June ‘26 Steam NextFest Demos
This go around I went for quality over quantity with demos and played only a few. Unfortunately, NextFest has really brought some of the worst trends on Steam to bear, and hunting down compelling demos has gotten very difficult. GenAI and 'friendslop' streamer-bait have become overwhelming and almost impossible to navigate, so I'll probably proceed with this approach until Valve finds a way to mitigate the onslaught in some way. I'm glad demos have come back, but the trend within NextFest isn't ideal.
Warhammer 40,0000 Boltgun II
Boltgun II is an upcoming sequel to 2023's original Boltgun, from Auroch Digital. Like its predecessor, Boltgun II is a fast paced boomer shooter with low poly pixelated graphics. I haven't played the original so I can't pull much from it as a point of comparison, but I enjoyed playing Boltgun II quite a bit, and it does a good job of differentiating itself from the pack with an extremely cohesive art style and presenting a vibrant take on the grimdark canon. It also has a banging soundtrack, though I saw the first Boltgun was criticized for the small soundtrack so hopefully they remedy that here.
Boomer shooters have been an increasingly popular indie genre thanks to their fast frenetic action and (often) simple visual features. Chunky polygons and bare pixels are common here and Boltgun II is no exception, featuring bright colorful environments that would look as at-home in a mascot platformer as a 40K FPS, crunchy billboard sprites for enemies, and lots of pixellated gore. As someone who generally finds gory FPS games offputting, and prefers colorful games to be more cartoon than acid trip, Boltgun II finds a nice balance between its key visual features. Enemy billboards are often more naturalistic in tone and true to what one would expect from the 40K universe, while environments have strong bright colors with a lot of large swaths of color, mostly relying on foliage and architectural structures within the level to break up the environments. Yes, you will find yourself fighting your way out of gore-filled pits of chaotic demons or Nurgle's grotesques, but these grimmer segments are found between large colorful segments.
The demo offered two playable characters, with different weapon options but otherwise fairly similar play. They both have options to manuever the battlefield on a cooldown, as well as a grenade for crowd control. The choice between masc and fem characters is welcome in an IP that has historically struggled to treat its women characters well, and both characters' weapons felt chunky and powerful. I would have liked to see slightly larger magazines, especially for the lower damage automatic weapons, as reloading often felt like an unnecessarily frequent bit of friction, but overall it plays very well and the guns high accuracy compliments the fast movement very well.
The demo also offered two levels, a forest filled with Nurgle nasties and a frozen glacier filled with chaos-influenced soldiers and demons. Both levels were fun to navigate, with just the right amount of winding path and hidden secret to encourage replay, and good encounter variety. Auroch clearly understands the value of pacing encounters and creating a diversity of arenas, and both levels avoid feeling repetitive by varying enemy types and environmental hazards between hordes of enemies.
Not much more to say. If you enjoy 40K or boomer shooters, there's a lot to like in Boltgun II. I'm pretty impressed with the level of polish and care in a genre that often emphasizes gunplay and speed above all else, and this demo promises one of the better boomer shooters I've played since the genre's indie revival.
Entropy
This is a tough one. Of the three demos I played this NextFest, Entropy was the one I enjoyed the least. Going in, I'd expected a grimey CRPG akin to a 3D Planescape, but what I got was more like a horror JRPG (it even has a overworld map straight out of a Final _Fantasy game!). Entropy, like Boltgun II, has a low poly pixelated art style and uses it fairly well. Unlike Boltgun II, it doesn't really seem to understand its own genre and I found myself chaffing against almost every system decision the developer, Lovely Hellplace, made.
Despite playing like a JRPG, Entropy seems to pull its influences more from the TTRPG subgenre of OSR ("oldschool revival") which often combines extremely high lethality with a harsh resource management system to reward players for ingenuity and cleverness in 'outsmarting' the dungeons they delve into over the course of a campaign. In OSR, characters typically die often and are simple and easy to reroll, and this make sense in the context of a multiplayer TTRPG where the players themselves are a constant. It doesn't work so well in a turnbased jRPG. You see, while Entropy describes itself as a CRPG with "tactical" combat, it feels more like a Darkest Dungeon or SRPG game, leaning heavily on permadeath and risk management as its defining characteristics. Every character except your player character is designed to die at any time and are therefore largely uninteresting, combat isn't exceptionally lethal on average, but spells have a chance to backfire and Entropy has a Fallout-ish body part system that gives normal attacks aimed at certain body parts the ability to disable abilities. These things combine into combat that feels more about weighing safety (casting fewer spells and disabling enemies) and damage (casting more spells and just smacking the enemy anywhere). This system doesn't feel very CRPG-y, nor does it feel very tactical, and in essence just resolves into a combat system where doing the cool stuff feels either like the absolute obvious choice, or something you feel bad about. Perhaps later in to the game when your characters are more powerful there's more meaningful choice in how you decide to tackle encounters, but in the demo most encounters felt like either raw DPS races or puzzle fights where you simply aim at the right thing or hit the weakness and trivialize it. There are systems that could be fun, but this demo gave the impression of a systems-before-gameplay design that hadn't really been playtested.
Combat woes aside, Entropy has strong art direction with a fantastically gothic take on the fantasy genre. Everything from body horror to theater troupes features, and if you're into the melodrama of gothic fantasy, I could see enjoying Entropy on those merits alone. It's releasing in Early Access first, so hopefully Lovely Hellplace will have he opportunity to tune the combat systems into something that feels more meaningful by full release.
About Fishing
Where to begin. About Fishing is a game about fishing, and it's made by The Water Museum (a single developer team, alongside an artist and composer). It's also a supernatural murder mystery that feels like a lost demo disc found in a broken Net Yaroze console. Regardless of if this sounds like your jam, just play the demo for the wonderful introductory sequence which is both tutorial and one of the best tone-setting introductions to a video game I've ever played. About Fishing isn't perfect but what's here is so uniquely compelling that everyone would be well served by at least giving it an hour or two of their time.
Despite being so much more, About Fishing is, genuinely, a pretty compelling fishing game. The gameplay uses the mouse as a sort of motion control scheme, where you try to keep your line straight as the fish pulls from side to side, releasing slack to avoid breaking your line and reeling gradually to land the fish. It could use a bit more feedback in terms of how well you're doing at reeling in the fish (one particularly stubborn bluegill gave me the run around for some five minutes as I desperately wondered what I was fucking up), but the core gameplay is fun and arcadey.
Part of what's compelling in About Fishing is that the fish themselves are more the characters than your player avatar. When you cast, you don't watch from over your character's shoulder as the hook flies through the air, rather you watch from the hooks perspective as it soars, then sinks, then waits for a fish to bite. While you sit in the water, you can pan around to see what fish might be in range and interested in biting from the perspective of your hook, and once a fish bites you watch from underwater as your character frantically waves the pole around in tandem with your mouse as the fish in the foreground writhes about. It's a very compelling way to make the game... About Fishing, rather than about a character.
The fish themselves are also incredibly detailed. Trout, catfish, bluegill, tangs, gar, needlefish, flounder and all sorts are instantly recognizable to the ichthyologists among us, with fantastically rendered realistic texturing and strong animation work bringing the fish to life. In comparison, human characters look unsettled and unsettling and generally combine low resolution photographic faces with undetailed and stiff bodies. Environments are somewhere in between, with enough detail to articulate a sense of place and tone. The small rural town you live in is as mysterious as the oddities it hides, and the blend of realism and occult horror brings that tone to life.
Where About Fishing comes into its own is in blending fishing with a mystery adventure game. The fish you catch aren't slaughtered as you add them to your tacklebox, rather they become conduits through which you uncover secrets well below the surface. Just as you catch the fish from the perspective of the hook, you can place a fish back onto the hook and pilot them into the deepest recesses of the under water tunnels and sunken oddities of the town. It makes for an extremely thematically cohesive experience despite its novelty and strangeness.
I won't say much more than that in the interest of leaving anyone interested plenty of strangeness and mystery to uncover, but I really recommend this one. I'm excited to give the full game a go, and while it'll take me a bit of time to fully wrap my head around the fishing mechanics, the duality of About Fishing as both fishing game and mystery is sure to give it legs even if I can't figure out how the fuck to catch that bluegill.