Loads of people recommended this in the same breath as Sanabi. I've had it in my library for ages but it has never grabbed me. Picked it up this morning and it's a super fun, short action platformer with a surprisingly good story. I can see why it's often compared with Sanabi - the gameplay is different but the stories share some similarities and both have amazing art styles.

Katana Zero's soundtrack is very strong in places too.

Well this was a pleasant surprise. Super fun platformer, loved the art style and music, and a very intriguing story. What a load of over-achievers.

The animation reminded me a lot of Dead Cells, which I think is 3D models converted to 2D. Makes for smooth, realistic movement that has this almost uncanny valley quality that I like a lot.

If I was feeling critical, it's heavy on conversation and exposition in places. Like very heavy. At times I just wanted to play the game but the story was good enough to stick it out, and those scenes are skippable anyway. There's also an annoying feature where you get stuck in the red bits and just die and that's quite frustrating but only happened around 3 times the whole game.

Definitely recommend if you're into grappling hook movement. It made me want to try Katana Zero again even though that has no grappling hook.

I wasn't going to get this. As I have mentioned, I've been pretty unmotivated by games lately, and it felt like throwing money away, which I don't like to do.

Charlotte and I watched a kind-of interview with Billy Basso and Dunkey where he talked about his development process, and that sold me on it.

It's such a cool little metroid/platformer with some elegant puzzling. I say "elegant" because most things I came up against, I felt like the game had already taught me how to do them. There's some stuff that is heavy on the platforming, and some that's heavy in the puzzling. It just works.

There's a couple of bits that annoyed me but nothing deal-breaking. I think I missed a visual cue quite early on that lead me down a path that was more advanced than I was equipped for, and a lot of the design language became quite opaque. Nothing that a bit of backtracking  couldn't solve, but then I had opened up a lot of the map without achieving anything. Upside was a lot of things falling into place quite quickly once I had everything I needed.

This game is pretty short - I saw the credits after about 5.5 hours. I have some stuff I'd quite like to go back and do, and it'd be nice to open up the whole map, but I feel like I got my money's worth.

This is neat. It's a hectic twin-stick shooter with a movement mechanic that may remind you a little of Splatoon with a twist. At any moment, you can turn into a ball (think Metroid Prime) and zoom around the level. You can use this to bash into enemies and knock ammo (and sometimes health) out of them. If you time it just right, you can also stop them from attacking, which I've found to be essential for bosses. The movement feels really fast and satisfying, and overall it's a fun casual game for picking up for short runs.

I did have to disable vsync to get over 50FPS but in doing that it does seem pretty stable above that. Would I love 60FPS? Yes of course, but I'll take 50 on a handheld. Doesn't even really kick the fans on either. I've always struggled with vsync and performance on PC gaming.

For whatever reason, when I played the demo in Next Fest I was being grumpy and  didn't like this game. Pretty much every single gaming site (that I'm still reading every day yes 🤫) has been going on about how great it is (and Nintendo pulling it down for being gambling. So stupid; I really hate Nintendo these days) so I thought I'd give it another chance and I actually love it. If it comes to iOS I would get it again. Perfect for waiting outside charity shops.

I don't usually like playing demos. Not sure why - I think investing any time in something incomplete sometimes just feels wrong to me. Demos are actually perfect for my attention span so I read some lists and tried a bunch of things from Steam's Next Fest. My experience has been largely underwhelming.

Here's a bunch of demos I didn't really like (or really didn't like) and why I didn't really like them.

Pepper Grinder has tonnes of potential. I like quirky platformers like Dandara and Flinthook, but something about Pepper Grinder just feels a little off to me. Maybe it's something I could get used to, but I'll see how much it is when it releases. Definitely one of the better ones on this list.

#DRIVE Rally is a very well-timed low-poly arcade rally game (the aesthetic is similar to art of rally, in some ways), but it seems to have binary braking (i.e. brakes are either off, or slammed on), the steering is super twitchy, and your co-driver is incredibly annoying. There's also some bits where the track forks that he specifically does not help you with, but then yells at you when you go the wrong way. This could be cool but at the moment it's annoying.

Berserk Boy is Mega Man, and it's a good Mega Man, but the combat is pretty one-dimensional and not very satisfying, and the first two bosses are identical except for the colour of their projectiles.

Balatro is a card game. One day I will get it into my head that I don't like card games.

Mullet Mad Jack is like if Hotline Miami was an FPS Japanese gameshow against robots. It reminds me of the movie Guns Akimbo for some reason. It's too difficult to distinguish the enemies from the walls so it's a pass for me.

Echo Point Nova is a bit Neon White-y, but the gameplay trailer makes it look way more fun than it is. There's a lot of mechanics here, and that makes the tutorial long and boring, and after a very short amount of time I was just done with it still being the tutorial.

Breachway is a card game where you play cards by dragging and dropping them onto spaceship animations. It made me miss FTL.

Rack and Slay is a top-down geometry sort of thing where you have to shoot pool and pot the balls except everything is weird. It could be cool as a casual thing, and I preferred it to subpar pool, but that's not really saying much.

Trash of the Titans looks like a cool pixel Final Fantasy Tactics. I say "looks like" because I couldn't actually figure out how to play it.

Raw Metal is a bit like Metal Gear Solid, except when you're spotted the game turns to a third-person brawler thing. I didn't like the stealth, and I didn't like the brawling, then I got shot by something I couldn't see, and uninstalled the demo.

Normal Fishing is a fishing game made by someone who has potentially only ever had fishing described to them. They may or may not have ever played a video game. Games are supposed to be fun.

Gatekeeper wants to be there for you if you like Risk of Rain 2 and Hades. I like both of those games but something about Gatekeeper felt really wooden and slow. It took me about 15 attempts to clear the first area of Risk of Rain 2, and 1 to clear the first area of Gatekeeper.

Artifact Seeker is another vampire survivors clone where all the women are impractically well-endowed. It makes me feel like a creep playing games like this, so I just don't. I seemed to do really well at this without trying, and then I died quickly and didn't understand why.

Never Grave could be quite cool. It has an interesting hat thing going on, which might work. But I don't get why it's ripped off so much of the Hollow Knight feel. And the first boss had an insane amount of health and appeared after about 3 minutes and I couldn't be bothered to deal with it. With a bit of balancing I'd play this again.

Arco is a quirky-looking tactical RPG that seems to have similar movement mechanics to things like Divinity, but it didn't have Steam Deck controller bindings and I couldn't figure out how to do anything so I bailed. Shame as I like Panic and the art style and tactical RPGs (even though I'm terrible at them).

Helskate is a skateboarding game where you play as some sort of demon doing skating and ugh that just doesn't work for me. Plus the controls are super jerky and twitchy and I need smoooooth for games like this. Hope the devs play Rollerdrome because that's the kind of controls I need from a game like this.

I was talking to someone about gaming and it occurred to me that I didn't post a game yet. Might as well start with one of my modern favourites.

I feel like Dead Cells set the template for the modern roguelite in terms of progression and the difficulty curve. There's essentially three parts of this game: the baby area, before you've maxxed out enough of the stats that you're actually going to use; the mid-game which is just training you to complete the "final" boss; then the post-game which is for people who have a far better attention span than I do.

I'm happy, as with most things in gaming (and maybe life?), to be good enough at Dead Cells to enjoy it. I can reliably get to the last area, and kill the Hand a lot of the time, but anything more than that just starts to feel like I'm playing the game just to play it, rather than because I'm enjoying it. I'm glad that stuff exists for the people who want it, but I can live with what I see as the core gameplay loop.

This does have a bit of a steep learning curve but it never feels cheap or unfair, which I think is super important in the early game, so that you can actually get established and not just feel like you're getting beaten up constantly like I do in things like Souls games.