First post of the end of the month: several thousand words on Steam Next Fest games (vids coming soon I promise)

Hey everyone!

It's that time of month where I update you on what's going on with video projects so I can afford to eat while getting them done, lol.

First off, I'm so unbelievably sorry that videos are taking so long, and rest assured they will be with you very very soon. The Elden Ring Bingo one, the MGS codec deep dive, the problem with the games industry one, and this one talking about how cool the Steam Next Fest games have been. I seriously cannot apologise enough and I am so unbelievably appreciative for your patience and support while the finishing touches get put on all of this.

Basically I had planned for a much smoother month than ended up happening. Wanted to get the videos done super quickly, then ended up getting COVID. The actual case itself was pretty damn mild but the knock-on effect it had on my already awful sleep schedule (which had been made worse due to new medication I'd been on) saw me working as much on my general health as much as the videos themselves. As the short month went on, I had to start working on the next videos too, so here we are. Just been a bit frantic and once again I am super sorry for that.

I'm looking to have at least work-in-progress vids up for all of this stuff in the next few days, but for now I'll just post the scripts of what I've been working on. This one is a write up of a bunch of Next Fest games I've been playing, and the hope it gives me for the medium—if not for the industry itself. I sincerely hope you enjoy it and can understand the delay here. I will make it up!

Thank you so so much for allowing me to do this work and ensure I can pay rent at the same time. You rule so much.

Thanks and see you in a minute with the other post,

Hamish

Writing on Games

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The games industry is unquestionably in turmoil at the moment. The tech boon of the early 2020s has long since faded and it seems that every day, we’re waking up to news of venture capitalists looking to recoup their investments not only at the direct expense of art, but of livelihoods. Layoffs are a constant feature of games reporting nowadays, and it’s difficult to see how these frankly inhuman, despicable CEOs are so myopic, so daft that they can’t envision the knock-on effect this exodus of talent and knowledge is going to have on the industry in years to come. It’s cataclysmically bad out here in so many ways. You know this.

Which is why, when a ray of hope like Steam Next Fest comes along, you hold onto it for all its worth. Because hopeful it truly is—allowing for an almost incalculable number of games, hundreds upon hundreds, to showcase free demos for upcoming indie titles. As a player, it’s a damn smorgasbord, a shower of wonders that no one person could hope to conclusively cover.

In a world where it so often seems like AAA live service slop dominates every sector of this industry, and despite how hard it is for indie devs to keep things ticking over within the brutal industrial framework in which we operate, the countless games those devs produce; the experimentation, innovation and colliding of genres those games represent, unrestricted by the need to appeal to the broadest demographic possible, it’s all enough to make you realise that there is a whole world of games out there that many of us might not know about.

Like I say, I can’t possibly cover everything I played, let alone everything great in here, so help exemplify everything I’m talking about and hopefully point you in the right direction, let’s talk about a whole bunch of the demos I played that give me this hope for the future of the medium—hopefully conveying why you need to be paying attention to things outside of what the AAA behemoths deem worthy of presentation. And be sure to stick around until the end to see the title from Next Fest that has gotten me more excited than perhaps any other game I’ve played in years. Seriously, this one in particular is one you don’t want to miss. But before we get to that, let’s slow things down a little bit.

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Football culture can be a wild thing. Americans couldn’t possibly relate, but outside of those borders, what they would call soccer is a really big deal—in many places it’s treated with an almost spiritual reverence. Where I’m from that regularly and unfortunately boils over into outright sectarian violence, but in the setting for Despelote, early-2000s Ecuador, the sentiment seems to be a lot more positive.

Indeed, still stabilising after a turbulent time in the country’s fiscal and political history, with economic crises and switching to the dollar and the coup that followed not long in the nation’s rear-view, the game shows that all of that seems to come second to the fact that hey, Ecuador might make the 2002 world cup (which they would eventually do). High economic inequality coinciding with deep national pride when it comes to the beautiful game—mirrored by despelote’s visual style, it’s a fuzzy, complicated situation (that, I should state, I am of course no expert in—my sincere apologies if I’ve fudged the details here).

It's a feeling captured expertly through the game’s use of perspective, where your focus on the finicky but clever football controls not only evokes that lumbering feel of old video game recreations of the sport, but also commands your blinkered attention. Playing as a child, speech bubbles discussing adult concerns pop up in your peripheral vision and fade away, flying right by you; you’re too busy chasing the ball back after your pal booted it into oblivion. You don’t yet care that VAT increases are going to reduce spending power—your focus is on how unfair it is that you only get one and a half hours of lunch for three hours of class.

There’s something beautifully pure about the way the game captures that intense excitement that comes with kicking a ball about with your mates; sticking your hand up and shouting “here,” hoping above everything else that it’ll get passed to you next—that you’ll get to drive the game for a second or two; that you can show off your daft wee skills and nutmeg your pals. That game, that ball becomes your entire world, for the briefest moment of time, that you will not learn to cherish until it’s gone.

You get the feeling that this is as much about the blissful, whimsical tunnel-vision that can come with being a kid as it is the economy of a nation or its view on the sport of football; it’s the beauty and innocence of being able to be obsessed with just one thing; going about the world with that singular drive to muck about. You can choose to play a bit of wally if you want (regional names for that may differ). That’s great, within a game following a strict narrative, that’s freeing in its own way. There’s a nostalgic haze to Despelote; a verisimilitude peering through its misty, cartoonish art style that still resonates with me despite not growing up in that region, its culture.

And yet I suspect there’s something else boiling beneath the surface, an element to its story that the mechanics may yet be hiding from us for now—with the fact that I’m able to read so much into a relatively simple mechanical and visual palate so far making me more than thrilled to check out the full game when it releases on May 1st. I personally cannot wait.

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As much as one of its very first quips might tell you otherwise, the stylistic influences underpinning the blocky, PS1-esque art style of FUMES aren’t exactly difficult to pick up on. You ride around landscapes that seem entirely barren, but for the occasional swarms of ragged, battle-hardened vehicles that, like you, are armed to the teeth; where the only apparent hostility between you is that you happen to share this piece of post-apocalypse, I guess.

All this to say, it’s impressive how FUMES effectively gamifies that delightfully simple Mad Max-inspired premise—where the legend of that particular franchise will just find himself in a random spot of trouble, which will largely form the film’s plot. As an upcoming video may or may not show you, I’ve been thinking a lot the last few years about what would make a good Mad Max game, and despite its relatively colourful, bouncy demeanour, I’d say FUMES comes pretty close to nailing it.

Beyond that though, with the scale of some of its vehicular foes, going from Hot Wheels to a bona fide fortress for you to take down, requiring multiple stages of exploration and dismantlement; the way the mechanics require you to lead your shots from modular weapons within a small reticule, honestly brought to mind some of the Armored Core games, as much as it did the Road Warrior.

And while that exploration did kill the momentum a bit—lacking as it did much in the way of impact, direction or precision in its light platforming—I enjoy the fact that there’s more than meets the eye here. FUMES was one I had seen footage of kicking about the internet for a while now, and after playing it, the game has jumped pretty high up the list of games I’m most excited for. It’s apparently releasing into early access soon, and I’ll be first in line when it does.

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I am a big fan of when games just start with zero fanfare. That might sound odd. You want your game to kick off with a bang, right? Well, I think there's a place for games like qualia doing the Sam Barlow thing and just opening up a computer window. An interface within an interface; every option that would normally be on some nondiegetic list, now simply another icon on this metatextual desktop. And I can't tell if this is just a quirk of the game or not, but the appearance of the menu bar, whether intentional or otherwise, serves as a nice touch. It all makes you wonder if you're actually playing a game or simply launching a piece of software here.

And sure, at this early stage, the presentation is what will dominate most conversation around qualia. The demo is up front with the fact that it will take you 2 to 3 minutes—a rigidly defined scope of experience, that I personally am a big fan of in this demo context. It also suggests multiple endings that will take you around about an hour to fully acquire, and how you get them is largely through this rather simplistic interface.

Essentially, qualia’s demo is a multiple-choice exam assessing whether you think either of the two parties placed before you is an AI or human. And similar to games like Not Gor Broadcast, to which qualia is being compared, there's a similar vibe of messing with the dressing a bit; picking the picking the objectively incorrect answer just to see what would happen.

But ya know, maybe this is just my paranoia talking. But there was something interesting that happened as I was analysing these answers over the few brief minutes I spent with qualia, where I started to second guess myself; where one answer, fairly pristine in its presentation, would be countered with a jumble of spelling and punctuation errors. My initial thought was always, well, human error suggests human intellect. But then I wonder! If I was an intelligent being trying to convince a human of my personhood, is this not a quirk of the species I would want to convey?

Would I even want to answer questions correctly? Or would I try to disguise myself with petulance, for example? Upset and anger? But does all of that mean that the other participant somehow isn’t human? Am I simply not giving humans enough credit in terms of honesty and precision while answering these questions? Or am I just looking at two Ais, at varying levels of development, of malice? That's a lot of questions to ask oneself in the space of a three-minute demo.

And instead of getting answers to those questions, you largely get the breaking down of The System you may expect from one of these kinds of games. And then the demo ends, because it's a demo.

But I think less important than those answers is the fact it got me to ask these questions in the first place, through such a simple interface. And as such, it seems like a journey I'm more than happy to take the plunge on—a really neat way to engage with technological anxieties of the modern age.

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There's something unassuming about Haste: Broken Worlds when you first boot it up. Indeed, with its weird, rather jittery animations that definitely feel like a demo rather than a full final product, combined with a heck of a lot of motion blur and the fact it utterly cooks my PC, the vibe initially resembles one of those “Fan Makes Mario or Sonic in Unreal Engine 4” videos, where there's a perhaps unnatural sheen, a gloss over everything that feels somewhat at odds with the occasionally blocky nature of the animation, its imprecise obstacle placement.

I'm willing to bet, though, that once you get this in your hands and you start to get a feel for the kind of momentum management it’s asking of you, you’ll be demanding Sega hire this man (or woman, or person, or team, I guess). Like a few of the games that will appear on this list, there's an importance of managing ebb and flow, of reading the peaks and undulations in the geography in front of you, and positioning yourself in the air to keep to a straight a line as possible, as you dash across these courses at superhuman speeds.

And when you manage to nail that flow, it's as pure a thrill as any game like it. I’ve seen people bring up the stronger 3D Sonic entries in relation to this. That said, the game that came to mind most prominently was, of all things, Descenders, owing to the game's level and mission structure; seeing you take forks in a branching level path, managing resources you collect across an entire run, and trying to keep your health up for as long as possible—a prospect made all the more daunting as the hurdles in your path increasingly envelope you and limit your options, forcing you to react in the moment.

Indeed, this is a game whose obstacles, like Descenders, make speed look tantalizing but feel potentially scary. There's a level of concentration, of anticipation required of you if you're to get through these courses unscathed. That flow state, once you achieve it, is a joy to exist within. And sure, while there's some visual jank to be ironed out I guess, the fact I'm able to compare Haste to one of my favourite games ever, should tell you all you need to know regarding how I feel about this thing. Keep your eye on this one for sure.

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On a similarly traversal-focused note, if you’ve followed this channel for any great length of time, you’ll know that emphasising movement as a key mechanic, allowing me to build catastrophic momentum, and unleashing me on a wide-open space designed for that very purpose, is a surefire way to win me over. And, in that regard, given that I initially discovered its developer (MadmanEpic) through an excellent video they made detailing the absurdity of TrackMania, AVENGE MYSELF is clearly coming from someone who firmly knows what the hell they’re talking about—a person after my own damn heart.

And as soon as you enter this first-person cyber playground and start working out the intricacies of gliding around, that understanding, that potential makes itself more than apparent. I say “potential” because it’s not a game that gives you that speed up front—you have to seek it out.

I mean look, the rise in popularity of Counter Strike surfing was a little after my time, and so the process of figuring out exactly what the game wanted from me at any given moment, what combination of button presses, in what order, it wanted me to get into the rhythm of, took some work beyond what the sparse, crudely drawn tutorials were able to drill into me.

In that sense, its tagline’s demand that I reject gravity ended up becoming the driving force of my time with the demo—as if I was a freshly awoken Neo watching Morpheus jump between two skyscrapers with ease, I frequently found myself plummeting to the wastes below. I kept thinking to myself, “am I even playing this right?” It’s its own process that may take a more carefully structured tutorial for many players like myself to fully grasp.

But contrary to the constant progression suggested by its mechanics, the best time I had with this demo wasn’t in its few more open-ended levels, but from carefully studying the path of surgically placed slopes and inclines before me, trying again and again to hit the perfect spot to maximise my momentum and catapult me to where I needed to be.

Where I get the feeling the meat of the game, as the developer sees it, might lie in the more conventional time trial format the game’s speed facilitates, AVENGE MYSELF was frequently at its best for me when it felt like a more focused puzzler—with all the repeated attempts and eventual feelings of triumph that accompany it. While I hope that part of the game’s identity isn’t left wholly in the dust as it nears its final release (and that there’s perhaps some more coherent checkpointing implemented), that sparse few seconds where everything just clicks, is enough of a thrill that I can see this becoming a staple of the Games Where You Go Fast genre, which to my mind is high praise indeed.

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Keeping on the theme of movement, we have Demon Tides—except, instead of the emphasis being placed on speed, this is much more your typical 3D platformer. As trite a comparison as it is, the ways in which your moves and jumps flexibly combo into one another, the comparisons to, say, 3D Mario are probably inevitable.

Although (and this may just be a side effect of the game’s demo state) there’s something charmingly scrappy to the way this plays. The animation is all top notch, the character designs are smooth, but you can tell the developers are really reaching for something here as far as flow goes. Just as you begin to think how much of a pain it might be to continually wade through this waist deep molasses, the game provides you a new, much faster mode of traversal; allowing you to rocket along the sea, from your hub (where you can also upgrade and customise your character), to the disparate islands that form the game’s relatively open levels.

Outside of the jank you occasionally find in its obvious pre-release state, there is maybe a little bit of a disparity between the speed you can achieve when you effectively combo all your powers together, and your normal, potentially sluggish walking speed. On a similar note, while the make-your-own-checkpoint system might seem like a good, freeing idea for a fairly open game, even setting aside its ropey reliability, there are points at which I’d rather the game handled that for me—rather than either waiting the several seconds it takes to place one, or forgetting entirely and losing, potentially, a good couple of minutes of progress, as the disparity in speed occasionally makes platforming feel a little awkward.

But that aside, consider me fully intrigued; the developers might really be onto something here, and with a little tightening up I could see this making waves when it releases later this year.

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So, you know, a lot here to work through. But if you want the game that had me the most excited, perhaps more excited than any game in years, look no further than Skin Deep.

When it comes to Next Fest (and indie games generally but that’s a subject for another video), there are simply too many games for any one person to keep up with, but all it took was fellow YouTuber Static Canvas (who is one of the best on the platform and absolutely deserves your attention) telling me that Skin Deep was the work of Blendo Games and suddenly I had to drop everything to get it downloaded.

I’ve been thinking about 2016’s Quadrilateral Cowboy a lot lately—it was one of my favourites of that year, and its mixture of coding as a main mechanic, speedrunning and wonderfully surreal worldbuilding has honestly stuck in my mind like few other games, so upon booting in to its tutorial and finding that it was an immersive sim—that rather than programming things from a distance you serve as the far more direct glitch in your enemy’s system, I was positively thrilled.

And upfront, the thing you have to understand about my excitement here is that in a couple of levels you provided for this demo, one of which being a tutorial, you're not exactly presented the most challenging of scenarios. Levels are small enough, rooms unguarded enough, that even when left to your own devices, it feels like there's not a whole lot that can't be achieved by just chucking enough stuff at the wall and seeing what gets sucked into the vacuum of space—a vacuum, I should say, that you can freely explore almost unencumbered.

With that in mind, I can imagine a few people being disappointed, at least in this early demo, at the ease with which these challenges can be overcome. Throw something at them, stun them, jump on their back, force them to crash into a wall. But the thing is, I also don't feel like that's necessarily the point of this demo. That's not really why I'm so excited for Skin Deep.

Don't get me wrong, I have full faith that the 1.0 release at the end of April will feature a far more robust and involved series of challenges, as the levels get harder and harder to navigate. But beyond that, what you're what you're provided here is an introductory playground. What's important here isn't the difficulty of the scenario you’re presented, but rather showing you the wild ways in which its systems, packed unbelievably densely as they are into this small package, can interact.

Like, sure, you can throw that pepper and crash them into an object on the wall. But what is that object? Perhaps you've just disabled a map screen that could allow you to plan your approach for the next room, as well as save your progress for this one. Enemies respawn after a certain while, so you have to pick up their head, taking up an item slot in your inventory, and quickly find a way to dispatch it. Maybe if you hadn’t slammed that head into the map, locating a bin for it would be a much more efficient, less frenzied process.

You could send that head flying into the vacuum of space, but upon sealing that vacuum, you'd better watch out for glass on the floor—glass that will damage you and you will have to manually remove, but that can be picked up and used as a weapon itself.

The sinks may read as a bit of funny set dressing, like you’d get in any other game that lets you flush the toilets, but sneak through enough vents and not only will you alert guards to your presence, but you'll also get dirty, eventually stinking up the place. The guards don't even need to see or hear you coming—suddenly, that hand sanitizer doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Hell, perhaps you simply slip and fall in the laundry room after smacking a guard's head into one of the washing machines, the resultant suds curing you of your stench so that you may get the card key and rescue the cats that form the part from the rest of your crew.

And this is where we get onto the main reason Skin Deep so resonated with me—it's the worldbuilding.

It's the retro-futuristic optimism and snark written into every instructional leaflet and industrial warning adorning the tech that governs this world. It's the fact that technology that allows enemies to respawn is its own product, where upon death, your skull can be separated from your body so that a new host might be found. It's a piece of technology that, in this world, suggests a level of wealth, and also allows enemies to shout at you as you frantically try to shove them down the toilet.

It's the fact that, as in Quadrilateral Cowboy, cats are some of the most important companions you can have. Where they sold you armaments in that prior game, here they command your ship; employees as they are of Manx Insurance Agent Organization; more erudite, well-spoken the human goons you come up against; they sheer, that same blocky look, that same narrative and mechanical continuity that lets you know in no uncertain terms that you are playing a Blendo game.

As fun for me as the immersive sim action was, just as enticing was simply exploring my room, scrolling through and replying to emails on a gloriously old school interface. More so than challenge what I'm looking for out of these systems is tactility—the story their interconnected nature tells as much as the problems they present me to solve.

And hell, you know, when I saw that timer come up at the end of the level, it sure did inspire those same competitive feelings that took over when my old podcast co-host, Nico and I played the hell out of Quadrilateral Cowboy back in 2016. I absolutely cherished my time with that game back in the day, and seeing the stylistic and narrative through lines from then to now honestly gave me a fair few nostalgic pangs. It really was something special. And honestly, from the limited time I spent with it, Skin Deep seems to be on a remarkably similar trajectory. Out of everything I played at Next Fest, this was absolutely the thing I came away from proceedings most giddy about.

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And I guess that’s just it. I have a video on the way talking about the complicated nature of the games ecosystem that, now more than ever, makes it difficult for anything but the most industrialised products to get traction. On every level, from development, production, distribution, marketing and coverage, things are goddamn tough for anyone but the biggest players right now.

But separate from that industrial context and the accompanying hardships, I find it difficult not to look at the state of the games themselves right now, the state of the artform (to put it in vague terms), and not feel pretty damn excited. If I could cover half the games I played here that will have me frantically extolling the virtues of to my mates, this piece would be about two hours long, and no one wants that.

Moreso than any individual recommendation then, if you’re to take anything away from this piece, let it be this—there are plenty of problems to be solved with the industry for sure, but as Next Fest shows us, if we make the choice to reject the AAA slop, there is no shortage of greatness that awaits us. Your favourite game of all time might just be lying in a corner that you’d never have thought to look in previously. As existentially daunting as that prospect may be, it’s that not knowing, that discovery that the AAA world just doesn’t allow for, and that makes independent art so incredibly exciting. Go forth and dig deep.