What's Good About the Steam Next Fest, February 2024 Edition
Do you smell that? Those are Demos. I love the smell of Demos in the morning! It means that there’s some cool stuff on the horizon.
Apocalypse Now references aside ITS NEXT FEST TIME Y’ALL. That’s right, it’s the most wonderful time of the season and over the last 5 or so days, I’ve looked at some pretty neat demos that I think will be shaking out awesome. I’m only gonna include the three that impressed me the most because I’d be here all day, but I will give a special shoutout to Stormgate by Frost Giant Games. Frost Giant Games is made up of a huge chunk of Blizzard’s old RTS team, so it was a fun time. Because of how the open beta test went, I couldn’t play it as much as I wanted to, but with that out of the way, let's begin.
MAD MULLET JACK
This right here is a roguelike…themed as an OVA FPS. That wording is used specifically because…well, this shit is 80’s/90’s Anime as fuck, but it’s done in a loving homage way while also being a First person shooter. In the future of the 2090’s Humans and the Internet have merged so thoroughly that it’s led to robot billionaires taking over the world. Fittingly called Robillionaires, they have made it so that there’s a new breed of human that needs a steady supply of dopamine every 10 goddamn seconds, otherwise THEY STRAIGHT UP DIE. Oh, and there’s a mega-corporation called Peace Corp that employs these Dopamine starved individuals to kill the robots in a profession called Moderation. And it’s live-streamed online to the masses who determine how much dopamine you get. And you take up a contract to save a Social media Influencer.
One of my biggest issues with Cyberpunk as a genre of fiction is that after the 1980’s, it never really kept up with the times. All of the stuff I just mentioned, while filtered through late 80’s and Early 90’s Anime aesthetics, feels stingingly prescient in terms of highlighting how ridiculous social media as a concept is and as someone with ADHD, that bit about the Dopamine chase feels like a personal attack and I’ll be getting my lawyer on the phone. Not really, but I love how the game lulls you into this false sense of security about being a wild FPS Roguelike that’s anime as fuck but then hits you with commentary and satire about society’s relationship with social media and the internet being used as a means of control and this is the kind of shit I live for.
Enough about how it looks and what the narrative is doing, time for the slice of gameplay that they show off. Mad Mullet Jack is, like the opening mentioned, a Roguelike FPS, and while you may be tempted to think shooter of the boomer variety, it’s more so that it’s inspired by games like Doom Eternal and Neon White. Which is to say, kill stuff at disorientingly fast speeds and in the case of the latter, possibly beat your friends on the leaderboards. At least the game gives you the aforementioned 10-second time limit on the normal difficulty setting. How you kill enemies determines how much time you get back on the timer, which is also effectively your health bar. Regular weapon kills give you three seconds, environmental kills give you four seconds, melee kills augmented with items lying around that turn your melee into a Doom-style Glory Kill give you all your time back, and so does drinking soda. That’s right you get dopamine from soda and that’s a goddamn mood. You then proceed to Rip and Tear your way across 20 levels of an apartment complex that get more and more fiendish in difficulty. Some bits break up the flow a bit, when you get to the tenth floor, which was the end of the first chapter, you lose signal and are disconnected from the internet, making us not reliant on speedy kills to get a dopamine rush to not die. Which is helpful because there was a goddamn boss fight on this floor. This is where more of the nu-Doom influence came into effect and I was more focused on just jumping, dodging and shooting to kill the boss at hand.
This feels like a good preview of what Mad Mullet Jack was going for. While it does satire well from what I’ve seen it ironically enough, did provide me with a good rush of dopamine and made me hyper-focus to the point of me making it through the demo and then immediately starting it back up. I would try to go in and get through as much of it as possible, die and then go again, it was wild. There’s even a difficult slider that gives you more or less time to mess with. Hell, there’s even a leisure mode that gets rid of the timer entirely to make it more of a traditional FPS campaign. Either way, it’s got you covered.
Mad Mullet Jack is probably the standout of the Next Fest for me because it just grabbed onto my brain and wouldn’t let go. It’s the demo I’ve played the most and I cannot wait to see the full game in action.
CHILDREN OF THE SUN
I first heard about this one before the Next Fest went live because I saw the trailer and went “Yo, this looks wild. And I was correct in assuming so. Children of the Sun is a “Tactical Puzzle Shooter” developed by solo Developer Rene Rother that Devolver Digital is publishing. They have a pretty good track record when it comes to scouting out great games, and surprise surprise, they found another potential hit.
Children of the Sun is a simple story of a young woman going on a vengeful killing spree against the cult that ruined her life. That’s some goddamn tonal whiplash compared to the last entry on this list. But that’s the reason you came to this website. For a dude talking about the things he likes about video games and the occasional bit of religious trauma. As a Treat. Okay, now that we have made a failed attempt to diffuse the situation, let’s talk about the actual game.
You start on the outskirts of the areas where the cultists are gathered. From there, you can use the mouse to go left or right to circle the area for a good line of sight and determine where to go. From there, you can mark targets and zoom in, and from THERE, you can fire your weapon and this is where shit gets spicy. When you start each level you only start with a single bullet. This is mainly because you take control of the bullet from the first kill. From there the game transitions into a slow motion tracking to find the poor cultist schmucks running away from their compatriot getting unalived, and you gotta find the quickest path to making sure they all go to the great cult meeting in the sky. And the entire demo is predicated on this simple, yet unique form of puzzle-solving. The demo immediately introduces new ways of iterating on these concepts like “sniping the fuel tanks on cars to make them explode and kill groups of cultists or shooting the bullet through fire to make it deal increased damage, and so on. And even as early as the second level, it makes it so that you have to use everything you’ve learned and just throws you into the deep end. I don't mind this because the demo’s design trusts that the player is smart enough to figure it out.
Part of what also makes this extra special aside from the literal example of “one shot, one kill” is that there’s a goddamn leaderboard as well. And that alone made me go “Well, guess I’m obsessing over this.” And when I went back to levels that I was stuck on, it felt like I had my third eye open and I just figured out new and interesting paths to get cultists killed.
To loop back to the story real fast, it shows more and more of what the woman and her family went through with the cultists and it’s both a good manner of showing how she ended up like this and they are also DEEPLY fucked up.
Children of the Sun is shaping up to be a great murder-themed puzzler through its unique premise, smart use of level layout and iterative game design, and devilishly difficult puzzle design. This is one to keep an eye on.
TALES OF KENZARA: ZAU
This next one is a bit different from the others. Tales of Kezara Zau is a Metroidvania developed by Surgent Studio under the EA Originals banner. Surgent Games was founded by actor Abubakar Salim after his work on Assassin’s Creed Origins gave him a greater insight into the development of games. With that out of the way, there’s a part that has a greater emphasis than the other games shown here. The Narrative.
The demo for Tales of Kenzara Zau showcases the titular Zau in grief over the passing of his father, taking up his mantle as a Nganga, a spiritual healer. After making his presence and objective to bring his father back from the dead known to Kalunga, the God of Death, he agrees to help him under the condition that Zau helps him bring him three Greater Spirits. The narrative on display so far is heavily inspired by Bantu tales and informed by Abubakar Salim’s own experience of grieving over his father’s death. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his performance as Zau. He’s singularly focused on his goal to the point of recklessness and his dynamic with Kalunga is shown to be somewhat antagonistic at the start because of this. While it does soften somewhat throughout the demo, that slight antagonism is an undercurrent of all their interactions and this combined with Kalunga’s seeing of the big picture so to speak, makes for a good dynamic between these two characters and serves as a good preview of the writing on display.
There is also a good preview of the gameplay here as well. Zau being a Spirit healer/shaman is shown in play by his use of the dual masks of the gods of the sun and the moon. The Moon focuses on ranged attacks and freezing enemies and the Sun focuses on slashing and lighting enemies on fire. The combat starts simply shooting from the moon mask, but once you get the sun mask, it opens up. You can mix and match from shooting and slashing by swapping masks on the fly and eventually can get new powers that can deal with multiple enemies at once. While what was shown was on the Simple Side, Tales of Kenzara ZAU has a promising combat system on its hands, and this is before getting into the skill trees that appear to be developed for the masks as well.
The other half of the gameplay in ZAU is the traversal and platforming. Zau can run jump, dash, double jump, wall jump and slide to traverse the environments. You use these to get around the environments and do some exploration and light puzzle solving. This is expanded upon further by the use of the new powers that I’m assuming you get as the story goes on. The only one of these you get in the demo is the ability to freeze objects, a previously mentioned combat ability, to completely freeze over running and rapid water to make it easier to traverse areas and even climb up to spots where you couldn’t before. There’s even some optional exploration to go off of the beaten path to get more skill points and other hidden goodies, it’s good stuff.
As a small slice, Tales of Kenzaru ZAU is a nice taste of what the full game is gonna go for when it comes out. And we don't need to wait long because this one is coming out in roughly two months at the time of writing. I’m also keeping an eye on this one.
These are just three of the games that stuck out to me over the last week, and I highlighted Mad Mullet Jack, Children of The Sun and Tales of Kenzaru Zau for the specific fact that even though the Next Fest is done for now, you can still download and give these demos a spin. So I recommend you do that because these are all awesome. This has been the Winter Next Fest for 2024, I’ll see you in this style of round-up in a few months.
