I was originally going to check out Lisa the Undone since I rolled that on my bingo card, but it’s that time again: Steam Next Fest is here! As usual, here’s a few games I played that I like.
Let’s start off with something casual yet familiar. Matt Roszak – or kupogames – is a big name in flash games and even now sticks to making things in flash. He’s most known for the Epic Battle Fantasy series that ended off with the 5th game, but it still lives on in spirit through the upcoming game, Find Matt’s Cats.
Find Matt’s Cats is a hidden object game where you find various items and cats in fanciful worlds filled with, well, cats. It’s a firm reminder that flash art can actually be pretty neat, as all the levels feel like nice dioramas. Meanwhile, there’s an inner narrative of the game being made by the Epic Battle Fantasy cast. Presumably taking place after the 5th game, Matt makes himself known as the most annoying type of gamedev guy – the ideas guy – while everyone else does the work.
Clicking objects usually elicits small animations or sound effects. Maybe it won’t give you progress, but petting cats and hearing their meows is pretty fun – after all, cats are very much in right now for games. Clicking on buildings will give you a view of its insides, while chests open up to show what they hide. Some objects move out of the way to show that they were hiding an important item, and this is much more pronounced in the game’s hard mode, where some important things are locked behind something and you have to search for something different that will open it up.
Besides the I Spy assortment of things to find, levels also hide a bunch of cash. Cash is used to buy cosmetics. Even if you aren’t into that aspect of things, I like that the game gives you something else to look for so you feel like you’re accomplishing something. The levels also hold fan-art like the museum from EBF 5, showing appreciation for the fans of the Epic Battle Fantasy series.
To be honest, I just sorta casually followed this game because of the dev, but didn’t have an interest in it. But now that I’ve played the demo myself, I think it’s a delightful and relaxing time. The game actually boasts to have a 20 to 50 hour playtime, which is nutty for a hidden object game, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised with how long this game was worked on and Epic Battle Fantasy 5‘s playtime.
Now, let’s check out something with a little more action! Typically, beat em’ ups have you cleaning the streets with brawls. But what if I told you… that you could stop crime by taking care of people? Wild, I know.
Punch Lunch: Food Truck Fighter is an upcoming game by 3R Games S.A. that crosses beat em’ up action with cooking sim. Everyone is hungry – so hungry that they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. Fighting is alright, I liked it when I fought a guy off in first-person. I wish I had a controller on hand to more effectively fight because my hands aren’t exactly fluid, but gameplay seems good.
Your haters will eventually respawn and they still want to beat your ass. But maybe, if you solve their hunger problem, they’ll respawn in a good mood. Sure, you might be using the money you beat out of them to buy ingredients, but consider that an advance payment.
So, we step away from the fighting to get cooking. Up to three customers await on delicious burgers, specifying how cooked they want their patties and what extras they want. Cooking is easy to understand, it isn’t as stressful as the hell of Overcooked – at least within what I could play of the demo. Satisfy a customer? They’ll be out on the beat em’ up world, cheering you on with no hate in their hearts. Flub on a burger? You can bet they’ll be a hater.
I kinda wish there was a reminder in the cooking phase of how much you have of each ingredient, but otherwise, I liked Punch Lunch. I think it has a nice structure, and it clearly has the potential to grow with what the Steam page promises.
Do you like war games? Well, here’s a war game! But nah, you aren’t going out fighting battles in FPS action. You aren’t even doing some RTS stuff. This is Acceptable Losses, a management game by Zann Archive.
In Acceptable Losses, you are a World War I officer managing the war effort from behind a desk. You manage a few squads and assign them to daily missions. You juggle decisions to maintain soldier readiness, exhaustion, and morale while hoping for good outcomes on missions. Seems easy, right? The problem, however, is that you can’t field all the missions. The war effort initially seems solid, but it will start to fray with those unaddressed missions.
Put off putting supply missions off for too long? Some soldiers will get weakened, so you’ll need to rearrange squad line-ups to make better whole squads. Fail to maintain the trenches for too long? Well, seems like a bad thing to fail to maintain during the war known for trench warfare. Forget to put a squad on defense duty when reports say the enemy is active? Nice job, you got some people killed, bozo. Put a squad whose members aren’t well-rested on a mission demanding full attention? You can bet your ass things go wrong. You can put yourself withn a squad to act as a little buff, but of course, you can’t oversee everyone.
Acceptable Losses is mundane and quiet to play, and the mundanity of it all contrasts pretty strongly with the horrors of failure. The safety of your position in all this is further compromised by your avatar character scratching the names of soldiers that died into the table, as a memorial and lasting reminder of your failures. It seems pretty obvious to say that war is bad, but well, the past few years shows that how we feel about it doesn’t matter.
…
But yeah, I like Acceptable Losses!
How about we check out a different kind of war? A war with magic people, quirky writing, chill grooves, and match-3 gameplay? Let’s give it up for the Titanium Court, applaud!
In AP Thomson’s Titanium Court, you are someone that was whisked into a world of fae and you’ve been implanted as the queen of the Titanium Court. The Titanium Court moves across a world full of tiles that can be rearranged when the world’s at high tide, and it must brace itself when the tide is low and war begins. As the queen, you guide the court across the realm in hopes of returning to reality…
At high tide, Titanium Court is a match-3 game. Match resource tiles together and you earn resources. Match enemy castles together and you take away some threat for what’s to come. Get a combo of matches and you earn more turns to make matches. But you can’t just match things willy-nilly! The Titanium Court is its own tile, and when the puzzle action’s over, the low tide phase starts and all enemy castles with active units will send their guys to lay siege.
Before the low tide action starts, you can buy up units with all those resources you gathered. You can buy up soldiers to fight the haters and lay your own sieges and you can buy people that could gather resources from resource tiles if the Court started low tide near them. You can also use spells, like a handy shift one that can change where the Court is on a line. Then the war may begin, with a timeline on the side counting down when enemy troops spawn and when the war ends. You don’t need to fight all the potential invaders, just survive until the end.
The low tide presents an interesting strategy layer with regards to the match-3 gameplay. It may seem tempting to match up mountain tiles for stone resources, but if there are mountains in between the Titanium Court and a castle, it might seem better to leave those mountains alone to delay enemy knights. But if the castle’s empty, you might want to get rid of those mountains so your knights have the time to ransack the place for money, since you can’t get money in high tide. It seems smart to merely prolong the Court’s survival, but you may need to enable aggressive moves for the sake of the long game.
Outside of the match-3 antics, the Titanium Court tells a strange story that’s pretty engaging. Your court of advisors are a goofy mix of people like Longfellow the actual folklore puck, a construction worker lady that doubts the helpfulness of magic and prayer despite magic clearly being real, a talking cat, and a talking tooltip whose existence is blasphemous to the fae. The Glass House is a potion selling establishment that aligns with the Titanium Court in a war against trebuchets for throwing stones. Its host gives you a potion that makes people love baseball more. It all truly feels like you’re in some bizarre fairytale story.
The story vibes are also strengthened by the presentation. Portraits are simple yet striking, feeling like comic book panels. Titanium Court furthers the comic book feel by emphasizing actions with goofy panels, with the conquest of enemy castles being heralded with baseball batters striking hits and the end of a low-tide being announced with a panel of a referee. And everything in the game is played under pretty chill music. Nothing high-energy, just pleasant grooves that feel like a sweet dream.
I fucking love Titanium Court. It’s got strong style, surprisingly deep gameplay, fun writing, and it infused me with an appreciation of shoegaze. This is definitely something to look forward to.
I’ll see if I can get around to playing more stuff this week! One thing I definitely want to check out is The Mermaid Mask, since that’s the follow-up to Tangle Tower. Another thing that might be worth checking out is Esoteric Ebb, a Disco Elysium-like that’d make for a good alternative to, you know, the supposed Disco Elysium successor also available from Next Fest.
Indie Hell Zone 