Shiara's Streaming Soliloquy: Difference between revisions
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! scope="col" | Notes | ! scope="col" | Notes | ||
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| || 2025-10-25 - Ongoing || Demos (mostly on weekends) || https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHtV_atSwR-mUftBh0sg3Lkaycfx1E2K5 || | | || 2025-10-25 - Ongoing || Demos (mostly on weekends) || https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHtV_atSwR-mUftBh0sg3Lkaycfx1E2K5 || 8 || 49 || See below for itemized Demos list. Deaths accurate as of 2025-11-23. | ||
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| || 2025-10-12 - 2025-10-19 || Demos (Steam Next Fest Aug 2025) || https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHtV_atSwR-mUftBh0sg3Lkaycfx1E2K5 || 8 || 8 || See below for itemized Demos list. | | || 2025-10-12 - 2025-10-19 || Demos (Steam Next Fest Aug 2025) || https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHtV_atSwR-mUftBh0sg3Lkaycfx1E2K5 || 8 || 8 || See below for itemized Demos list. | ||
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| 202 || 2025-11-23 || [https://store.steampowered.com/app/4028070/ Crazy Roads] || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhsLQoTQYis || 1 || 0 || 3 || The demo was apparently just one road with no opportunity to upgrade anything and no distance tracking either, both things the game will supposedly eventually have. Even what the demo had was buggy, we would randomly lose the multiplier for no reason and a road bugged out and left us floating in midair until we emptied our fuel. | |||
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| 201 || 2025-11-23 || [https://store.steampowered.com/app/4053750/ Irezumi Defenders] || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcxl65FHElo || 1 || 0 || 4.5 || The demo was rough with multiple bugs to do with the invaders not being able to destroy the base, the workers not properly processing things, stacking not being handled well, etc. The idea was interesting but there's far too much busywork to do and having a card limit and a timer on top of everything was a bit over the top. | |||
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| 200 || 2025-11-23 || [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2957350/ Cyberpunk Inquisitor] || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgLDi4DjPgg || 1 || 0 || 7 || I like this concept and felt it worked quite well, except once I understood what was happening the levels were quite simple. But this was just a demo of the earlier levels after all, and whether the game will be great or not depends on how creative the future levels are. The diaries and loot that we got felt samey even by halfway through the second level. It also seemed to lack a way to arrest the perpetrator early, even when I knew who it was and what the murder weapon was, which caused a couple other citizens to get murdered. | |||
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| 199 || 2025-11-22 || [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3565830/ Under Par Golf Architect] || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn39tqbyGko || 1 || 0 || 6 || I like the golf management aspect of it but there seem to be a lot of systems not really fleshed out yet. My playing a hole made the course really backed up and everyone was angry until I closed the gates and started letting people trickle out slowly to raise happiness. Golfers bugged out if the course goes through an out of bounds area. The employee management was pretty horrid and needs an overhaul to tell what areas are covered by who. The SimGolf vibes were nice, though. | | 199 || 2025-11-22 || [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3565830/ Under Par Golf Architect] || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn39tqbyGko || 1 || 0 || 6 || I like the golf management aspect of it but there seem to be a lot of systems not really fleshed out yet. My playing a hole made the course really backed up and everyone was angry until I closed the gates and started letting people trickle out slowly to raise happiness. Golfers bugged out if the course goes through an out of bounds area. The employee management was pretty horrid and needs an overhaul to tell what areas are covered by who. The SimGolf vibes were nice, though. | ||
Revision as of 20:30, 23 November 2025
Shiara streams as dizzypixie at https://www.twitch.tv/dizzypixie/ every day from 6pm-9pm MST, more or less. She tries to complete games that she starts on stream. She suggests you download the video-swap-new userscript from here (it also requires something like Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey or some other similar primate) to block her stream's ads.
Fragments of other games that have featured on the channel in the very distant past but were not recorded (or she doesn't care to share the VODs) include ArcheAge, Cultist Simulator, DARK SOULS™: Prepare To Die™ Edition, Fast Acting Microbes, Guild Wars 2, inFamous First Light, Little Busters! English Edition, Scrolls, SKEAL, and The Lord of the Rings Online.
There's also a Miscellaneous Playlist for the VoDs of other games that she has played that aren't story games and so don't have a start or end, or were too short to have their own dedicated playlist. It's located here. (# of Total Deaths in here: 4)
---
This last list is a separated Demos list for games that I played during the Demos sections in the above table. (The Demos master playlist on YouTube is here.) Afterhours means streams that I did offline and then uploaded onto YouTube. Note that I am scoring the games below based on the specific demo version that I played, and I only play demos of games whose full versions had not launched yet when I tried them. Some were in alpha, some were in beta. Some were still tech demos. It is not at all necessarily indicative of the full game.
| # | Dates | Game | Youtube Link | # of Streams | # of Stream Deaths | Score (/10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 202 | 2025-11-23 | Crazy Roads | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhsLQoTQYis | 1 | 0 | 3 | The demo was apparently just one road with no opportunity to upgrade anything and no distance tracking either, both things the game will supposedly eventually have. Even what the demo had was buggy, we would randomly lose the multiplier for no reason and a road bugged out and left us floating in midair until we emptied our fuel. |
| 201 | 2025-11-23 | Irezumi Defenders | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcxl65FHElo | 1 | 0 | 4.5 | The demo was rough with multiple bugs to do with the invaders not being able to destroy the base, the workers not properly processing things, stacking not being handled well, etc. The idea was interesting but there's far too much busywork to do and having a card limit and a timer on top of everything was a bit over the top. |
| 200 | 2025-11-23 | Cyberpunk Inquisitor | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgLDi4DjPgg | 1 | 0 | 7 | I like this concept and felt it worked quite well, except once I understood what was happening the levels were quite simple. But this was just a demo of the earlier levels after all, and whether the game will be great or not depends on how creative the future levels are. The diaries and loot that we got felt samey even by halfway through the second level. It also seemed to lack a way to arrest the perpetrator early, even when I knew who it was and what the murder weapon was, which caused a couple other citizens to get murdered. |
| 199 | 2025-11-22 | Under Par Golf Architect | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn39tqbyGko | 1 | 0 | 6 | I like the golf management aspect of it but there seem to be a lot of systems not really fleshed out yet. My playing a hole made the course really backed up and everyone was angry until I closed the gates and started letting people trickle out slowly to raise happiness. Golfers bugged out if the course goes through an out of bounds area. The employee management was pretty horrid and needs an overhaul to tell what areas are covered by who. The SimGolf vibes were nice, though. |
| 198 | 2025-11-22 | Blue Dynasty:Town Defense | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpO36doDjHw | 1 | 0 | 7 | I really liked this combination of genres. I liked being able to pick upgrades for my hero and turn him into someone who could then kite some of the enemies around so the troops and the towers would take out others first. The ability to rewind the clock to the start of the day is great too, since its very possible to accidentally start the next night. The game doesn't show where the enemies are coming from or currently are once the night is started, and that should be fixed. The main bad part of the game was the dungeon exploration, since ranged enemies (and allies) seem overpowered and I was often up against many at once in the dungeon without a good way of fighting back. |
| 197 | 2025-11-09 | Midnight Saturn | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZARXPH-ziw | 1 | 0 | 5 | Vaguely interesting plot, especially the ending, and the travel map looked really nice. The level maps themselves were small and weren't very interesting, and there were some weird combinations like the plastic piggy bank in the mechanical crab's mouth. The writing, art, and music were all inoffensive and decent but didn't really catch my attention. |
| 196 | 2025-11-09 | Elemental Flow | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2kkSA6AVCM | 1 | 0 | 7 | Interesting concept, reminded me a lot of Signs of the Sojourner, but with more of a story, since this is an RPG and that one was a roguelike. Loved the themes about travel, returning to the hometown after a long time away, and being confronted with changes in people and yourself. Mechanics were a little confusing here and there, you seemed to gain and keep XP even when you lose so it seemed like lots of xp could be farmed by failing, there was no continue button in most cases and you had to retry battles until you won even though the game suggested that failing a conversation is "normal". and the game would just progress. The game also soft locked near the end so we never finished it. |
| 195 | 2025-11-08 | The Secret of Weepstone | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQD_J5-NFE | 1 | 1 | 8 | Very fun, very stylish, good humour, good art, some slight bugs like the lever in the barracks claiming to be the armoury lever, but nothing game-breaking. The major problems with the game are D&D rule issues rather than game issues, like the ability to be one-shot, the extra terribleness of not winning the party initiative roll, the metric ton of xp needed to level up compared to how much xp you get, etc. The house mechanics to try to guard against this, like the party buffs you get when someone dies, are a great idea. I'd love a long campaign in this style. |
| 194 | 2025-11-08 | Abysm | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6MzHS7Y0T8 | 1 | 39 | 6.5 | Fun puzzle game, although the kill zone of the creatures seemed to be big and unforgiving, being killed one square away is one thing but sometimes it felt like I was two squares away and still died because we must have briefly brushed against the one square radius or something while one of us was transitioning between tiles. Also a lot of puzzles had to do with killing something in a specific spot, it could get annoying in later levels if you have to chain many of those together successfully. |
| 193 | 2025-11-08 | Petal Runner | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p4gdZA85yQ | 1 | 0 | 5 | The game is pretty, but the demo was too short and the minigames were too easy to be enthralling or to fall in love with the characters. The town area in the demo was also far too small. And fthe game crashed right at the end while I was trying to look for the handbook entries, when I clicked on what seemed to be an Untitled note in the journal area. |
| 192 | 2025-11-02 | Shutter Evidence | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzDvWhD3SMc | 1 | 0 | 3 | Very imprecise controls, would often hit objects that shouldn't be hittable, camera depth always felt a little off, invisible walls in places like the toilet cupboard, you'd take damage at weird things and sometimes even for landing on a weird surface, the perpetrator just walks in a set path and their scream is terrible, water in bathtub was treated as a solid surface, no explanation as to how a drone can loot keys (and what the keybind for it was -- we found it in the end though), no real hints as to what to look for, and the camera made me dizzy after less than half an hour. |
| 191 | 2025-11-02 | Bots & Mods | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj98RTVoH04 | 1 | 0 | 5 | The game felt kind of empty, with weird unbalanced systems that didn't mesh well, like upgrade tokens needed for food to lower depression, which seems to make it possible to get softlocked. And depression is an interesting but weirdly named mechanic since it prevents some crafting but not all, and it kind of makes light of depression as a problem since it doesn't seem to attempt to actually reflect that in an in-character sort of way. The spills in the shop were far too common and annoying. Fights somehow didn't raise rep for the person you helped. Reputation did nothing anyway though. The graphics were pretty but the camera style with blocks that could overlap other blocks was not nice. |
| 190 | 2025-11-02 | Manic Pixie Dreamgirls | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6HQr7LQqOY | 1 | 0 | 7 | I liked this story, although its bad ends were a little abrupt, I have seen that sort of stuff before in traditional gamebooks though. Being a visual novel, I'd expect a way to check text scrollback, although there was at least a button that would rewind you to the last story choice. Well actually, when I tried it it rewinded me to the start of the story after my last choice, which makes it a little less useful. I believe it was also missing a way to use the keyboard to proceed. There were lots of typoes too. |
| 189 | 2025-11-01 | 3025 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_EUPTKIzVs | 1 | 0 | 5 | We see hints of the conspiracy through the demo but it doesn't actually show more than it being some hacker group trying to raise knowledge of the crimes taking place. The story could go great places, but the part of the story showcased in the demo felt too slow as it was locked behind playing the minigame too many times. The window also did not capture the mouse cursor so I was under constant risk of accidentally clicking outside the window and stopping OBS while trying to grab digits on the left side (for me) of the screen. |
| 188 | 2025-11-01 | Guide To Apocalypse | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EGLhdu4xUM | 1 | 7 | 6.5 | The game has lots of style and does several interesting things like genre and viewpoint changes, cutscenes with jumping cameras, the turning Kwanyin statue once you loot something, and so on. It also gives lots of ammo and resources, at least within the demo. The jumping camera during cutscenes can be polarizing too but I liked it. It suffers from slightly imprecise movements, unskippable cutscenes, and a crash near the end that wiped out my process. |
| 187 | 2025-10-26 | Inky's Sleep | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXspAnsDRSM | 1 | 0 | 6 | I did like the wordless narration bits, those were very cool. The puzzles were okay, nothing too difficult, though a good chunk of what was in the demo seemed to be maze-related. Everything was very linear, especially early on where walking from room to room seemed very busywork and there was no agency at all or anything to do in them. Also while I'm sure we will learn about more things later, things like the sentient ball of yarn made no narrative sense in the demo, though I guess it doesn't necessarily have to since this was a cat's dream. Or was it? |
| 186 | 2025-10-26 | Guilds of Greybrook | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIRWU-MHf88 | 1 | 0 | 4.5 | I like the concept, but the demo is unbalanced, especially once they ratcheted up the difficulty for no reason in the second week. Many of the quests were outright impossible with the heroes due to lack of time to train up. There's also a rather primitive feel to it, like all you ever get back from the quests is gold unless you equip a specific item that might net you another copy of an item you already have. Nothing like named magical or legendary items. Also there were a few bugs like having to pay someone who was already on their way out at the end of a week and so didn't even appear in the finances bit where you could choose to pay someone or not. And items still showing as being equipped even once the equipper had left. |
| 185 | 2025-10-26 | Train Station Project | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-u7WJTjQbc | 1 | 1 | 8 | This was lots of fun and there's quite a variety of things to do, though the main complaint would be there's almost far too much to do, with constant queues at the ticket shop and post office and who knows what else, and you're running the place by yourself. Assumedly you can hire people later on outside the demo though? What also mitigates this is that there's no real concept of time in the game, so there's no clock before the end of the day or any sort of time limit so far. There are lots of humourous interactions too. |
| 184 | 2025-10-25 | Midnight Mazesoba | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTsT9BrH8Hc | 1 | 0 | 5 | Uninspiring gameplay and cheap jump scare at the end, it wasn't terrible but there's still not much here. Price of decoration doubled between the end of Night 1 and Night 2 somehow. |
| 183 | 2025-10-25 | Dupery | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3GnaR04TOU | 1 | 0 | 7 | Like Demon Bluff and Blood on the Clock Tower, with a noir detective skin and jazz music and a time mechanic where things happen after 12 or 24 hours with certain roles on the board. Very fun, but some of the rules interacted weirdly with other rules, like a copycat mailman turned evil but I wrongly lost reputation for arresting them, and keywords and mechanics were not explained well enough in many cases. |
| 182 | 2025-10-25 | Carcerem | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7RK6dRb5KE | 1 | 1 | 6 | Most of the puzzles were okay but I feel like we missed something as I think we completed the demo with two identical keys (I think one respawned?) and might have missed a third unique key somewhere. The labyrinth itself also felt very samey, especially the second one which had a single minotaur chasing you around. But it wasn't too difficult. |
| 181 | 2025-10-19 | A Slice of Lunch | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAW3lpOpmDc | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | Short and cozy but buggy. Ending a cut partway through a food piece seemed to reset the cut but if the piece was too small then it just made the piece partially invisible instead. This invisibility/missing food glitch lasted past undos too. It was also very hard to select and drag particularly small slices of food because the hand cursor interact location was on the top left part of the hand instead of the middle. Also the game lacked shortcut keys for the different tools, which made it annoying to constantly switch back and forth, and it would never let you overlap other items or the edges of the box even when trying to rotate them, which meant that to do a small adjustment in the bento box often necessitated removing the object entirely, rotating it back in the plate area, and then moving it back in again and hoping it fit this time. The comic at the start was very cute. |
| 180 | 2025-10-19 | Xenomycology | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgHL-wKBOPs | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | The idea is interesting but the demo was quite short and lacked meaningful tutorials. I didn't really understand that each room has its own water economy, and that the water mushrooms only gathered water from pools on the ground until near the very end of the demo. It also made no sense that enemies would come in to try to destroy fungi, sent heliocopters and tanks in, and yet could only attack the first mushroom it saw each time. |
| 179 | 2025-10-19 | Wonder Warp | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qw8PrMVv4w | 1 | 6 | 5 | I'm not good at Pacman in general so I don't know if it's good gameplay or not, I always felt like I missed a lot of corner turns due to the character trying to turn one square before she was supposed to though. I did like the story and the workplace humour, but I didn't like that the options menu was so hidden away -- the game started in the tiniest of screens and to change that I had to load past the intro cutscenes, and then walk around the office and figure out which room was the Settings room (top right one) and only then could I change the resolution to fullscreen. Also the music was a bit jarring after a bit. |
| 178 | 2025-10-19 | Origament: A Paper Adventure | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ntYFJebyM | 1 | 0 | 6 | It was neat and cozy, but very linear in the end. There are coins along the way but at least one coin during the minecart chase scene (which was very unique) was a reaction time thing right before a checkpoint, so if you miss it you have to redo the entire chapter to get back to it again. No major flaws though and the music and art was nice. |
| 177 | 2025-10-19 | Heat 'n Hit: The Blacksmith Simulator | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUQalzIMP8E | 1 | 0 | 4 | The blacksmithing part was very bland, sourcing resources just involving buying them from a market, you'd lose rep for pointless things like not taking on a job fast enough while you were doing another job, the Caffeine (cat?) quest didn't work, the guild hall is somehow inside and above the tavern which only opens at night, and the whole game glitched out once. The music was nice though and the turtle was cute, and the roadmap also looked promising enough. |
| 176 | 2025-10-18 | Truckful | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eH0qpGcqYs | 1 | 0 | 5 | It played okay, but felt very silly in the end. Both the premise of you being stuck in your cab, and the fact that the girl can't hold on to anything or help you balance things in the back despite it being her packages to deliver. It also was not clear early on that I had to turn around to continue on my way to the repair shop. The truck chase was weird too, after the first 5-10 seconds I was so far ahead that I never saw the truck again? |
| 175 | 2025-10-18 | Destiny Spire | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inGO-9kZmJM | 1 | 0 | 7 | I dislike the control scheme and not being able to see the opponent health bars and I swear that lowering the enemy spawn rate does not actually work. But besides that, I quite liked the game visuals and sound and puzzles and what there was of the story, minus some confusion with NPC text not updating initially and making me think there was something else to search for when there wasn't. The ATB combat is fine if you are on level with the enemies, but definitely can feel frustrating if you're fighting someone more powerful. I'd like an auto-resolve battle option. |
| 174 | 2025-10-17 | Taste of the Wind / 醉风酒 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9EqP5iTnG8 | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | Despite some translation issues, and text often dropping outside of the text box and requiring opening the full log to read, and some murkiness around the store mechanics itself, I really enjoyed this game. It seemed to have a lot of story, fun characters, great art and music, lots of world-building lore, and many little funny moments. There didn't seem to be a lot of random events/minigames during opening hours though because those seemed to repeat fairly quickly, not sure if there are seasonal/other staff related ones or not. |
| 173 | 2025-10-16 | Train Station Simulator: Together in Japan | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN76Spy5b0U | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | The game idea is solid, but there just isn't anything meaningful to do. Turning the ticket machine and dragging cleaning balls to the trash over and over is not gameplay. The limiting factor was the people spawning and coming to the station, and they were janky and very slow. You unlock the wooden hammer on day 2 (that's the only thing that unlocks that day) but can't use it until day 4. You can somehow ride the train and sometimes walk through its walls in and out, and it takes you to the game border and then you phase out of it. There were never any visitors to buy my tea from day 5. |
| 172 | 2025-10-16 | OPUS: Prism Peak | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UWNwOaZBL0 | 1 | 0 | 7 | This was very nice, with high production value, and I like where they're going with the game story. The voices were great too. I wish the main character walked a little faster. Especially in the dream scene with no one else around. My second photo of the dog overrode the first photo entirely and it didn't even go into the "Old Photos" folder, which I thought was weird. How to get seeds was not explained at all, but then this was a demo that showcased a vertical slice from the middle of the game. |
| 171 | 2025-10-16 | Dorothy's Job | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_MxvOYdUFs | 1 | 0 | 6 | This was quite fun, though I can see that it will get very frantic when you have more than two tools. I wish they used a 1-2-3 system to swap between tools instead of pressing Shift each time. The dialogue banter was funny, especially the demo-specific stuff at the start, but it was a little unnecessarily long between levels. It was hard to see the two different shades of green on the minimap. |
| 170 | 2025-10-16 | Exodus of Descent | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbAbWH0s4SU | 1 | 1 | 4 | The idea seems interesting but the demo was buggy, we ended up in a state where we could not attack or dodge. Having a button on the escape menu that immediately abandons the mission and sends you right back to base is weird too. The inventory system, where you can hold five items of each type, is also weird. Invisible walls where I could see monsters but could not shoot them is likewise weird. There was no bow shooting animation either. |
| 169 | 2025-10-15 | The House Dreams Along With Them | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9BGLymPJdo | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | It felt a bit janky in places, especially in the jumping living room zone, and the flashlight not being strong enough to give you information on where to go next and that being part of the puzzle is a weird trope, but the garage puzzle was cool and we also found that bowling ball thing under a tree as a secret, which was neat too and hints at other secrets around the place. Intertwined puzzles is super cool and I liked what little narration there was as well as the presence of an unknown language that could be decoded too. The delayed main menu after the tutorial was cool but not everyone will appreciate that. The load screen had an extra save game that did not work, and crashed the game twice. There were also a couple of doors in the living room zone that just "ended" the run as well for some reason. |
| 168 | 2025-10-14 | Pencil Stories | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gJI_2mbARE | 1 | 0 | 5 | Simplistic and short demo but I appreciated that the game page told me exactly how long the demo would be, and I enjoyed the art. I'm probably not the target audience for the game mechanics, but I can appreciate it as a work of art. It seemed like I could walk down a bit too far "off the visible screen" here and there. I liked that both mouse and keyboard controls worked and that the game adapted to that, and also how the area lit up as you walked around. |
| 167 | 2025-10-14 | Wall World 2 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOxJicUqDNw | 1 | 0 | 5 | Interesting concept but seemed like it would get monotonous after a while. Strongly dislike how you lose all upgrades and relics after a quest and just get the dust currency for it. That doesn't make sense anyway, if you didn't bring it back why do you get dust for it? If you do, why don't you get to keep it? And if they're too heavy to bring back, why can I buy permanent upgrades back in town? Wouldn't those be too heavy too? And I also worry that the player would run out of things to buy with dust currency halfway through the game. The busywork of walking between the workshop, armoury, and tavern was kind of annoying too. Also the extraction can be cancelled if you're out of the zone for too long but there didn't seem to be a UI showing the timer to cancellation. |
| 166 | 2025-10-14 | The Legend of Khiimori | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbDMD9dLojk | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | The game crashed an hour in, but I mostly liked it up until that point. There were some movement controls, and some mechanics like looting that were not explained and that I had to learn, but all those could be chalked up to the equivalent of learning your character's job and capabilities too. Horse and player control and animations were great, horse sometimes would not really obey you but I think that's intended. Main character spoke what I am guessing was Mongolian most of the time but sometimes went into English, which was weird. I really like the demo countdown timer, though I wish they put that on the Steam page. I also really liked that it stopped in menus. |
| 165 | 2025-10-13 | A Song Of Sunlight | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjJzZaCXcQ | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | The story and characters were really neat, but far too long and wordy. Except for a short training segment, we didn't even get to the night/combat section in 1.5 hours! Despite skipping a number of side quests! The rhythm-based combat segment did seem interesting but something that would take some getting used to. |
| 164 | 2025-10-13 | Nighthawks | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl35mSeTblI | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I like Wadjet Games a lot, but for a VN that Kickstarted back in September 2018 running this demo's contest as a preview back then, it still had one broken dialogue path near the front of the game and a couple of typoes here and there. The phone UI also looked too confusing and clicking on the first tab sometimes did nothing. The time mechanic where every action took at least 1 minute was interesting, and the game's vibe and ambience in general is great, though. None of the starting choices besides the Sire really had an effect at all, Corpsetalking did nothing impactful in my demo experience for example. |
| 163 | 2025-10-12 | Love You to Bits | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUIigcGk14o | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Neat game, reminded me of Machinarium, I very much liked how all the puzzles were bite-sized and how the game used a show, don't tell method to display its narrative. We ran into multiple bugs where we just got stuck and had to restart the level because there were no "fail" animations for using an item while in a certain inventory state though, which is weird considering the game is already long complete on Android/iOS. |
| 162 | 2025-10-12 | My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All) ⭐ | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40mYr5RKm88 | 1 | 0 | 4 | While I like the game's concept in general and think that it could be very relaxing, the game definitely needs more diversity in garbage type and treasure and more bug-fixing. Invisible walls everywhere blocked throwing, the swimming pool was made of a fake water texture and jumping into it or throwing things into it did not make any splashes, the radio's AI song was funny but was an undisclosed use of AI, the dog was extremely buggy and kept on picking up treasure items for me nonstop, I could somehow pick up generic garbage through the barrier walls of the garbage piles that had not been unlocked yet, and my garbage bag eventually bugged out too and I could no longer pick up any items, soft locking the game. |
| 161 | 2025-10-12 | Sinking Eternity | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFL5LSWo5CE | 1 | 0 | 5 | The crafting/survival aspect and the UI menu design looked very simplistic, although the story potentially hints at something very interesting and the world is meant to be a lot bigger than the starting area that the very short demo allows us to explore. There wasn't much variety in the starting area, but we did see placeholders for a lot of other denizens of the deep to find. I almost worry the world will be too wide/deep though, for how simple of a design the starting area was, but we'll see! |
| 160 | 2025-10-12 | Abyss Kitchen / Naraku no Kitchen | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyQI1M5IGy8 | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | The game was cute and the concept is interesting enough but the controls were awkward, though I appreciated having several different targetting schemes to use. It still always felt like all of them were not ideal though. The demo itself was very short. How exactly I gathered those instant meals felt unclear and feeding them 10 each to trigger their skill also felt like busywork. I also didn't see a way to toggle between Attack Type and Support Type, and the game lacked a clear main menu and in fact I couldn't even start a game at all without using the controller as there was no kb/m option for it. Attacking also seemed pointless since it didn't seem like my party would ever lose a fight, it just takes time. Great main menu song. |
| 159 | 2025-10-12 | Regions of Ruin: Runegate | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TVkoYvPL-Q | 1 | 0 | 7 | More Regions of Ruin! The first game was fun enough, this one has base-building in a pocket dimension as well, which is a nice aesthetic. Some of the puzzles seem very obtuse, which is fine, the first game kind of was like that too. The UI was unclear in several places, but especially when upgrading the training hall, it never showed what items it used (nor why we needed to upgrade it). Omed the Demo Demon at the end of th edemo was amazing demo-specific content. |
| 158 | 2025-09-29 | Philna Fantasy - 菲尔纳传说 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jKl6Y7IJH0 | 1 | 0 | 5 | Love the concept and art, but the game combat and the monsters itself was very basic, like it was a first time developer's game, and the colliders were all wrong in many places. But then suddenly there was a King Bee boss fight and that fight was actually really good. And there were lots of poor and incomplete translations through the game, but sometimes you'd find some really well-written descriptions too. It's like two very different people worked on different parts of the game. The art and music were fairly nice too. |
| 157 | 2025-09-29 | Bob Saves the Princess | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se5LMQAntTY | 1 | 0 | 5 | The idea of a control panel being able to rearrange the rooms of a dungeon and guiding an adventurer down that way from inside a dungeon is great, very much inspired by Dungeon no Naka no Hito. The implementation, with the weird scrolling in and out, jumping between TV screens, and there being not enough time to process all the information and treasure and summons and gear combination and other things, was not so nice. I had no idea what the rooms did, what the random rolls between levels were for, sometimes I couldn't tell which room was the boss room, the item shop reroll counter was buggy, and the game itself hard crashed at the end. |
| 156 | 2025-09-28 | KIYO - Bunny Tyranny | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1AWDpOipps | 1 | 13 | 7 | I liked the story, the characters, the art, and the ambience of the game. The stealth platformer portion felt awkward to me though, with it being a mystery why I was being attacked sometimes, and I felt it was janky in general. Not all the time though, just occasionally. And things like the game not being clear on what the ninja % was initially, and whether killing more guards or less guards was a good thing. I did appreciate a few cool QoL things that the game did have, like the way it handled auto advancing dialogue was very well done. And that starting animation on boot up where the game took a snapshot of your monitor screen and turned that into pixels before the owl appeared was chef's kiss. |
| 155 | 2025-09-28 | 东方异域见闻 ~ Touhou Dystopian | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8czi9PUNxE | 1 | 9 | 7 | The game was fine and most controls were clean and easy to use, though there just wasn't a lot of depth in what I played of the demo, in terms of skills and cards etc. Characters were fine, music was fine, bosses were mildly difficult and involved learning their patterns. I never figured out how to cast my Noble Phantasm though. Nor whether the ghost currency increments or not. I did like the ghost unlocks though, especially the voice activated stuff, which while it didn't work perfectly, was still a cool feature to try. Game needs QoL and a bunch of tooltips. |
| 154 | 2025-09-27 | Dancing with Ghosts | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pea5m1gVy1s | 1 | 0 | 6 | I like games about dealing with grief, but the game sort of skipped that part of the backstory, though it tried to display it in how it makes the character unable to perform her best in dances. It still felt like it was missing a layer of sentimentality though, at least in how far of the demo I got. One of the early karma-gated stars did not unlock even when I had more than enough karma. I had to go get even more karma before it would take some. The art and especially the character animations are very, very nice. The voices for the main girl and the ghost girl and the bullies are miscasted though, they're far too American and it's very jarring, especially since the grandpa is not miscasted and sounds very Asian. The camera also jumped around a bit too much when zooming a couple of times. |
| 153 | 2025-09-27 | The Dungeon Experience | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPbWMPTM1J8 | 1 | 0 | 6 | The game was okay, it had some funny bits and very unique dialogue and stuff but sometimes the humour also just didn't land, and other times it was awkward and dirty in an adult humour sort of way that I did not like, like the bit about pushing the nipples. That hurt its final score a lot. This however could be a game that I like a ton if the final story veers into crab depression and/or descent into insanity themes. |
| 152 | 2025-09-27 | Nova Antarctica | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yndn3yjFi24 | 1 | 1 | 4 | While the core concepts seem interesting, the demo was a weird survival crafting thing without the narration and open world that the Steam page showed. And it was extremely buggy in places and had poor tutorial tooltips in others. We could hug a penguin and carry it around though, that alone gave it a full bonus point in my final score. |
| 151 | 2025-09-27 | Death By Misstep | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_bJnaoP9V8 | 1 | 7 | 5.5 | It works well enough, but I found myself mostly staring at the breathing rhythm timer in the middle of the screen instead of the game itself behind it. I could still mechanically play the game and navigate just fine, but it kind of defeats the purpose of designing the game and having pretty visuals and everything. A big negative was being forced into stealth in some segments and unable to manually unstealth and run away to safety if you were seen. |
| 150 | 2025-09-26 | Q-UP | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEYhImbCl-c | 1 | 0 | 8.5 | Very fun demo. Hilarious tongue-in-cheek narrative writing, with an absurd core concept surrounded by interesting Balatro-flavoured mechanics, just looser and with weird unlocks over time. And the lack of a lose condition in the overall game was a good idea as well, as you aren't just forced to restart if you fail to meet an arbitrary checkpoint. Over the top features like Steam friend integration and even co-op invites were there for seemingly no other purpose than to parody a real E-Sports MOBA type game, and I admire that they stuck to the bit and coded all that in. The demo took me to Gold 3 and that took me about an hour knowing nothing about the game but understanding basic Balatro score x multiplier mechanics, and I enjoyed it very much. My main worries were firstly that the items in the shop seemed kind of uninspired, not bad per se but most were one-dimensional compared to the rest of the game being so zany, and secondly that I climbed the ranks so fast that I worried about how much game content there would be. Those were early ranks though, and it's a matter of trusting the devs and the story they wish to tell. |
| 149 | 2925-09-26 | Touhou Random Tower Defense | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN7AKeA_qtw | 1 | 0 | 3 | The tower defence and combining part worked fine, and it was easy enough to understand, and I'd say the way the tower defence was just dolls circling the field was actually kind of unique too, but other than that there wasn't much of a game here. Nice music, but zero narration or character interaction, and zero plot or progression, just one map in the demo. It was also hard to pick up and move characters. |
| 148 | 2925-09-26 | Deadline Escape | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BobMuggRZ9g | 1 | 2 | 6.5 | It's a serviceable extraction shooter, although with several NPCs and features locked down in the base it didn't feel like we saw a lot of the game even after 4 or 5 runs. Quest system felt like a very early prototype too and the main quest seemed to disappear after two quests. Jumping system felt very weak, inability to jump over waist-high fences and stuff seemed weird. Other than that, it borrowed a lot from other extraction games and was fine in general! Gun magazine reloading bugged out at one point, and a dropped backpack disappeared at another point. |
| 147 | 2025-09-25 | Fantasy Maiden Wars - DREAM OF THE STRAY DREAMER - | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDA2m3DzwRE | 1 | 0 | 7 | Touhou SRPG that apparently follows the Super Robot Wars formula, with a lengthy story section and then a fight section that often involves killing enemies on their turn in retaliation attacks. There were a couple of small typos but it was acceptable for the amount of text that we saw in that time. The biggest drawback of the game is that the resolution of the game is very small and there were no audio or video options that can be adjusted. |
| 146 | 2025-09-25 | Bladesong | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3H3iZycA0c | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | Well-written story and interesting gameplay within the demo, though I'm not sure if the sword making part would get samey later or not. The crafting jobs came from people with long stories and short stories, and even after 3-4 days in we had already seen some of the short stories repeat under an NPC with a different name, even when we completed the quest for them. The "sharpness" and cross-section stuff was a little bit harder than it needed to be to understand at first too, though I eventually got it. |
| 145 | 2025-09-24 | Finding Your Way | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX8Dyb1Yb-o | 1 | 0 | 8 | This game was very cool. I liked the concept, and the ambience of the city nightscape level in particular. Just when using the first splash weapon was starting to get tiring, they even introduced a different splash weapon to make the lighting up part easier. The puzzles were a bit simple but that's probably good, the boss fight was a nice surprise though. They even had a level editor in the demo. The colours in transition phases were far too kaleidoscopic at times though and will definitely cause epileptic issues with some people. It would be really cool to be able to go back and get a birds eye screenshot view or something of a level once you're done with it. Maybe from a couple of well-placed preset vantage points from each zone that can see most of the zone and the colours you applied to it. |
| 144 | 2025-09-24 | Creator Chronicles | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvGiMmHp0f0 | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I very much like the concept, though it felt like it had rough edges.The initial unlocks maybe could stand to be a bit lower, and guild members losing levels and leaving the guild when dying felt a bit weird, though at least they eventually returned afterwards. I did really like the rolling for loot aspect. Either priests or warriors seemed underpowered, and my paladin wouldn't tank at all, but druid turned out to be a strong tank? Building placements hiding other building behind seemed weird, but that probably improves once more land is unlocked. Some translation and writing issues for sure. It needs streamlining and QoL but might be an excellent game eventually. |
| 143 | 2025-09-23 | Dynasthir | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgI0DA_4xU | 1 | 4 | 4.5 | The game was pretty, but the writing felt very loose though I liked the way they presented it, everything was a little too dark, physics was wonky as heck, some friendlies could be attacked but wouldn't react, whereas others couldn't be attacked at all, the first town itself seemed to be missing a rest point, the camera would wildly gyrate at times, several controls were not shown in the controls menu, fighting felt awkward, skills weren't mentioned or weren't fully implemented, the bloodlines tree was weak as most of the nodes only gave stat bonuses, and many other little issues. Could be fun once polished though. I still liked it enough to spend ~2h on it. |
| 142 | 2025-09-23 | Lands of XON | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihGGhtmhisY | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | I very much like the "show, don't tell" philosophy, and letting the players figure out the rules of the land. There were a couple of aha moments in there that were well-earned, I thought. It was pretty as well, and gave megastructure vibes even though we weren't walking around in one. It looked kind of simplistic at first but I very much underestimated it, which is a great feeling. I very much liked seeing the interconnected puzzles even if we couldn't reach them in the demo. The very end of the demo, with the platform leading up to the purple seed, bugged out though. And it was lacking music and menu polish. |
| 141 | 2025-09-22 | Million Depth | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaCPDmchi8w | 1 | 1 | 7 | I like the story and the weapon-building part of the game, although I worry that the former might be repetitive after a bit and the latter might devolve into one or two metas. Some relics seemed very useless, like the grace healing one. We did eventually get stuck into a loop of starting a fight with 1 health and being unable to complete it even with retries, which is fine for that run but encourages suicide if you get hit a few times in a battle just so you can try it again and try to lose less health. The vibes and art and music were great. The mouse/keybinds were not, especially in menus. I like the bouncing mechanic in combat. It seemed sometimes I wouldn't get hit when I thought I should have gotten hit and I was not really sure why. |
| 140 | 2025-09-22 | Ashfield Hollow | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7riGVb9zmmw | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | While the demo was obviously an early build, I like what they are trying to do with it, with a farming and town relationships portion like Stardew Valley and then a scavenging and looting portion like Project Zomboid, and apparently eventually an extraction looter thing at endgame too. Love the combination of genres. The demo was barebones, several NPCs didn't speak at all, loot was sameish, town food didn't heal much, doors on buildings didn't make sense, very few interactibles and crafting recipes, etc. Dying should heal you to half food and thirst so you don't immediately start dying again. Time progressed too quickly and the demo was too short, we barely found the town map before it ended. A lot of QoL and keybinds need to be implemented still and the sound and music needs a normalization balance. |
| 139 | 2025-09-21 | Alabaster Dawn | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXAmpqxm5ik | 1 | 0 | 9 | I love almost everything about the game, but I'm biased since I really liked CrossCode too. The action felt fluid, the movement around the map felt fluid, the story seems interesting, the puzzle dungeons seemed to be more of CrossCode. The only thing I'm unsure if I will like is how you swap both weapons at once, across all the elements at once. That seems like it will be a lot to mentally keep track of, especially once we get more weapons, and especially since they all have their own set of skill triggers too (although all the triggers seem identical across the weapons so far). |
| 138 | 2025-09-20 | After School Afterlife | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvpvWP4w1RU | 1 | 0 | 8 | I'm bad at platformers, but I had fun with this one, which was full of humour (and I understood and liked the Singaporean references sprinkled through it, which helped). The beaver minigame changing its rules, the noodle minigame for falling off the platforms twice, the old man and the jumping puzzle, the ghost dog, the mahjong fight where you made your own platforms through rhythm, they were all super memorable. The music was excellent too. References to Singapore-specific things like PSLE needed to be explained better. |
| 137 | 2025-09-20 | Bad Heroes | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BymOKf8kExU | 1 | 2 | 3.5 | It was pretty and the art was fun, but I did not like the writing, which was immature in places, and which tried to force through the romance aspect far too heavy-handedly, I felt. The beat-em-up segment was also very poor, with it being very hard to tell what the depth of the character on the screen was because the character is the same size in all situations and there's no shadow underneath of them. The steam grates hitting me when I was visually above it but actually on the other side of the street from it made zero sense too. I essentially beat the second boss by body-blocking it and partially bugging it out. And the menu buttons were misaligned. |
| 136 | 2025-09-20 | THE LIFT: Supernatural Handyman Simulator | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvpvWP4w1RU | 1 | 0 | 7 | I liked tinkering around with all the various machines and solving all the Pipe Dream machines, and I also really liked being able to drag back furniture into your Elevator area and basically furnishing it with junk. But I thought the inventory controls and the way you take out/put away items was awkward, especially the fact that there's a separate "item in hand" state from "using item" state. And boxes never really fit on shelves properly. Also the game seems to have a bit of motion blur even when motion blur was off. |
| 135 | 2025-09-19 | Magic Forge Tycoon | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIT1du3Ja5Q | 1 | 0 | 6 | The game loop is fairly fun, although the demo never got far enough for the political part of the game to matter. Some of the earlier forced tutorial stuff felt off, like it never asked me to make maces so I made a bunch of bows, and later the first compulsary tutorial quest was for maces, and I couldn't complete it without going back and crafting more so I lost out on another bow quest that I could have taken and sold my bows at. It was unclear at first that the sell price to the guild was for all of the item stack, whereas the sell price at the markets was per item in the item stack. During crafting, there are berry bushes below the forge that if you are clicking on them when the next phase screen pops up, it will activate the button to start the next phase and you will miss the ability to adjust those sliders. And there was an immature fart joke. And the dev studio was advertising two other games that they had in development/playtesting at the same time on the main menu. Small dev + many games at once tends to = asset flip/reuse. |
| 134 | 2025-09-19 | Survival Era | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqWaDiCD8V4 | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I like the concept of the game, though I feel like the autobattler part is a bit weak and it would be better to somehow be able to arrange your troops a bit. But it's not a big deal in the end. Dragging and dropping felt a bit weird too, like sometimes I missed combining things because I didn't drop them close enough on top of each other or something. The roguelite segment was not in the demo at all (besides gaining resources for it) and if that scales well then the game could be pretty great. Otherwise it could feel grindy. Hard to say. The music was repetitive, the UI was plain, and a couple of translations were missed. |
| 133 | 2025-09-14 | Space Foodie | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpNpL34m16M | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I like that there's a lot to unlock and do in the game, that part (especially the talent/exploration trees) seemed very interesting. The game was plagued with localization mistakes, text that overflowed text boxes and became unreadable, some untranslated bits, and things like that, but the game looked like it had a lot of potential as long as there's many ways to unlock stuff to be more efficient when cooking and serving. |
| 132 | 2025-09-14 | Forge of the Fae | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUIHht3JZHA | 1 | 0 | 8 | The art, music, story, and level design in the demo all seemed very solid. The wheel mechanics took me a bit of staring to figure out, but once it clicked it made perfect sense. It seemed like it could use a tutorial there or something though. I really liked the way they did overworld "random" battles. A little black cloud that chases you around but that you could outrun, but it would remain where it was once outpaced, invisible and waiting for you to come back. I thought the combat needed a pass button, or we needed to be able to restore mana out of combat. And we need to be able to examine characters and their statuses in combat. The ending of the demo was excellent. |
| 131 | 2025-09-13 | Detective Hindsight | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ4Nj2trgX8 | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Decent idea and concept, cool characters and art (even Phoebe's!), but the clue capturing/writing system felt a little awkward to use at times, though that might have been not having the muscle memory yet in what was ultimately a short demo. Hopefully the scenes/puzzles are larger in scale too as the demo one only had really 8-9 different short scenes to look at. The main glaring issue though is that even in the demo, there was a grammatical error in the solution that caused some consternation until we figured out what was wrong, and you absolutely cannot have grammar issues in the fill-in-the-blanks puzzle sentences that cause confusion when submitting answers. Also, the detective's reaction to Phoebe and then his colleague afterwards felt very stilted to me. Either he needed to be more surprised in the Phoebe scene or the inspector should have been the one telling him about the crime details and he should have been more surprised there. |
| 130 | 2025-09-13 | Arcana Academy | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YvEzyIyLw0 | 1 | 0 | 7 | This was fairly solid, with some new mechanics and ideas that I haven't seen in this kind of game before, like buildings, and the whole magic school student raising game is a theme I like a lot. It looks like they have different maps with different races and overall map modifiers too. There are some rough UI bugs here and there, card cap and building cap seems a little low (though card cap didn't seem to do anything), some stuff especially nearer the end was untranslated from Chinese, and the upgraded beast pen from the elf gift quest didn't seem to work, but overall I had quite some fun with the game. |
| 129 | 2025-09-07 | Pillar of Salt | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-8mfG6icHk | 1 | 2 | 6.5 | Mechanically it was solid, however it's missing a lot of QoL stuff, like it lacked tooltips and explanations as to what all the terms were, so at first I wasn't sure what counted as a spell and what didn't. And you couldn't wear or move items around in shops. Or view inventory in combat. Things like that. I did like that it had characters and you could form a party with them, but there were far too little sources of healing or damage mitigation that I saw. Still reached the final boss (of the first day) and barely lost even with a suboptimal build though, so maybe that part was fine. Items did not seem to apply their proper affinities to your bonuses, instead only their spell affinity applied. |
| 128 | 2025-09-07 | Requiem of Reuinis / 列乌尼斯的挽歌 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMCDZiTYPFs | 1 | 0 | 7 | The visual novel part was poorly translated and written in general, but the mechanics part was fairly solid. The rats seemed bugged, and would move one space and attack you right away even if you were in the next space over, and you did not have an option to just pass a turn and wait where you were for the rats to come to you either, so they always did bonus damage no matter what. I liked the roguelite and upgrade loop quite a bit. |
| 127 | 2025-09-06 | Placid Plastic Deck - A Quiet Quest | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYpcuva1mnU | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | The main character was great, and the writing, plus the ending animation, made us laugh out at a couple of points. The length of the demo was perfect. The card system made sense, but a drawback I saw was having to manually click on a mana card and play it somewhere on the board every single time, there's got to be some sort of UI shortcut for that. And overall I do not like the 4-lane Hearthstone-like system (apparently very similar to Inscryption too) and would like to have seen some innovation there. |
| 126 | 2025-09-06 | Duck Side of the Moon | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks2BSY4Bj9k | 1 | 0 | 7 | Very casual, cozy collectathon. Really enjoyed being able to drop an item into the spaceship and have it remain there. Spaceship upgrades seemed really cool too. The characters were fun and music was great. The ability to quack was appreciated too. Negatives included not being able to figure out how to use the gravity gun, the egg friend constantly reminding me to fly, the seeming inability to cancel a boost once the shift key was pressed, the personal item vacuum not having a very large radius, very and a fart joke that was out of place in this sort of game. |
| 125 | 2025-09-06 | Humanity Echo: Cyberpunk Tactical RPG | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy0S4y9I9Io | 1 | 0 | 3 | Much of the AI art (which was acknowledged on the Steam page) had stuff that was out of place and very noticeably wrong -- garbled text, items merging together, uncanny valley characters, and so on. The writing was very bad too, with leaps of conclusion that made no sense, a couple of contradictions, and some stuff that was outright not translated into English. Combat AI was very bad and the skill buttons would just not work sometimes. Once the AI ally and the last AI enemy in the first mission walked up to each other in melee, they just danced around each other without ever attacking. Some loud sounds were linked to music instead of sound and volume controls didn't work on them. The character name was hardcoded in on the character sheet. |
| 124 | 2025-09-06 | Cloak And Coin | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsSOJfTmxck | 1 | 0 | 2.5 | The game didn't work properly, with the lockpicking minigame in particular completely nonfunctional, which in turn rendered the levels uncompletable and the jail inescapable. There were next to no tutorials or tooltips, putting loot in the cart was weird and there was no way to see how much progress you had made, guards would just insta catch you if they caught up to you. The escape key to open and close menus didn't always work properly as well. The aesthetics were nice enough though and the game idea is cool. |
| 123 | 2025-08-31 | Death & Faeology | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQdmu5lGpN0 | 1 | 0 | 6 | I feel like you're doomed to fail initially because the manual and clues are a bit vague, and only if you savescum to see the good result will you kind of understand how things work. Maybe that's the point though, since humans don't know much about the fae world. The writing was also a bit unnecessarily wordy in places, however it was pretty good in general, with very few errors. I felt that the weakest point of the game was the investigation "table" screen, with things like the case files being so big and completely useless, the magnifying glasses bugging out if you partially overlaid one item with another and then tried to scan one of them, and there just not being a list of unlocked hints that you've found or anything like that. Also the game froze and didn't advance scene on one occasion, and there's no chat log (yet?). I do like the characters quite a bit as well as the branching story paths in terms of research assistants. |
| 122 | 2025-08-31 | Mesmalie | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv3_mH1Xf14 | 1 | 0 | 6 | I liked some of the stylistic art, especially of Mesmer, who was drawn really well. I also like the intriguing story that seems to be unfolding, which seems to have a hint of psychological horror in there although I don't think from the store tags that that is where the game is going eventually. That's fine though, still good stuff. The most triggering part of the game for me were the misuse of punctuation marks everywhere, to the point that I couldn't tell if they were on purpose or not and made fun of it for most of the game, plus there was some "lazy" writing (like a character saying chat abbreviations out loud) and grammar issues. |
| 121 | 2025-08-30 | Chaturanga | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24GI40mNmnM | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Some balance issues, with powerful upgrades being available right from the get-go and offered side by side with much weaker options in some cases. Particularly the Amazon for the Queen-type piece. UI text is also far too small for the screen size I had it on. Campaign saving also seems to be not working even though trying to exit a match says that it will save game progress, just not the specific match. However, the general gameplay loop of winning matches and upgrading pieces or buying relics, Balatro-style, is good. |
| 120 | 2025-08-30 | Minefield Fractalis | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS_cq1Em3Lw | 1 | 0 | 4 | It's an alpha tech demo, nothing wrong with that and everything did work, but there was no story or no inter-puzzle gameplay aspect like earlier puzzles unlocking later ones or anything like that. No reason to actually play the game and progress through it. It just felt like a random collection of Minesweeper variants. The meaning of UI displays were unclear (maybe on purpose) and why we sometimes get thrown into recursive boards while sometimes we get ejected from them made no sense. The ambience of the game was nice though and the actual games themselves were solid. |
| 119 | 2025-08-30 | South Words Hero | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEjVGCD6bEw | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Fun idea with potential, although I felt like I was missing out on large segments of the game by not having certain letters. Some of the tooltips and chats seem to be remnants of old ideas, like using Z to deflect projectile onto the target button at the start (there were no projectilves to deflect) or people saying you could climb up onto a D (you can't because they despawn instantly). Lots of typoes, but some of the writing was funny. Demo was a good length and ended with tantalizing glances at future content. Note: We didn't count deaths since it rewinds time in what looks like a time loop. |
| 118 | 2025-08-24 | A Pretty Broken Adventure | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzpWDk5oYkE | 1 | 0 | 6 | The art was neat and the writing was cute, and I liked being able to highlight all interactable items, but it basically devolved down to trying every item on every other item to see what would happen in the end anyway. Especially in the final bathroom puzzle, where oddly all the interactables in the bathroom except the stalls were locked out in the demo (why?!) and the final solution involved an interaction that made no sense, using the key on the toilet pull chains. There were also odd regional things like German-style quotation marks. |
| 117 | 2025-08-24 | Don't Lose Aggro | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4S1urC-QAM | 1 | 1 | 5.5 | I like the game's general concept, but the healer standing still and not moving, while enemies walk in from the sides of the map, really broke immersion. I found that UI elements often overlapped each other too, for example during level up, and yet conversely I couldn't find a way to hover over my skills except when levelling up. The mouse cursor was not captured by the side of the screen which for some people could mean that its easy to click outside of the screen on accident. Lastly, my charge skill activated on a wrong monster far away from the one I was targetting, on the other side of the screen, three times or so. |
| 116 | 2025-08-24 | Die For The Lich | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzhNUiUoKa0 | 1 | 0 | 7 | I liked this game, although at least within the demo it felt very easy. Possibly just the first map of many though. It wasn't obvious that I could scroll the level map with the mouse wheel at first. I did find some of the wording to be a bit confusing, like what exactly the half effect curse meant at first and how critting on an item use lowers its curse by 2. And whether weapons that let you roll extra dice required the dice to be from your tray or if it generated dice for you or something, since some stated tray and some didn't. |
| 115 | 2025-08-24 | DWARRF: A Pinball Roguelike | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrb8c4coG9w | 1 | 1 | 5 | The game was interesting, and I liked that you couldn't run out of balls, but the normal cannonballs and some powerups (healing) felt too underpowered and there's no way to remove them from your "deck" in the demo at least. The mobs felt like they had too much HP, and the ranged boss did way too much damage at once for his health. The UI was terrible, with no way to see the map on demand, no way to check what upgrades did when at a shop or upgrade place, etc. The auto-death pits with one covering block at the side of many of the pinball tables were very silly. The minecraft travelling phase with the ability to pause for no reason was a waste of time especially since you can't change direction in that phase. Inability to access options midgame or remap the bumpers was bad too, especially since the title bar on the window meant that part of my UI was cut off by the bottom of my screen (but not on the stream itself). Also the ball jokes were too immature. |
| 114 | 2025-08-23 | Fogpiercer | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmt4E-MVFHw | 1 | 2 | 7 | I like trains, and I liked the Into the Breach style combat system, but it felt a bit awkward between the number of cards you get per turn, their cost (many of which change over the turn), the radius around each carriage they can be played, the low health of each carriage, and the number of enemies you had to fight each turn, and the low rewards per fight. It felt very.. extra. I did like the concept in general though, but I would like an undo move/restart turn button and for movement to cost a standard number of action points, not scaling up as you move more. Also what was with that tutorial round with 14 enemies? |
| 113 | 2025-08-23 | Moonsigil Atlas | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUFhyrlJs80 | 1 | 0 | 8 | The grid system in place of energy is very clever, although as it was just a demo, the sigil size changes felt ineffective since the run was over after a single board. But the potential is there, and hopefully they have many more cards in many more shapes, as well as many ways to manipulate board space -- we saw some like a tile that removes the first tile you place every turn after resolving its effects. The dev stopped by the channel to answer questions and found a bug while in there too, which was awesome. Also the blueprint/planning system was very nice. It felt like some of the "Persist" and "Start of turn" mechanics could resolve in a better way though. Like Meteor Shower persists for 3 turns but only fires twice, at the start of turn 2 and 3, since "Start of turn" has already passed by the time you play it on the first turn. And its presence on the board on the 3rd turn is completely useless. Why not End of Turn instead? Also a combat log of some kind eventually would be great to show the order that things trigger and the calculation of actual damage done. But they're small quibbles. |
| 112 | 2025-08-07 | BroomSweeper | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvLFaAMqL78 | 1 | 0 | 6 | I do like Balatro variants, but maybe I didn't play far enough in to get hooked by its charm. The game seems decent, but the unexplained hazards felt weird and I'm still not sure what one of the two I encountered really does, there were typoes and broken buttons in the demo, a run ended after one level and we had no idea if it was intended or not, and the pixelated art felt ill-suited to the game. The game itself was fine though, and I would probably like the full game, but I didn't feel like there was a pizzazz to the demo. |
| 111 | 2025-08-03 | The High Tower | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCSCH7g1yw | 1 | 1 | 4 | I did realise after a bit that this was just a slice of three different aspects of the game, rather than one flowing demo with a narrative and everything. The sound mixing was off and some things (noise of marshes, person panting) were too loud or would not deactivate properly, others (music at the end of dam) too soft, at least one sound effect was set as Music instead of SFX in terms of what slider bar controlled it, and the climbing part was weird, what with the ability to bunny hop while climbing, occasional clipping, and items not obeying physics in any way. And no skyboxes and backgrounds so it had a very early tech demo feel. Still, the autosave for death worked just fine and I did complete the demo without too much incident. |
| 110 | 2025-08-03 | Memory's Reach | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj59aHgFgEg | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | It was very pretty, and all the puzzles were individually well-crafted, fairly straightforward, and not too big in scale. The lore notes were interesting too. Nothing really made me go "wow" though and the spaceship looked weird. Since this was a demo, I'm guessing the puzzles were introductory level and they get more complex too, if not then the game will not be as good as it can be. The 3D map was hard to use and the inability to leave meaningful notes hurt the game. |
| 109 | 2025-08-02 | The Crazy Hyper-Dungeon Chronicles | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwWX7MB1900 | 1 | 2 | 8.5 | This game was very cool and very funny. It was well-written and I enjoyed the whole experience, and there were some cool options that I had not seen in other games, particularly the one where you could choose between a talking mode, an exploring mode, and a fighting mode, depending on what you liked to do more. I do worry that it's perhaps possible to run out of food and potions and not be able to make it to the end of the game though, but who knows. Mouse movement of the active target during combat was so much better than keyboard and possibly controller too that it seems not using a mouse is a disadvantage. |
| 108 | 2025-07-27 | Demonschool | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIRvMC1EG7M | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | The game wasn't bad, the characters yapping was fine though it started to annoy me slightly near the end, and the combat was fun and puzzley but the sidestep mechanic seemed slightly bugged (like you can move 3 in any direction but only 2 to the "side" due to the sidestep mechanic, but it's not the character's actual sides relative to where they're facing, but instead the combat board sides relative to the player. Makes no sense. I did like that they dropped us in the middle of the story and gave us a week to play, though it was so long that I never finished the alloted time anyway. I didn't like that we had class currency but I couldn't find a place to use it in, and a vending machine I bought just disappeared with no effect. |
| 107 | 2025-07-26 | Demon Bluff | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jIfuB0ofJo | 1 | 0 | 8 | Lots of fun! I loved the puzzle solving. I have not played Blood on the Clocktower but I am familiar with the Werewolf/Mafia games, friends who are familiar with it tell me that the newer to me mechanics, and things like corruption, are from there. That demo does have a couple of bugs that need fixing like health not restoring between ascension levels, some of the tooltips have information that are too important to hide away there, the corruption mechanic can be a bit too chaotic at times, and things like the order of operation and what happens if a villager lies is not clear at times, but those are all fixable things except maybe the corruption mechanics. |
| 106 | 2025-07-20 | CloverPit | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=480DG46gDC0 | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | I only tried it out for one run, but my major irks were the toilet stuff, with yet another dev who thinks that sort of thing is funny humour, and the fact that charms that activate as a response to your roll do not clearly state what they are or what effect they give, they flash in and out too quickly without any text, just an image of the charm in question. |
| 105 | 2025-07-20 | My Familiar | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rLASYpk270 | 1 | 0 | 8 | I liked this one a lot, except that the world is a little too grim and dark for my taste. But the detail, vibe, animations, music, humour, were all on point. The combat worked fine as well, although I wasn't a fan of the equipment menu and inventory in general. Not sure how that could really be improved on though. Also would have liked to see health bars and damage estimates in battle. I did like the QTE battle system. |
| 104 | 2025-07-19 | Runeblight | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w4-W4tsyA8 | 1 | 8 | 6.5 | The game was pretty, especially the overworld landscapes, though there's only so much you can do with limited graphical resources. Some things like the waterfall and some attack and death animations were not as good. I don't know how I feel about the way items respawn and what you're supposed to do to level up with shards. It feels like you'd always be encouraged to warp back to the start and speedrun all the (easier to get) shards from the start to where you were each time in order to upgrade your character and all shrines. The movement mechanics were pretty decent, though there was some weirdness like stairs giving you upwards momentum that you could combine with a jump to get higher jumps. Combat, especially melee combat, felt a bit off though. |
| 103 | 2025-07-19 | Sintopia | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhLg4EAG-RM | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | The game was pretty, especially the overworld landscapes, and the tutorial was nicely done with voice acting and an introduction to various mechanics. Not being able to set priority for the switch commands seemed like an oversight but maybe that's a future upgrade. I feel like everything moves too slowly and takes too long to process though. It didn't feel balanced with the amount of daily upkeep needed. I'm also not a fan of needing to micromanage two different maps at once (building below, killing/expansion above). |
| 102 | 2025-07-13 | Blacksmith: Ignite the Forge | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU9qhaJMcps | 1 | 2 | 6 | The forging and shopkeeper part of the game was decent, but the autobattler portion was terrible since you sometimes require a specific dwarf to defeat a story progression node and have no way to know what that dwarf is until you try it. And at that point, since it's an autobattler, you have no agency in the fight and the three dwarves you sent just die, along with losing all their weapons. Also, there's no way you should lose your weapons if some of your dwarves die but not all. Why aren't the survivors bringing them back? |
| 101 | 2025-07-13 | StoryArcana | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IByCuk9jzuE | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | The stories we were shown had good potential, the spell drawing concept was neat, there was a great anime cutscene halfway through the demo, all characters had names, and it was even voiced, but the alpha had a lot of problems like poor instructions, complete lack of tooltips, getting stuck on death screens, and players like me not even being able to realize for a long time what the healing potions look like. |
| 100 | 2025-07-12 | Goblin Vyke | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNeJn7o_Vd4 | 1 | 2 | 7.5 | This was a really fun blend of a shopkeeper sim with dice blackjack-style haggling mechanics, and a stealth metroidvania with single player extraction looter mechanics. The English localization suffered from translation issues and words not fitting in boxes, there were a couple of fart references that were immature and a turn-off, and some of the quest UIs and such could stand to be a bit clearer, but the underlying game mechanics were really fun. |
| 099 | 2025-07-09 | Crescent County | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjsN6HbrAKc | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | World is empty, but they do acknowledge this and say that this is an alpha to showcase the various driving and quest mechanics. The motorcycle-broom handles fairly well, both on land and in the air, the character interactions were fun, and the honking at sheep was great. |
| 098 | 2025-07-06 | Echoes of Elysium | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSFyJM5IFng | 1 | 4 | 6.5 | It's Voidtrain or Raft but with an airship, post-apocalyptic sort of theme. The demo did not include any "story" that we found, but the initial airship building part was satisfying, especially once I learnt that you could cheese the airpack by holding down spacebar for one second, then letting go spacebar for one second to recover stamina, and so on, to "bunny hop" across the sky. Combat was easy, while death seemed to do a weird partial rewind for you and your ship, without you actually losing anything in your inventory. There were multiple minor bugs here and there like floating logs and bugged winch anchors and goats inside of pots. Tying down crates and storage units on the deck was very satisfying. |
| 097 | 2025-07-06 | Hope: A Sky Full of Ghosts | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVgv9_sr9FY | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I liked what we saw of the story and the way they showed the player the puzzles without actually giving tutorials on how to solve them -- show don't tell is always the best way to do these. We managed to soft lock the game at the very end so we couldn't continue any further. Some of the UI pieces, especially the white box in the top right, were ugly, and there were spelling problems here and there, and it seemed like one character had a promiment laugh track and the others were all silent, but all those things are demo stuff and can be fixed. |
| 096 | 2025-07-05 | Teamcrafter | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvT3AbYD-Ds | 1 | 0 | 6 | It's a pre-alpha, and a bunch of cool, interlocking ideas are there, but it's definitely rough around the edges still. The initial post-tutorial fights are difficult, and the gathering segment isn't particularly engaging so it feels like a lot of farming to just progress even past the tutorial. The portal system having charges is the worst idea there is in the game, since it means you softlock and lose if you don't find a gear combo that beats the next monster. And on the flip side, it seems like the game takes away your extra charges once you beat a monster so if victory is imminent early, it is suboptimal to not concede, go back to the portal and do all your remaining runs to at least look for artifacts and traders. Which is a very bad feeling. And then later there's apparently an item that gives you extra charges for legendary items anyway which makes the whole system pointless. They are trying to approach this as a "roguelite" for maximum replayability and that idea is a bad one, since it generally involves 1-2 hours of farming for new players to beat the first post-tutorial mob. Give us all the characters the first time, infinite entries into the portal, and let us build up our guild for one single, long playthrough. |
| 095 | 2025-06-29 | Re:VER PROJECT -TOKYO- | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbQvvr9id3U | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | Buggy, with things like the female character being able to go down to 0 health just fine at the "end of the day" but randomly dying in the middle of the day if that happens then (and no way for me to tell that she's dead except by happening to go back to the shop midday, else I probably only find out at the end of the day once I've wasted more time). It's weird that I have to feed not just myself but also her those first few days. Hopefully she's able to feed herself past the point in the story where she regains her consciousness. It was good that the game let you start out again at the start of the day if you die, and good that the girl questioned the protagonist about his skills at the end of the demo. There were lots of bad translations too. |
| 094 | 2025-06-29 | The Songbird Guild | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3BJ8uJEhI4 | 1 | 0 | 8 | Tons to like about this game, characters were oozing with personality and made use of their skills in regular conversations and actions outside of combat, game had a lot of interesting world-building going on and a nice encyclopaedia that reminded me of my own blog, and the art was nice too. The only drawback was that while most of the game's UI was nice, and the combat itself was fine, the combat UI was terrible. Also there were no henshin animations, and there was a fullscreen Ren'Py crash halfway through a combat, though it just let me continue the story anyway. |
| 093 | 2025-06-28 | Neo HaBits | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npz6ROf2-1Y | 1 | 2 | 3.5 | The game mechanics were very poor, with a high number of bugs and a horrible camera and movement system. The art was actually pretty good though, the music was great, and some of the moments, like how the character stopped and stared at the camera and laughed, were creepy in a great way. The pipe connecting puzzle was unexplained and it was extremely silly that you could just move the entrance and exit next to each other to solve the puzzles, and that time didn't stop while you were solving them so an enemy could eat you up while you were solving it, on top of the timer inside of the puzzle itself. Cutscenes made no sense, writing was bad, but then suddenly there's a music video displayed in the background of the game that was so neat. The bads were very bad, the goods were very good. |
| 092 | 2025-06-28 | Ctrl Alt Deal | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6-R3PpBWlE | 1 | 0 | 5 | I get the concept, but it felt kind of boring. The cards were uninspiring and it did not made sense that an AI would not know what the roles of the people in the office were. Everything needing to discard 2 or 3 cards to do meant a turn felt very limited in comparison to how many cards you had. Making friendships did not seem to be a useful mechanic, at least not as far as the tutorials go. Too many clicks needed to select cards and then confirm action again after. |
| 091 | 2025-06-28 | Warp Speed and Witchcraft: Disastrous Dating Sim | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oco03tjKxR8 | 1 | 0 | 8 | Great, fun story, no major complaints. Could have used more upfront introduction to who Henry and David were (maybe like a "card art" splash screen near the front showing that they were witch boy and space boy) instead of pointing people at the journal right away, because I did mix them up a couple times, especially earlier on. And some voiceovers and a typo read through. But this was a 1.0 demo version, so very early on. |
| 090 | 2025-06-24 | Dicey Hacker 1999 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8RT9b1jk-k (Afterhours) | - | - | 3.5 | It's a very early demo, literally version 0.0.0.1. Some of the systems are there, and the dice hacking minigame is fine, but stuff is definitely a bit unbalanced still. Music system is bugged, the slot machine is way too loud and kinda pointless, the passive buffs aren't good, skills and deck upgrading are nonexistent, and the idler part seems very slow compared to how active you need to be on the dice hacking portion. All balance and gameplay issues that can be fixed in development though. But I'm not sure it's such a good idea to mix an idle game with an active dice game like this. |
| 089 | 2025-06-20 | Deadly Days: Roadtrip | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHD8up8lWb8 | 1 | 2 | 6 | This looked like it had a really long tail of character collection and meta upgrades, and although we didn't play too far into the game, there are probably lots of items to collect as well. I didn't like the items you pick up going into a pile that you could use after the level, yet airdrop crates could be used immediately, that made no sense. I'm not really a fan of the fuel collection mechanic either. Also there was too much visual and UI clutter for me from my initial playthroughs. But the game looked solid. |
| 088 | 2025-06-20 | Neo Junk City | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaSvg7NLZDU | 1 | 3 | 8 | This was a lot of fun and great humour, I loved almost everything about the game. The main disappointment about the game was the UI, like the window not capturing the mouse cursor properly (Which caused my stream to end prematurely once), the WASD keys both moving the character AND the UI selection at the same time, and a few other things like that. |
| 087 | 2025-06-20 | Fishing Shop Simulator | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaRIyXip7RM (Afterhours) | - | - | 6 | This was surprisingly fun for an alpha. I like the idea of restoring a village around you by fishing and reviving the economy. Suspension of disbelief is needed for a lot of the mechanics, like how the first poor villager will constantly come by and spend a fortune on fishes from you every day to start, and later on it seems like there are far more customers that you can ever provide fish for, and also hooked fish can glitch through things and sometimes end up at unlootable spots. Also the bait booster pack is still a little weird and I wish you could just buy X number of bait. But overall, the game loop slice is already pretty good. |
| 086 | 2025-06-19 | Overlooting | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-s5jc-BcEI | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | The set bonus and item combination systems are nice, but many of the set bonuses felt underpowered, some of the stats like lifesteal were useless, and the boss was way overtuned so only a couple of builds could reasonably expect to beat it. But if this is a roguelite, maybe that's okay and it was done this way on purpose. There were too many fights before though, since the boss was in room 50. Also there's no way to see the set bonus for a class while picking items, and no way to pass on items. And potions got overlaid on top of regular items in the inventory sometimes. |
| 085 | 2025-06-19 | Mighty Meow | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsQnRovaR9s | 1 | 0 | 5 | There's an idea of a game here, and it's not a bad one, it was basically setting up factories and pipelines/conveyor belts with animals that you rescue from a dungeon. A lot of UI improvements need to be made though, like there was no way to pause a factory when it was not actively building an item (i.e. had enough ingredients to build it), and no way to set a maximum item stock. And many tooltips needed improvement. I also managed to get stuck in relocate mode and then duplicate a chest after loading game. Also the combat part wasn't very interesting since the enemy types were just reskins of each other, and the hit boxes of weapons were much larger than their visuals. Also you can just walk out of the world map. |
| 084 | 2025-06-19 | DOG WITCH | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCs03l-lrZk | 1 | 0 | 7 | I liked the "10 pick 3" upgrade mechanic after each battle, that was great. Two rerolls for each round was a pretty decent mechanic too, and the donation made to charity for finishing a round was very cool. Only minor complaints would probably be that the minion summoning (only two, one on each side) was a bit weird, some things like charge cards become useless once you are fully charged, losing charges when you are hit were not explained, and the enemy "attack + extra effect" icons were not explained. |
| 083 | 2025-06-18 | Sunny Side Crossing | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpaPnDYDVtE | 1 | 0 | 3 | Localization was very poor, the restaurant portion with the helper was weird as he sometimes wouldn't do anything and it wasn't clear which orders were active, the story made no sense with things like the flame feather lizard being killed even though it actually escaped, etc. There were several screens that auto progressed even though it said press a button to progress, and others that didn't progress until you pressed even though there was no text or anything to see on the screen. The cooking and chopping mechanics were poor, but the fishing mechanic was actually pretty good, as were certain art pieces near the end. |
| 082 | 2025-06-18 | Medieval Crafter: Blacksmith | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdZaEUAlbas | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | The crafting was pretty great, the fantasy town and outer castle had good medieval vibes, the inner castle and the cave were kind of weak though. At least the front part where I wandered around in. It needs a leave button to teleport out from anywhere. The smelter bugged out my coals at one point, there were tooltip issues here and there, the whetstone minigame could have been better, and the voiceovers will get annoying after a bit. But those were small blemishes on a good demo and seemingly fun smithing game. |
| 081 | 2025-06-18 | Guild Master | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk5NWNeasi8 | 1 | 1 | 5 | It crashed three times before I even started the game, and once more after, but was fine after that. The numbers in the adventure zones, especially healing values, seem off. And that whole adventure bit seems like the output from a 2D game dev course. There was no music and barely any sound. The building up the guild section might be good though, and if there's even story around the characters.. I want a game like this, but better and more fleshed out! |
| 080 | 2025-06-18 | Cybersim: Noetic City | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC6JFX9SaGg (Afterhours) | - | - | 6.5 | The base idea is actually really solid -- Balatro in a light cyberpunk hacker sort of aesthetic, complete with a cozy diorama decoration game in your own hacker pod apartment, where you can use the currency you earn from the minigame to buy stuff to deck out your room, It needs more of everything -- more tutorials on what the numbers are, more clarity on how they increment, more types of "jokers" (perfs) and more varied fights, more furniture, etc. But that's what a demo is for. The levels cannot reset each time you lose a battle. But battles also become ludicrously easy after a bit. |
| 079 | 2025-06-17 | Discounty | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8FsbELZ2Vg | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Pretty solid game with funny writing. Characters all seem to have their own quirks. The shopkeeper part of the game might be a bit too micromanagey once it scales up but it's hard to say without knowing what other shop mechanics there are. I like the whole town restoration and befriend townsfolk to unlock their profits in your shop sort of theme. The shop part became better once I figured out you could use a keypad to operate the cash register. It's weird you need the keyboard to do some interactions and need the mouse to do others. And the click and drag mouse to pick up items part gave me lots of issues. |
| 078 | 2025-06-17 | The Vast White | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoYfZm7EwTE | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | The swapping between control and camera types when I was on my snowboard versus walking about were very annoying. Sometimes the controls wouldn't revert back properly either. The "quests" did nothing. Lots of little issues like getting rooted in place after conversations if I sped through them, camera errors if I was on a snowboard when I went into a cave, managing to softlock myself by jumping over a fence, the slalom flag triggering being cheesy, and other camera quirks like being able to look below the ground or having my view stuck behind a mountain. I did like the graphics and going up a mountain in chair lifts. |
| 077 | 2025-06-17 | I NEED SPACE | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_Y1k-S6N-E | 1 | 0 | 8 | This demo was awesome. Lots of great writing, and lots of little touches like the robots playing differrent instruments for make their tune and they stop playing their instrument if you talk to them, causing the background music to change. The game implies you can find and unite other musicians with them as one of the overarching plots too, and if that is true and that changes and enhances the music then that is amazing. Only a conjecture though. The only poor part of the game was the controls for the drawing a constellation part. And the actual collectathon mechanics weren't anything to write home about. |
| 076 | 2025-06-16 | Fishing Alone | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAbgLi-5h9c | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | I managed to softlock the tutorial by running out of battery before catching 3 fish since releasing them did not count. That put me in the city zone but with no interaction prompts to get back to the fishing area to progress. The fixed camera in the city was absolutely horrible and the city was far too unnecessarily big. Not being able to walk around the fishing area was disappointing. The demo didn't seem to let me catch any of those fragments of the lost human past that the game page talks about. Lots of typoes too. |
| 075 | 2025-06-16 | STAR FISH | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3084hgu5DjU | 1 | 0 | 2 | The UI looked nice but was horribly broken in multiple places, and the window did not capture the mouse properly, and that made the game annoying to play more than anything else. Once all that is fixed it could be an interesting collectathon though. There was little explanation on how to catch legendary fishes or what a fish hotspot looked like and such. |
| 074 | 2025-06-16 | The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRJVi18oYYw | 1 | 0 | 4 | The most annoying part about this was the difficulty of the depth perception needed to fly through the little rings on the serpent for extra shells. The art also did not suit the game and made it hard to find fishes at times. Fishes should not be able to phase through the catfish and basically everything else. The serpent always spawned so far away and it was difficult to track nearby objects. I thought the tutorial was softlocked at first during the scene where you needed to open the browser and type in a webpage. |
| 073 | 2025-06-16 | Mourning Tide | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98ptTzaZ2Yo | 1 | 0 | 5 | I'm not a fan of the graphics, but the game works fine and the demo ended very interestingly. I couldn't figure out the spamming of spacebar to cut the rope for a while, that was unintuitive. The fishing minigame was cool and unique, especially once the directional shoving buttons were introduced. |
| 072 | 2025-06-16 | Fishing Mega-Game | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkjMCZ9HK0 (Afterhours) | - | - | 4 | The game seems short and hasn't quite thrown off its "game dev project" feel. Skills are named weirdly, with references to swords and axes that don't exist, music is repetitive and abruptly cuts short, there only seem to be 15 fish to catch, no keybinds, no skills, no healing, using keyboard to select skills meant I accidentally selected something once without meaning to, no way to see what skills you already have, etc. No idea if I completed the tutorial demo or not once I fished all the initial fish out. Still, the fish theme on Vampire Survivors is definitely something that could work. |
| 071 | 2025-06-15 | Witchlight | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XZizgyx4JA | 1 | 0 | 4.5 | 4.5 - The game does feel like a decent slow life exploration simulator. It was buggy though, with janky animations like standing on the cat while patting it, and some vibrating when I tried to use candle plinths. I managed to soft lock myself early by placing the candle on the wrong plinth because there were no instructions on what to do. Very few options, and options in the accessibility menu like the crosshair do not properly persist, and the main menu has an irritatingly long pan downwards that cannot be skipped before it shows you the menu options. Very easy to get vertigo in this one, I could feel its onset after 30 minutes. |
| 070 | 2025-06-15 | Consume Me | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWkGfkZLYnc | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | Very fun, and felt like a very authentic depiction of an Asian family and the chaos of being a teenager. Love all the little minigames and how they represent the little imperfections in the chores that kids had to do. Love the flawed art too, it was very charming. Some aspects of the minigames were not explained well, but arguably that could also represent the kid having to trial and error to figure out how things work. |
| 069 | 2025-06-15 | Beyond the Map | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUk8tz4yzME | 1 | 3 | 5 | The game mechanics work well together, but there isn't any story or goal at all in the first hour, though there was a decent tutorial to follow for the crafting bit. We didn't really get to flex the ARPG side of things though. I did like the skill system and crafting your own skill tree is a unique mechanic. I did get stuck on a roof, and get swiped through doors by enemies, the rotation keys bugged me to no end, and it felt like my teleport trait stopped working for the rest of the demo after the first usage. |
| 068 | 2025-06-14 | Hirogami | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSgFbnE_uc | 1 | 0 | 5 | I don't like a fixed camera in games, and the mouse and keyboard definitely did not feel like the optimal way to play the game, although they do say that at the front and it does still ultimately work. Right mouse button "special" did not seem to do an attack, and was only used to trigger event nodes, but you could still do it "in combat" even though it did nothing but a small animation that rooted you in place, and that seems like a miss. It also ultimately meant every character only has one melee attack. Aesthetics were very nice, although I almost glitched through the ceiling a couple of times. |
| 067 | 2025-06-14 | Fading Serenades | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy1IRIKTMfw | 1 | 0 | 4.5 | It's okay, the courier mechanics seem a little too simplistic, but perhaps it works well as a vehicle with which to tell a story, I don't think the courier mechanics are meant to be the main draw here per se, and the energy system being tied to the minigames (especially the sloooow log) seems contrived. There were definitely translation problems, and issues like there not being a confirm option when using the bed, or when pressing the Exit button from the options screen. Why not just repair the bridges? The previous postman would have. |
| 066 | 2025-06-14 | Strange Antiquities | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbd47UtU1AM | 1 | 0 | 8 | I love the Fallen London-esque occult feel and writing of the game and the sense of mystique and exploration of the unknown that the game evokes. Assuming that the rest of the game is like how the first couple of days were, this should be pretty great. I should go back and play Strange Horticulture. Many of the mechanics were not explained in the demo, which makes sense, but some things like the green/red bar on the right side of the screen that governs how well you do, and the fact that you can get different examination results by hovering over different parts of an item, probably should have been. Items not being able to be rotated also feels like a miss. Still excellent. |
| 065 | 2025-06-13 | Oldish Stuff | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3G4BF-BPbo | 1 | 1 | 3 | The idea of a game is there, but this demo was obviously rushed out for Steam Next Fest. Can't talk to NPC, equipping items bugged out once, menu screen ended up behind map when pressing Escape with map open, enemies attack you while you talk to the minigame NPCs with full screen text plates up, you don't have a starter weapon and killing initial enemies takes forever, poor drop rate, poor healing rate, enemies keep asking for items that you don't have but it's completely random and there's no penalty for not having the item nor any chance to go out and get it, the biome borders are all straight and there are unnecessary invis walls, etc. |
| 064 | 2025-06-13 | Backpack Seeker's | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fJjRAMkpDs | 1 | 2 | 4 | The UI elements are clunky, character gets stuck in terrain very easily when you leave the inventory screen, items seem unbalanced, characters had no names, and the boss characters look overly tough, but there's a cool idea here and the in-character references to it being a demo were funny. It needs better execution though. |
| 063 | 2025-06-13 | Dead Engine | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNvv7yL3yh4 | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | I'm not sure I like the backpacks resetting after each node instead of at the end of each run, but being able to permanently upgrade the backpack is nice. The needing to find and rescue characters in the nodes to upgrade the base is a good twist on the Vampire Survivors genre too. Being able to come back for items later in the same node once you find backpack space, and the ability to bring them back to base, is cool too. How good it is might depend on how much there is to unlock in terms of base progression. |
| 062 | 2025-06-13 | Upalu Mundi | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eexzNLqEmws (Afterhours) | - | - | 5 | The demo lacked a title screen! And some mechanics like how to toggle train stations to thin platforms (and what they really did) were not really explained, I think, though I kind of figured it out in the end. There was also no leaning into the fantasy theme at all so far. I did like the end screen displaying the efficiency lines and showing that you needed to find *one* of the possible solutions that hits the line to pass the level, and the whole blueprints system allowing you to load a previous attempt (I think), that was cool. |
| 061 | 2025-06-12 | Trainatic | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczsN9W9oH4 | 1 | 0 | 5 | The game itself might eventually be fun but the demo was slow and didn't really showcase any interesting mechanic that I didn't see in the first 10 minutes. It was literally just number upgrades to get a little further each time, and eventually one new resource. I needed to see more biomes, more resources, maybe more interesting things to upgrade besides just small train numbers. MagicCar of Delicious did this sort of game a lot better. |
| 060 | 2025-06-12 | Halcyon Days at Taoyuan | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnDLM5GSqww | 1 | 0 | 7 | The UI was a bit clunky, and there were a few minor translation issues, but overall the localization, mechanics, characters, design etc seemed good. Love the ambience and setting. The crafting minigames seem like a good idea and I do like that they only apply when you're learning the recipe, not every single time you craft it. Each puzzle should be unique to each recipe though. Whether the game is ultimately good depends on what the rest of the game's story and events are like. |
| 059 | 2025-06-12 | Anomalous Railroad Crossing | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpxA9ILjVDs (Afterhours) | - | - | 2 | There is not much of a game here because the level is not big enough, this feels like a tech demo that says "Look, I know how to alter the properties of an object in Unity!" The location it's based on is very beautiful and I have been there IRL before, but the demo fails to showcase any meaningful gameplay or interesting mechanic. You literally can complete the entire thing in 3 minutes. |
| 058 | 2025-06-11 | Wanderlust: The Magnificent Journey | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnj_6w6HTPE | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | The writing is great and all on paper, but there's far too much of it. In the demo chapter at least, there's too much focus on pointlessly explaining every single action. It felt like there was "padding" put in to hide the game's other deficiencies. Like there only being 4 dialog options in the first 2 hours of the game. Half the text from the entire chapter needs to be mercilessly cut. Conversely, once the travel portion started, the art and writing were not good enough. The airplane sleeping scene was great, but the New York part of the story was bad. Landmarks were not named or drawn, and the group photos were not shown on screen. If you are a game about travelling, and it means so much to the characters, you need to NAME and SHOW the locations. Not generic_landmarks and generic_museums and "New York Airport". Have these devs never actually travelled before? Watch the Zatsu Tabi anime! And yet, despite all that, the game ended up on my wishlist. |
| 057 | 2025-06-11 | Dungeon Mori | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozuw-mduY0s (Afterhours) | - | - | 6.5 | This worked surprisingly well. I liked the loot run concept that the game is built around. It needs better tooltips on what the stats do and how to improve some of the rolls like Lockpicking etc, and not being able to change the equipment loadout dungeons, particularly for consumables, was not a nice experience, and more graphical resolutions are needed, but despite all that it got a decent score because the underlying game was fun. |
| 056 | 2025-06-10 | Tokyo Underground Killer | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kSb9NLOCYo | 1 | 3 | 5 | As a first-person shooter/slicer game, this was pretty cool. Very stylized, very smooth. Voiced in both Japanese and English. Character felt fairly sturdy. I disliked the right click + left click slice mechanic that force turns the character camera around in a circle though, that's terrible in first person games. And it lacks checkpoints so everytime you die you have to reset. |
| 055 | 2025-06-10 | Galvatein: Adventurers’ Guild | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsHrQxOhBlw | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I'm still looking for a good Adventurers' Guild game, and this one seems fairly interesting, though we'll see how well it holds up in the end. The Papers, Please style of gameplay as the guild receptionist was neat, and the information gathering plot for the princess was neat too, but the tavern cooking part of the gameplay felt incomplete and pointless. Translations need work. |
| 054 | 2025-06-10 | Dispatch | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vgE9Pulx9E | 1 | 0 | 6 | The demo was neat and stylized but there wasn't much of it, there was a lot of comic book style exposition and very little game, and what game was there felt unexplained in parts, with very little plot. The hacking minigame was also poor. The post-game comic book scenes hinted at a lot of really interesting things that will happen though. |
| 053 | 2025-06-09 | Elevator Music | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDdkF_hlSic | 1 | 0 | 7 | I liked the idea of this one, though the ingame music wasn't working and it was easy to misclick levels and miss people boarding on your current level. The story is really intriguing though and the time moves so slowly that that seems to imply there's a lot of potential storyline to uncover still. It seems like it would make any attempt at replaying it a huge pain though, and also there's too many instances of people coming into the elevator and not having any convo option at all. And several instances of missing "back out" dialogue options, options that didn't quite make any sense, etc. |
| 052 | 2025-06-09 | Outrider Mako | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_i634dTOE8 | 1 | 15 | 3.5 | The controls were convoluted for no good reason, and jump and shoot just didn't make sense and didn't feel fluid at all, coupled with poor implementations of things like it being impossible to jump onto an elevator if a monster is near cause the jump auto targets the monster, and the inability to hit a monster that you've jumped onto without spending red nectar. And the sheer sillyness of the very first major fight being in the rain so you couldn't use the red nectar you'd just learnt about anyway. And the fact it autosaves whenever you die so when you respawn you don't get back any consumables that you might have used. |
| 051 | 2025-05-15 | Across the Wonderlands | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-lP5m-ArKo | 1 | 10 | 5.5 | A survival crafting game with a strong Alice in Wonderland theme and a pocket dimension home base similar to Once Human. Mystical, quirky, a bit pretentious, but in a good way. It might succeed or fail depending on how long they can keep the wondrous feeling going. I didn't like the (on purpose) lack of a crafting table meaning that I couldn't just craft gear and weapons. I almost soft-locked myself on the starting zone boss due to that. The demo either broke at the end or ended at a random quest objective. I fell through the world or out of bounds a couple times too. |
| 050 | 2025-05-15 | Scarlet Deer Inn | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39ZfPCox9E | 1 | 7 | 5.5 | Serviceable platformer with an intriguing story but slightly weird UI that felt like it was missing tooltips. Torch management felt a bit like busywork. I liked the art style and how the characters alternate between two shades. |
| 049 | 2025-05-14 | Neverlooted Dungeon | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV0JM0KpOWk | 1 | 6 | 8.5 | Minus some issues with dragging tombstone covers and stuff and weirdness with arrows and ropes and fire, and some oversized fish attack ranges, the game was very fun. The levels are hand-crafted so there likely won't be much replayability once all the dungeons are played through, but the first demo dungeon alone took me 3 hours and I still missed some stuff. Definitely felt like a modern tribute to Thief. |
| 048 | 2025-05-13 | Fishbowl | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnCxsvD1PTg | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | I liked the rhythm work minigame, and the story seemed cool, especially the dream part of it, but some of the characters speak a bit too childishly and the demo overall wasn't too long so it was hard to tell if it would trend into a great story or not. |
| 047 | 2025-05-13 | Mushroom Musume | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xKGR1Llhhk | 1 | 0 | 6 | The game goes back and forth between viewpoints and the other character is stuck in stasis stats-wise despite living their life in game, which is weird. This means you need to know upcoming events and plan for them in a previous season if you want a specific ending. It seems like there's a lot of unlockable story bits so later runs have more options. |
| 046 | 2025-05-13 | Let's Build a Dungeon | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDrhlU70ksk | 1 | 1 | 5.5 | Game crashed 4 times at the start before we could start going, starting tutorial was sparse, and the UI and storyline and all was a bit weird. I found "Lord Richard" and his story to be rather clumsy. There were funny bits though, like player reviews. And the idea of an overbearing investor could be interesting. |
| 045 | 2025-05-12 | inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NacY9wnd3pw | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | I like the chill pace and the idea of talking to your customers and learning their stories in a liminal setting late at night. Kind of reminds me of Coffee Talk. The pseudo Japanese language is weird but consistent so it's interesting in that it represents a different language. UI feels primitive, and keybinds and when the mouse can or cannot be used could use some work. |
| 044 | 2025-05-12 | Ten Thousand Coins: The Golden Merchant | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPmCHZjQHnY | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | Love the use of merchant goods in combat, and the story so far seems pretty good too. UI has a couple of issues here and there, like the ability to accidentally lose combat loot due to clicking the Forage button while the combat loot window was still open. Not sure the trading mechanic regarding getting the opponent to become Impatient is the best option, but it's interesting. |
| 043 | 2025-05-11 | Forgotlings | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGOugNwDD3M | 1 | 2 | 5.5 | I liked the existence of the stealth bits and the storyline seemed interesting so far, and the jumping was mostly fine out of combat, but the combat was atrocious. Combat lag animations, easy to get stunlocked into a very quick death, imprecise jumping where your character locks onto a ledge instead of trying to jump away or at opponents... |
| 042 | 2025-03-26 | Vuntra City | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1TDyfCjkIs (Afterhours) | - | - | 7 | Very pretty. Some fake reflections and car/road mesh issues and I did find some repeated prefabs and items, and this was just an environment demo so there were no people around, but what was there of the city generation seems very nice. |
| 041 | 2025-03-19 | Cairn | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmHQ1Rlnuus (Afterhours) | - | - | 8 | Love the vibe, and the gameplay is interesting enough though there were a couple of things I wasn't sure about. The mountains and solitude and the cairns and rest spots that you find were really nice though. I felt like I bonded with my character as we climbed wordlessly. |
| 040 | 2025-03-18 | WindStop Strategy | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQydRMjEZ8g (Afterhours) | - | - | 3 | Mostly held back by terrible/nonexistant translations right now, it mixes a tactical map conquering layer and supposed sect management/self-cultivation aspects with a strategic combat layer and a bunch of visual novel stories in between. There's no in-world character movement -- the world and battle maps both involve selecting nodes to travel to, and combat is a 9 square grid for each side's characters to stand on. The demo broke at the end too. |
| 039 | 2025-03-13 | Am I Nima | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMTVuBTZPmY (Afterhours) | - | - | 6.5 | It's Little Alchemy but with an interesting mild-horror psychological story wrapped around it. Interesting premise, but needs UI/QoL improvements, suffers from the same avalanche of combination choices and organizational problems that Little Alchemy has. |
| 038 | 2025-03-06 | Cauldron | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k__Fp2gpMXc (Afterhours) | - | - | 6.5 | Wish the UI was a bit better in places, but this one has lots of dopamine -- you play minigames to collect items to upgrade your party or upgrade the minigame itself. Pleasant game, funny writing, definitely a great companion game to putter on while doing other things. Multiple game modes for different moods that affect each other, like some powerful upgrades require you to complete X number of game modes. Could use more tooltips and such for the combat part of the game though. |
| 037 | 2025-03-05 | FUMEHEAD | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWGObO5OaSE | 1 | 0 | 7.5 | I liked this one a lot. Stylish colours and characters, a unique battle phase implementation for the deck that determines what colour cards are eligible to appear that round, consumables that have expiration dates so you cannot hoard them too long, a stylish inventory/upgrade menu, a descent into insanity storyline, and a funny post-end-of-demo scene. |
| 036 | 2025-03-05 | Doloc Town | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SMBR0miG5I | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Cozy farming/life sim with a post-apoc theme and a side-scrolling view. There are quite a few almost-familiar-but-slightly-different implementations of systems like the faint/sleep penalty, the need for planters, the sleeping tent that you can build platforms in, portable 15-use boxes, tech trees that require XP levels in multiple tasks, etc. Some I like, some I'm intrigued by, some I'm not sure about. The ambience during the rain is especially wonderful. There's combat and bosses too, though not in what I played. |
| 035 | 2025-03-05 | Cubic Odyssey | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD3SlTlE6eA (Afterhours) | - | - | 7 | Pretty smooth, stylish galaxy-wide Minecraft/NMS inspired game with things like vehicles and spaceships, including what seems to be mobile spaceship bases and such eventually. And portals to go back to any planet bases. I liked the demo quite a bit, minus a few issues like hotbar quirks and the inability to split items. The stars, the colours, the meteor showers, they were great. Can't tell how repetitive it is later on though. |
| 034 | 2025-03-04 | The Northern Path | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1srD1upPisw | 1 | 1 | 6 | Sledge. Dredge in the tundra with a dog sled and a more peaceful overall vibe. There does not seem to be a food/supplies mechanic, which is fairly different from many other coldlands survival games. Which means you can basically farm tons of money at the start of the game with no penalty. That part's weird. |
| 033 | 2025-03-04 | Shadowveil: Legend of The Five Rings | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXQeFozkUYk | 1 | 1 | 6 | Roguelite autobattler. I like the idea in general and love the flow, but gameplay was a bit slow, some clicks weren't intuitive, and I felt like I was fighting the UI here and there while trying to get used to it. I LOVE L5R though. And we didn't get to see much of the roguelite upgrades, but it apparently is quite good. |
| 032 | 2025-03-04 | Absurd Story: Back Home | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hihldHN4Srk (Afterhours) | - | - | 3 | This demo is held back by a very poor translation effort, but there's a chance the actual game could be fairly interesting. It looks like the main character is en route to pick up a quirky party and the puzzles are easy in the demo part of the game, except for a part that I wasn't noticing the ingame feedback for. |
| 031 | 2025-03-03 | Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y13D9FqC34Q | 1 | 0 | 7 | Fun, solid, well voice-acted game. Not super simplistic, but not too tough either, it's more of like a comfort food game, put on your detective hat and follow along with the story. I did dislike occasionally knowing exactly who a deduction was talking about but not having the keyword for it because you have to find and talk to one specific person to get it though, but then again the map does show you what clues you have uncollected. |
| 030 | 2025-03-03 | Sylia | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_boKEXnYWg | 1 | 2 | 7 | Despite the forced 640x480 fullscreen resolution, some weird text things like characters at the start of some lines not being capitalized, and the perhaps slightly too long introduction gameplay segment, this game was great! I played far more than I meant to. The pet characters were fun and memorable, being able to recruit random monsters was awesome, and the first Sequoia dungeon was cool, while also dropping hints that there were other pets we were missing. I managed to sell my map, that is probably a bug. |
| 029 | 2025-03-03 | Bura: The Way the Wind Blows | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYgXHt0nhBo (Afterhours) | - | - | 3.5 | Most of the art was decently nice but some (faces, walls) were low-poly, weird and offputting. Lack of decoration and life in village, the "church" was a small empty room. Story was nonexistent and characters twice referred to things that hadn't happened yet. Interestingly it looks like the full game involves a time skip to an older protagonist. Game gave me vertigo too, partly because FOV slider was hidden, but the controls were not very good overall and hiding acorns in random places is not "rewarding exploration". |
| 028 | 2025-03-02 | Deliver At All Costs | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5NTpoeW2B8 | 1 | 3 | 8 | This was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Destructible physics, fun and voiced narrator and over-the-top characters, great music, chaotic quests, and intriguing vehicle upgrades. Kind of felt like playing GTA: VC again. Main drawback would be the tank controls, but I suspect this is deliberate in order to cause more chaos. |
| 027 | 2025-03-02 | qualia | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vp953IRHdg | 1 | 0 | 2 | More an art project than a game. The main menu did warn that the demo was only 5-10 minutes long though. But even as an art project, it's lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. It needs more interaction than just pressing Human or AI buttons, and it basically doesn't make full use of the video game medium. The engine was also very weird, with visible menu items up top. |
| 026 | 2025-03-02 | Nice Day for Fishing | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfH5UDYXbkE | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | I like the game and its fishing mechanic, and the NPC banter was quite funny even without knowing about Epic NPC Man, but the game runs the risk of being repetitive and how good it will be will depend on that. |
| 025 | 2025-03-02 | Veloria: The Knot of Candles | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzTHDavhqQM (Afterhours) | - | - | 5 | I enjoyed this one enough to play it all the way to the end of the demo, but it needs several passes to deal with all the translation issues, punctuation, missing line breaks that made sentences cut off, etc. Classic Asian jank. Some of the puzzles were moderately difficult, with red herrings thrown in, and translation issues hindered a couple of them. Plushie and dog abuse trigger warnings. |
| 024 | 2025-03-01 | My Lil Afterlife | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KCp7rv41QI | 1 | 2 | 2 | Felt like a very early tech demo. Graphics were cute, but music was a bit repetitive, inventory/placement needs QoL, there's no reason to craft anything, the dungeon was too short even for a demo, and combat is weird with some attacks ignoring line of sight, attacks landing before induction bar ends, etc. Also a bug where you can go into decoration mode as the dungeon was loading and you'd end up invisible in the dungeon. |
| 023 | 2025-03-01 | Do No Harm | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96mjNYolrlA | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | They pile on quite a lot of mechanics and some things like dosages, allergies (and how to get around them), and the meter thing that came in with the wheel were not explained well or seemed inconsistent. Don't know if that was intentional. Dislike the sanity mechanic where you have to quaff laudanum, because that's like RNG saying "Hey, here's a random gold or sanity loss for this customer." |
| 022 | 2025-03-01 | Tales of Seikyu | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpmzCUqkCrY | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Yokai and cozy Stardew mechanics in a 3D game seems to be a nice match, but there are signs of lack of polish that I hope get addressed. Inventory and the shortcut bars were a chore, at least on kb/m. Some characters clipped through things or stared at walls. I had some screen tearing, though the stream didn't capture that. It was a 3-day demo so there was nothing like a festival or event to see, those are often the highlights of these sorts of games. |
| 021 | 2025-03-01 | Hanako's Flower Shop | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEZP1X06gKg (Afterhours) | - | - | 5.5 | I very much like the concept, but I found the English voice acting and the amount of unnecessary early banter during the "tutorial" offputting, though maybe I was a bit harsh. There's proper JP voices planned though. The flower collecting segment was buggy too. Things like trait stacking were not explained, at least within the first couple bouquets. I love their volume sliders for each character. |
| 020 | 2025-03-01 | That's not my Neighbor | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_H4-LzX_Lo (Afterhours) | - | - | 4.5 | Demo on https://nachogames.itch.io/thats-not-my-neighbor and not part of Steam Next Fest. It was fine, fairly straightforward, demo only contained one level with 7 neighbours to interview. The rotary phone UI was a bit weird. |
| 019 | 2025-02-28 | As I Began to Dream | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfHELWJsLcg | 1 | 0 | 6 | The store description mentions trauma, but the demo never got to the trauma part, and it was fairly easy and straightforward. But it was a cozy puzzle platformer, and if the puzzles eventually get harder then it will be a good game. The rules around the collectibles felt a little confusing. |
| 018 | 2025-02-28 | Promise Mascot Agency | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRbja6aJWso | 1 | 0 | 7 | Smooth, solid demo, with a Yakuza-like weirdness that I like, was voiced in Japanese and even has a vocal song, all great things. Vehicle controls (on keyboard) were a bit too slidey, but might be adjustable. My main worry is that it felt like a weird but ultimately bland minigame collectathon. It will live or die by how good its story is, but that didn't impress me in the demo. I really like the timed demo concept though. |
| 017 | 2025-02-28 | Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx_-Gn0go64 (Afterhours) | - | - | 6.5 | Fairly smooth and very pretty Japanese-themed, Hades-like, action roguelite, though there's a bit of an animation lag at the end of the attacks that I don't really like in my action games. No major complaints though. |
| 016 | 2025-02-27 | Wordatro! | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoTFyHWOEKs | 1 | 0 | 6.5 | Balatro with words, and it is exactly what it advertises to be, needs more QoL and powers and stuff but the demo promises that in the full game anyway. Main Menu button really shouldn't end the current game without warning, demo or no. |
| 015 | 2025-02-27 | Valkyrie Star: A Cacophony Choir | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKAf-LyyPtQ | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | Combat is missing lots of descriptions like tooltips on buffs/debuffs, some skills and mechanics (like mana/mystique) were partly renamed and had two names, and the story writing was incoherent at times. Nice to see several sort-of henshins though, and the concept in general is intriguing. With polish and an interesting story, could be very fun. |
| 014 | 2025-02-27 | What Comes Next | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FMjuqG9Mns (Afterhours) | - | - | 3 | It's really simplistic, has weird "story" arcs (like when you break into a house to get a shirt for a beggar), you can't retrieve the mouse after he completes his tasks and returns to the girl, and it overall feels very much like a free game or tech demo. |
| 013 | 2025-02-26 | STRAND | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD5u3M3W8iY | 1 | 0 | 5 | What I played of the demo didn't really show that much, though I really liked being able to pick up and spin/examine so many weird items. I might have gotten softlocked at the end though, not sure. Also the game has FPS issues on higher graphics and looking around can cause motion sickness. |
| 012 | 2025-02-26 | Skin Deep | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT5ysVzzlGU | 1 | 1 | 5.5 | Stylish spaceships and weird cat captains! Am worried using props to murder enemies and get rid of heads might feel sameish after a couple of levels, especially with the "easier" ways of killing. The teleporting in the demo was weird too, but assumedly not in full game. |
| 011 | 2025-02-26 | Wanderstop | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qePDwBbre8k | 1 | 0 | 9 | Amazing demo. Beautiful graphics, stylish teahouse, great concept and intro, fun characters, perfect length for a demo. Main nitpick would be that controls can be a bit touchy, both in terms of picking things up, holding them, and item interaction. But it's a nitpick. |
| 010 | 2025-02-26 | Dragon Heartburn | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqUOZJwHkfo (Afterhours) | - | - | 2 | A finicky "precision puzzle" game where you are breathing fire and need to navigate through rooms of idiotic workers without killing any of them. There's a cursor bug in fullscreen, and the fire mechanics and the weirdness around what happens at angles in the game are not what I'd consider fun. |
| 009 | 2025-02-25 - 2025-02-26 | Mayhem Maidens | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we3qAdUjDTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv8ytlqVtcU (Afterhours) |
1 | 0 | 4 | Basically Vampire Survivors as a tower defencey roguelite where you control/recruit up to 5 girls (characters from some Light Novel) and protect/upgrade an orb in the middle. Character movement is slow though, and it's very difficult to switch to/control the characters in the chaos. The melee characters feel a lot weaker too. |
| 008 | 2025-02-25 | Food Wagon | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDVKaafocI | 1 | 1 | 3 | The adventure part was weak, the graphics and UI were super basic, some Korean signs were not translated, the "roguelike" component felt out of place like they didn't figure out how to save games, and the only NPCs I found were bugged. But pulling the food wagon around and across bridges and setting up camp and cooking kebabs was evocative of something much greater. I want a better game like this. |
| 007 | 2025-02-25 | MagicCar of Delicious / Gourmet Food Wizard | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0-9ftL_1J8 | 1 | 0 | 7 | I enjoyed this one. Upgrade a little train with towers that you drag around clearing little zones. There's a night market segment to sell food at too. <3 Though that part is weird, since you can just leave and reenter with no penalty to reset the stall. |
| 006 | 2025-02-25 | SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHLBl-gXdF4 | 1 | 0 | 5 | It's a serviceable "restaurant" simulator with stages, using Singapore/SEA-inspired recipes, with the main twist being that there's a different "outdoor" area connected to the restaurant with each stage. It's meant for two players and I felt disadvantaged playing alone. The early story is weak. Who am I selling my food to? The island is deserted! |
| 005 | 2025-02-24 | Moves Of The Diamond Hand | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t409cCnDZqY | 1 | 1 | 7 | Fun dice-levelling mechanics and stylish art, though there are some weird decisions like not being able to just use items in inventory to heal yourself directly. Might be possible to get softlocked. |
| 004 | 2025-02-23 | Sultan's Game | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRDRUt0-Eck | 1 | 1 | 6.5 | This is a Cultist Simulator variant with similar QoL features from those games, but with a narrative story wrapped around it. Lots of typoes in the demo. Some unclear bits on what cards can be used where sometimes. But very intriguing otherwise. |
| 003 | 2025-02-23 | CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2oulOZbBPM | 1 | 0 | 3.5 | The crafting is both simplistic and finicky (some unexplained parts) at the same time, but with a bit of polish it could be a lot of fun. Right now, not really. Game is voiced, somehow. There are two buttons at the top that return you to main menu, for some reason. Lost my first character because there's no confirmation on one of them, and the game crashed soon after. |
| 002 | 2025-02-22 | Save the Villainess: An Otome Isekai Roleplaying Game | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blYilW2TpwI | 1 | 0 | 5.5 | Funny/interesting narration style, pretty art, but lots of unnecessary and slow animations (skippable though). It's not "snappy". I accidentally mixed up save and load twice, annoying menu UI. |
| 001 | 2025-02-22 | VIOLENT RUSH | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1goU_YWSkt4 | 1 | 0 | 2 | Stylish, but short demo that abruptly ends, no meaningful choices, very questionable content and art. |