bag Mons” are element attuned and have at least one weakness and one strength against the other teams in the demo, but as pre-set teams they just aren’t very compelling. It would have been nice for the demo if the player could have selected their own team of three and seen how far they could go before losing. The creature designs also don’t really stand out. The announcer and the stylized comic book direction the art goes for were nice, but the 3D models lacked the life that comes from other creature collectors.
There is hope for things to be more engaging in the full release. The promotional material indicates the game is set in a fictional open-world Brazil, a location inspiration that even the Pokémon series has yet to engage with, so I’m interested to see what these developers have cooked up for the world design and the story. I am also hopeful that battles have a deeper gimmick or something else to ensure combat doesn’t devolve into the same element versus element battles of Pokémon games, maybe taking notes from other games of the genre like Cassette Beasts or Beastieball. I hope the full release is a fun romp. — Jahwon E. Corbett
Guns Undarkness
Composer Shoji Meguro isn’t a stranger to more direct development roles, having previously acted as director for the PlayStation Portable remakes of the Persona and Persona 2 duology. His newest development effort, Guns Undarkness, is a turn-based RPG set on an Earth on the brink of destruction. Players lead a team in a private military company aiming to prevent the dire state of the world becoming worse.
The thirty-minute demo is largely combat focused, giving players an initial tutorial before briefly showing small hub and shopping areas and finally another short mission. There are some clear Persona influences in combat, not least how characters have strengths and weaknesses to different weapon types. The one gameplay aspect that does stand out is its use of cover. If players can get themselves, and their two squad mates, into cover before initiating combat they can inflict an initial all out attack as well as starting with the bonuses that cover conveys.
It’s hard to glean too much excitement from the demo. The hub and areas are pretty basic, and there’s almost nothing to learn about the story or setting, which feels pretty bleak from what is there. The character art is nice, but the 3D graphics fall into an odd place of lacking both realism or style. As to be expected, the music is very catchy and the gameplay works decently enough, even if the demo’s content is very easy. — Alex Fuller
Dark Deity 2
Dark Deity 2 is Sword & Axe’s sequel to the 2021 tactical RPG Dark Deity. It’s a decent-sized demo, coming ahead of its launch in March, letting players go through the first four story battles of the game, covering around two hours of game time. The series’ Fire Emblem influences are readily apparent from the outset, from the turn structure, to the different unit types, to the bond conversations and events.
One area of note is the level of customization players can apply to let them tailor the experience. This includes being able to change the overall difficulty, whether unit stat increases on level-up are randomized or linear, whether battles have turn limits, and more. The first four battles show a good mixture of scenarios, as well as player choices and replayability as they select one of three groups to assist in one of these missions, which definitely looks like it has an impact on the story.
Much like Fire Emblem, the game doesn’t waste too much time setting up events, instead getting players into combat, with the necessary world-building details worked in as events progress. New players won’t need to worry, the story does a good job integrating them if they hadn’t played the first game. Story events are all fully voiced with decent quality acting and there’s a good mixture of personalities to the cast. Those looking for a new Fire Emblem-style experience should find themselves well catered for by Dark Deity 2. — Alex Fuller
Portal Fantasy
Monster collecting will always have a place in video games. There’s just something about seeing a new monster design that still brings a smile to many faces. As a result it takes a lot to stand out amongst the others in the genre and the game-titled developers for Portal Fantasy can see some success with a bit of fine tuning. The world feels more interactive and comedic than many of its contemporaries, the only thing that seems to be holding it back is the slow combat. If it can be made a bit faster, there’s something fun here.
In Portal Fantasy, players start out as an apprentice who overslept their first day of class. As a result, when they arrive at school, only their teacher and a choice of three monsters remain. The starting town is filled with interactable objects to get extra resources, both for crafting and use in combat. Right from the beginning though combat feels rather sluggish, as “Porbles” (what they call monsters in this world) have decently high health compared to their damage output. This often means up to a minute per combat, alongside the extensive load times, making each combat encounter a chore. Thankfully, there is a low encounter rate, so players are free to run around collecting things off the map and solving rudimentary puzzles to reach new areas. Portal Fantasy is scheduled to be online with PvP when it releases, which will open things up a bit, but it depends on how it affects resource gathering.
As it stands, there was a decent amount of Portal Fantasy that was intriguing. There were many Porbles to collect and the world felt expansive. Hopefully, more abilities learned by leveling up and diverse equipment created through crafting may strengthen the game’s expansive feel. — Ryan Costa
Shuffle Tactics
Deckbuilding seems like a natural marriage to tactical RPGs. While Club Sandwich’s Shuffle Tactics leans more into the deckbuilding side of things, the tactical gameplay is nothing to scoff at.
Shuffle Tactics takes place in a world of contrast. Dark colors and shading gives the world a uniquely muted tone that rather than dull, gives things like the backgrounds and battleground a fresh feeling. It’s unfortunate that this contrast blending doesn’t extend to the character designs; the cast blend in too easily with the backgrounds between their generic faces and their even more generic clothing.
Shuffle Tactics shines brightest in its gameplay. There are many little nuances to customization, making the game an easy one to return to. The player has the ability to pick up new cards after each combat to diversify their combat style into whatever is most needed. Alongside this, there is a long list of sidekicks that add further tactical variety through level ups and their individual abilities. At the end of combat, players can gain charms or relics that can be added to cards or boost the party’s stats respectively. In combination, something like the slash ability can go from a generic damage ability to a poison laced devastating cut, or return to the player’s hand if its the last card used to get a kill. Bosses can be a bit annoying, needing to have players optimize their strategies lest they find themselves on the bad end of the infinitely respawning henchmen and lose the war of attrition. Despite that, the deckbuilding and grid-based battles are a lot of fun.
In the final release, the developers plan to introduce even more cards and sidekicks to tinker with. There’s a lot to look forward to when the game releases. — Ryan Costa
Fretless: The Wrath of Riffson
Sometimes the term “RPG” feels a bit meaningless. So many games take the title and use it as a platform to fit a broad number of side activities that it makes for an easy starting place to showcase a favorite story or pastime. Music, specifically good music, can be so eclectic in why it’s good that it can be almost impossible to place the reason as one thing or another. So when I took on Ritual Studios’ Fretless: The Wrath of Riffson, I had the honor of seeing (and hearing!) gameplay, style, story, and music blended into an amazing guitar ballad.
Rob is a friendly talented musician, who wants to showcase his guitar skills for the world. His opportunity arrives when he learns of an upcoming Battle of the Bands contest via his TV. As he dreams of exiting his small town for a potential world tour, he finds himself in a nightmare scenario out of an A24 film: his little hometown is attacked by musical plant/animal hybrids that can only be defeated by Rob and his guitar.
Combat is a mix between standard rhythm games (Guitar Hero, Elite Beat Agents, etc.) and standard turn-based RPG combat. Players are required to match button inputs with the background beat to match offensive abilities and defensive timings. Timings can be tighter or looser depending on an in-game difficulty slider that makes the game very approachable for the rhythmically challenged. As the demo goes on, new abilities are unlocked alongside new riffs and guitars that add more interesting moves to Rob’s repertoire.
Fretless’ mix of humor, fun adventure, quirky combat, and great soundtrack are setting up the game as the next great indie gem. — Ryan Costa
Sol Cesto
There’s a beauty to simplicity, especially when playing a roguelite. The key to a great roguelite is making the gameplay varied yet fun, with brownie points if there’s some visual quirk to help it stand out. Sol Cesto, from developer Tambouille, fits being simple and varied. It has an enjoyable loop to get plenty of milage out of it, even in its somewhat too short demo. Sol Cesto adds plenty of variance to each run with constantly added items, special abilities, and monster possibilities to make every dungeon and run different.
In Sol Cesto, classes just vary the starting attributes and provide a new special ability to shake up the dungeon floor with. Everything is based on luck as the dungeon floor is on a four-by-four grid with a percentile chance of the protagonist landing on any given square in a row. Special abilities alter that movement from row based, to something like columns instead or hoping to an adjacent room. There’s five rooms out of the sixteen that must be entered before the floor can be cleared, gaining either currency to buy new items or experience to get stronger. Enemies will always be defeated if players land in their room, but if they are stronger than the character being used, health is deducted.
After every few floors, relics in the form of false teeth appear as a multiple choice, often re-arranging percentile chances to land in rooms or otherwise giving a boon to the character at the cost of something else. Other than enemies, rooms can have traps, healing strawberries, and treasure chests to try and collect and with a percentile chance of landing in any given room on the row, luck plays a big factor in how far players will get. There’s a sense of simplistic fun in just jumping in a dungeon and seeing how far down the depths a character can get. Add in a wonderfully weird visual style and there’s something addictive about this title that with more options and variety will be an easy one to keep coming back to. — Ryan Costa
Tales of Seikyu
ACE Entertainment’s Tales of Seikyu is a farming sim with adventure elements and a yokai flavouring. Players control a fox yokai, primarily in human form, who arrives on the island of Seikyu along with their sibling Kon, who is in fox form, where yokai have formed a settlement inspired by those of humans. The game’s demo gives access to the first few days as players get a brief introduction to the game’s characters, island, and systems. On the whole these days are all about giving the fox siblings a warm welcome, with hints of the larger goal being to find and attract more yokai (particularly foxes) to the island, with one somewhat suspicious plan involving the construction of a casino.
The general crafting, gathering, and farming systems are all there. Nothing about them seems particularly complicated nor overly time consuming, making it quite easy to just pick up and get into. It looks like there should be lots of different things to make and do, and there’s a decent amount of layering from raw materials to finished items that gives it necessary depth. Rather than giving players various tools for land manipulation and gathering, the game offers various forms to shapeshift into. Fox yokai are supposedly able to take on multiple different forms, with the player unlocking a boar form on the first day. The boar form is able to do the land tilling simply by “attacking” the land, and the same goes for collecting wood and stone from trees and rocks. The adventure combat is quite simple, giving players a regular attack combo, a jump attack, and a dodge.
The overall presentation is also quite pleasing, the art style and environments look nice, and are accompanied by pleasing music that makes spending time in the world an enjoyable experience. With the game planned to release on Steam Early Access later this year, farming sim fans will likely find this one worth keeping an eye on. — Alex Fuller
Maliki: Poison of the Past
Ankama Games and Blue Banshee’s Maliki: Poison of the Past takes players on a time-warping adventure with turn-based combat. Players control Sand, who is summoned from a near-future world that suddenly comes under attack from hostile creatures. They are transported to the Domaine, a haven outside of time guarded by the Thousand-Root Tree, where Maliki is spearheading an attempt to stop the fearsome plant monster Poison, altering the space-time continuum and destroying humanity. Using the power of the Domaine, players venture into the time-frozen locations to defeat the threat of Poison and its minions.
Ahead of the game’s launch in April, the demo offers a look at the game’s first hour or so. Exploration is fairly standard, with a few small puzzles that involve time-manipulation elements such as pushing a floating log forward in time so players can cross a river. The basics of turn-based combat is along the lines that many would expect with individual character turns indicated on a timeline and the usual options of attacking, skills, dodging, and item use. The combat’s distinct element is the ability to “slide” time, using points that are gained slowly during combat or more quickly by sacrificing a turn. Moving a party member back in time allows them to restore health and skill points, the latter of which comes in especially handy. However, this also impacts the turn order and can see both the player and an enemy’s turn occur at the same time. When this happens, players have a limited time to either block or take the attack but counter it. It adds an interesting twist that helps give the game an important touch of depth.
While the music has been strong in all of the demos I’ve played, Maliki: Poison of the Past has the best of the lot with great environmental and combat themes. The game’s graphical style is also perhaps the nicest, with some great comic styling to its artwork and somewhat chibi character models that complement the artwork well. There are some light farming elements that combine with a cooking system for restorative and buffing items. The demo shows a game with a lot of promise and should give players plenty of enjoyment when it launches. — Alex Fuller
Kabuto Park
Sometimes a good RPG comes in a smaller size. Kabuto Park shapes up to be a shorter experience around the theme of catching bugs. The game is built around two main mechanics: Catching insects and combat.
Catching is very straightforward: players go to a location and have initially two chances to capture a bug. A bar zooming from left to right and players have to stop it either in the green area to capture the bug, or blue zones to get another chance with easier areas. Once the bug is caught you see how large your bug is, with larger bugs being closer to the maximum stats of that particular insect. Once all the chances to catch a bug are spent you have to choose if you want to keep them for your team or want to turn them into upgrade material for your other bugs.
But what to do with the bugs caught? Send them into battle. Battle has one goal: push the enemy team of three off the battle arena with your three bugs. The game decides how combat will end in two ways. On one hand, insects have offensive, defensive, and speed stats that determines how well they do. On the other hand, every bug also has three cards, with three random selected from the nine combined into in the player’s hand. Cards are activated by spending a gradually increasing resource. While simple, this addition makes for engaing combat as players can pull off clutch saves from certain defeat and crushing victories if played well.
All in all, Kabuto Park is a game that focuses on a strong combat system, but is currently very barebones when it comes to any worldbuilding. As such, it will likely be more a game for those in-between larger titles to be dazzled by its charm for a while, even if it doesn’t even up being something one can expect to put a lot of time into. — Benedikt Geierhofer
Twilight Monk
As someone that grew up with the Game Boy Advance Castlevania titles, I am always on the search for a title that recaptures the feelings that I have for that series, and Twilight Monk might be it. While definitely different from those titles, Twilight Monk gave me enough things to like to be looking forward to its release.
The game reminded me a lot of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia’s fractured map design; every location visited is a small sub area instead of everything being one giant map. While concerned about it at the start, I found that most dungeons are large enough to make them still feel worthwhile and interesting to explore. It even has a world map to walk around in and get drawn into combat.
Combat is a mix of many different things. There are Zelda-style Hearts, a weapon with the range of a Castlevania whip, and a Hollow Knight-style amulet system to customize one’s playstyle. Level up doesn’t impact health, only increasing weapon damage. So playing skillfully is always important, but those struggling can make things easier with a little grinding, and I found myself doing that at multiple points, if mostly due to wanting to explore more than needed to progress. At the end I felt sad that the demo didn’t go further, even if the amount of content the demo provided gave me five hours of fun exploring, which is testament to a strong title that happily launches very soon. — Benedikt Geierhofer
Dice ‘n Goblins
Dice ‘n Goblins combines classic dungeon crawling with chance-based dice combat. Players are a small goblin having to explore a giant dungeon to help their tribe find a new home.
While simple from a story perspective, a lot is going on in this game’s combat. Battles revolve around picking different dice and rerolling them when needed. Players are able to equip a certain number of gear, be it weapons, shields, or potions, giving damage, defense, or healing dice respectively. Picking the right dice can make combat easy for otherwise gruelingly hard. In addition to having a dice value, gear also has additional abilities to complicate things. Certain combos of dice values can give bonuses to stats or add additional abilities like poison. However, the same holds true for enemies, with specific enemies having specific abilities. Sometimes players face enemies having incredible damage values or heal themselves. How to get around it? By rerolling. Every time players don’t reroll they gain a star, and these stars can be used on other turns to reroll the dice twice. Managing stars is critical for the combat, balancing limited resources with the opportunity to turn a dire situation in a crushing counterattack.
All these systems click into place nicely and make the combat system far more challenging and engaging than one would assume. The combat evolves as player fight more enemies and gain experience, with each level up granting more abilities to tweak the rolls in combat further, trade in dice for different types, or gain more stars.
Thus, the game rewards players as they explore the maze-like structure of the game’s world, finding new gear and enemies to fight. The game also has traps, though the demo only showed pitfalls. These are used in a lot of ways and are sometimes required to progress, sometimes leading players to treasure or sometimes deadly. Death is not to be joked with as it sends players back to the last heal point, which might be far back. All in all, Dice ‘n Goblins is a game I look forward to seeing the full release and worth checking out. — Benedikt Geierhofer
Metal Hunter
We end with a somewhat different title to the rest. Metal Hunter was a game I wanted to like but had issues with. Metal Hunter is heavily inspired by the Metal Max JRPG series. Anyone that remembers and loves the series could easily find joy in this; however, there are some grave issues. The biggest issues are two-fold:
- The game’s current use of official Metal Max music.
- Its buggy nature, especially around its UI and translation, makes it easy to walk into soft locks.
On the first issue, the developers have stated that the music is a placeholder, so should be readily resolved, but it is still, as of the current demo, problematic. The second issue is a bit deeper and stems from core systems that will require much more polish to undo. According to the developers, the game will be free, so hopefully these issues can be circumvented, but that remains to be seen.
On the game front, it’s quite interesting. Like Metal Max, vehicles change up the gameplay from the on-foot sections, giving access to powerful yet clunky beasts of destruction. Players can use vehicles to terrorize enemies with rocket launchers or flamethrowers, but they’re balanced by themselves being incapable of traversing all terrain. Vehicles also don’t level as the player character does, so players are required to optimize their vehicles with augmentations and strategizing which upgrades or loadouts work best for their combat encounters. Overall, I look forward to seeing more of the game, and hope the developers are able to move past its current issues. — Benedikt Geierhofer
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