Any interesting couch co-op or couch multiplayer upcoming games?

Only one I got to try was Approximately Up. I’ll probably get it if they keep going with it. I might over-simplify it as Archean I can run without a raytracing GPU.

The Vampire Survivor Turbo whatchacallit was fun.

Personally, I played a whole bunch of demos.

Far Far West was a lot of fun, especially with friends. It needs some tweaks, for sure, but we played for a solid several hours just having fun.

Dobbel Dungeon was one that I immediately bought upon finishing the demo. It’s an adorable style, but I feel like the tactics are fairly deep? I’ve put in a handful of hours into it and am still rather enjoying it.

Hozy was another demo I really enjoyed. It’s like Unpacking meets House Flipper, kinda. Very cozy, feels good to play.

Vampire Survivors card game was also fun, but I’m not entirely sold on it yet. It feels like it needs maybe a little more work.

Loot -something? I’ve forgotten the title, but it’s similar to slay the spire and then resident evil 4’s loot system. Everything has to fit within your backpack, some items have bonuses to specific things. I had a helmet that would give thorns bonuses to adjacent plate armor, for example. Very interesting concept and I was having a lot of fun organizing my inventory. But similar to vampire Survivors, I felt as if it was lacking chew. But maybe I am comparing it too closely to slay the spire?

In any case, I had a lot of fun. It seems like this year will be a good one for games. :]

I didn’t have a lot of time for the next fest but I did give three games a try that were on my radar before the next fest.

The first was Allumeria. It was recently in the news because it got DMCA’d for looking like Minecraft. Having played it I would say that while the artstyle is somewhat Minecraft inspired the game felt more like 3D Terraria than Minecraft. But I still consider it to be too raw to really get into it. The forest boss was kind of just running around to avoid getting hit by projectile spam while spamming projectiles back at the boss. I don’t know if I was supposed to have better gear for the boss but it was like 10 minutes of just running around taking potshots at the boss because the boss was too tanky. I followed up the boss fight with the forest dungeon and after literally spending an hour inside the dungeon I gave up because I had no idea where I was supposed to go what I was supposed to do. That said, I’ll still keep it on my radar because the concept was appealing.

The second game I played was Let’s build a dungeon. This was probably the best game I played and the whole concept of the game is so novel I’d definitely recommend keeping an eye on it. Basically the core gameplay of let’s build a dungeon is to build an MMO world. You throw in a spawn point, build roads, scenery, and then add quests and dungeons (which you also build manually) and then get NPC players come in to play your MMO world. Except that is not all that the game is. The game is also a game dev studio management game where you deal with hiring talent, managing the popularity of your MMO, budgeting etc. Except that’s not all that the game is. You also get to play the very MMO world you create. You can make a character and play through all the quests and dungeons you’ve made and if I remember correctly you can also play the MMO worlds other players have created. I would also recommend their previous game, let’s build a zoo, which is a game where you build a zoo (with a twist that I’m not going to spoil).

The last game I tried was Cargo hunters. It’s essentially a single-player extraction shooter where you play as humanoid robot. The novel idea in cargo shooters is that any other bot you destroy you can saw into pieces and then you can take those pieces back into your base and rebuilt your own bot using the pieces from the other bots. And that’s pretty much all I can say about the game because the demo was so barebones I couldn’t really tell anything more about the game beyond that it worked and didn’t play like ass. In fact I’d say the demo was an excellent example how not to do a demo. The game is supposed to have crafting, but most of the crafting stations are not available in the demo. It’s supposed to have trading, but trading station is not available in the demo. You can find gun parts to modify your guns, except the modification station is not available in the demo so you can’t do that. There’s a leveling system in the game but beyond being a requirement for some crafting stations I didn’t see any reason for there to be a leveling system. The demo felt like a mash of all sorts of things that an extraction shooter should have, except more than half of those things weren’t even in the game yet. So the game boils down to running the same level over and over again killing the same bots over and over again while you become weaker and weaker because you can’t really replace the gear your started the game with. I’m keeping it wishlisted because their trailer showed far more content than what the demo had so maybe there’s a quick jump into something with more substance when the early access launch happens, but overall this was the demo I was the most disappointed by.

Everytime a nextfest comes along I am reminded with how over saturated the market can be. How many online survival games do we need ? How many moba rouguelike hero shooters do we need ? How many cozy farming life simulators ?You make a drinking game out of It, you may die of alcohol poisoning.

Most of it is trash and some at best is mediocre. The only standout to me was WildBlue being a fun StarFox clone. And the best okish ones were Far Far West and Dark Haven. Honorable mention to Toxic Commando. But none of them super original or something I don’t already own something exactly like it …

I tried out the new House Flipper Remastered Demo, and it was decent. As someone who owns all the DLC of the first game (I haven’t and won’t play the sequel), there are some nice QoL improvements they added, like a tool to see dirt, and a top-down view.

However, there are some performance issues along with some bugs others have reported. I’m hoping it’ll be good when it releases, though I’m a bit hesitant as it will be about $20 USD for those that own all DLC, which seems a bit much for just a few new enhancements and a graphics ‘improvement’.