Preamble

Whelp, we are one month removed from Steam's last Next Fest, but here I am talking about another slate of five games I played that caught my attention during the event. With this article, I tried to cover game types I hadn't covered or reviewed in the previous episode, as well as a few games I hadn't seen covered in the major online gaming publications, along with the big hits of the event. Apologies for the delay in getting this one out; life got the best of me, and that's all I will say. If you missed the first entry in this two-part series, here's a handy link, and if you are wondering about which games I will be discussing in this episode, they are:

• Lost Wiki: Kozlovka

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka

What is it?

Do you enjoy going down Wikipedia-induced rabbit holes? Do you ever find yourself looking up information about a current event, only to end up reading pages of text that extrapolate the history of Sumeria or how organic chemists make food coloring? Well, Lost Wiki: Kozlovka might be a game for you! In it, you find yourself in the shoes of an investigator initially tasked with researching current events associated with the fictional town of Kozlovka. Your liaison provides you with a few keywords they want you to explore, and as you complete or fill in missing sections of a paragraph, you start to uncover a mystery associated with the city. The hyperlinks on the webpages you end up exploring are limited, but they also prove to be the key to solving textual puzzles. The final puzzle in the demo has you matching runic symbols to their meanings, and a previous one has you learning about the suspicious disappearance of a person by finding their name on their son's wiki page. The appeal of Lost Wiki stems almost entirely from how much you gel with its text, and that depends on how much you enjoy reading wiki pages. The creepy vibes are there, but only briefly, as this demo is shockingly short (i.e., ~15 to 20 minutes).

What's in the demo?

As mentioned earlier, and as you can likely see in the screenshots, most of the gameplay involves you needing to analyze online databases or wiki pages to complete an unfinished report page, which has blank sections that need to be filled with specific proper nouns or keywords. Checking out optional database pages is part of the appeal because if you don't, whole swaths of the game's worldbuilding will be totally unknown to you. As you complete report pages, the game becomes more horror-oriented. The first whiff of that comes when you are required to review a database page on a "Draken Oak," which clearly is branded in pagan or druidic runes, and that leads you to a database page about the mysterious disappearance of a research team. The puzzles or cloze reading procedures aren't too difficult with enough surrounding text to provide decent enough context clues that don't ever leave you feeling like you're running around in circles. The final puzzle, which is the hardest one in the game, has a tooltip that outright tells you the solution, or at least tells you what you need to find to get past the puzzle. So, with a low barrier to entry, this demo is worth a shot even if its premise doesn't immediately sound appealing to you.

But BOY is this demo way too short. It clocks in at around twenty minutes and only gives you a brief taste of what it's really about at the very end. It ends on a cliffhanger, which horror games usually do during Next Fest. Still, in Lost Wiki's case, it ends right as the game finally starts to rub off some of its faux petina, a mask that makes it seem like you're perpetually stuck doing busywork and data entry. It finally gives you a better sense of its genuine tone and mood, and then, WHAM, the demo is over. When I think back to horror or narrative games with strong Next Fest outings, I find myself recalling Mouthwashing's February 2024 demo. That demo was short, but it perfectly communicated the game's vibes while also giving you a clear sense of what its possible ulterior motives might be. You don't really get that with Lost Wiki's demo, which leaves me a bit flummoxed when trying to assess whether or not I plan to give its full release a shot.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

MAYBE. I hate to say it, but this is unquestionably a "vibes piece" through and through, and if you don't see the appeal in going down Wikipedia or YouTube rabbit holes, I genuinely doubt this will do anything for you. But if you enjoy reading codex entries in RPGs, or, like me, think one of the best parts of any Elder Scrolls game is reading random tomes and informational books, there's something unique about Lost Wiki's structure and gameplay that feels ripe for transcendence. Regardless, there's not enough game in this demo for me to feel comfortable committing to buying it or recommending it without caveats. Does the gameplay progress beyond you completing fill-in-the-blank cloze reading procedures? Boy, I hope, but I only got the briefest sense that would be the case rather than a definitive answer, and that leaves me ever so slightly on edge if the game "sticks the landing" so to speak. Nonetheless, even if it doesn't, the vibes are immaculate.

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

What is it?

Most people were buzzing about Esoteric Ebb, but it's time to talk about the OTHER skill check-based dialogue-heavy roleplaying game from February 2026's Next Fest! However, with Zero Parades coming from ZA/UM, the game studio that previously gave you Disco Elysium, things are decidedly less goofy. The game certainly makes that impression right from the rip when starting its demo, which relays a creepy narration from an unnamed male as you determine your character's stats and skills as you answer their probing questions. ZA/UM have gone to great lengths to say, unlike in Disco Elysium, you don't have to play Zero Parades as a self-loathing, sad communist, but based on my own personal experiences with the game's demo, that was fairly difficult. The world you end up exploring is one teeming with misery and countless stand-ins for the ills of modern society. And given that this is ZA/UM we are talking about, they have a thing or two to say about how best to fix that. Nonetheless, what you have here is a choice-driven CRPG where skill checks reign supreme as you attempt to work undercover in a repressive regime. As you try to further your mission, you can interact with the citizens of the nation you are visiting, which puts you into an almost endless treasure trove of side quests and long-winded character interactions. And by that I mean, every conversation you have goes on at least five to six paragraphs longer than it reasonably should, as the game lays its grandiloquent descriptive language into you. This game is, after all, from ZA/UM.

What's in the demo?

First, don't take my one-paragraph summary to mean I'm a hater of ZA/UM or Disco Elysium. Disco Elysium was near the top of my GOTY list back in 2019, and there are whole questlines and characters from it that are permanently etched into my brain. Nonetheless, in the six years since the game's release, I have increasingly found myself perpetually not in the mood to relive the game's more magical moments as they are hidden between mountains and mountains of depressing anti-capitalist malaise, and my patience for ZA/UM's overly embellished diction is at an all-time low right now. Thus, when I booted up the demo of Zero Parades, I was fully ready to nod along to its flowery dialogue, with no interest in going any further than playing the demo once. And to be honest, that's exactly what happened. Zero Parade's demo is a beefy one, with the game essentially giving you its entire opening hub world with all of the full game's quests and side quests to boot until you further the game's storyline up to a certain point. And the characters you talk to and meet are completely enthralling, and the skill check-based gameplay seems much more well-rounded here than in Disco Elysium. The alternatives for major situations felt more equitable to different character builds. As I said at the start, ZA/UM don't overtly nudge you to play Zero Parades with a specific gameplay or political bias as you explore your surroundings, which means Zero Parades feels more open for experimentation.

Nonetheless, this game is even wordier than Disco Elysium. While I get that's what fans of ZA/UM, at least the ones that have ignored the studio's multiple scandals about being a toxic workplace, want, it's also worth mentioning to anyone who either skipped Disco Elysium or felt like that game wasn't their cup of tea. The game's prologue, wherein you flesh out your character's background and explore what their core skills and stats will be, involves you talking to an omniscient voice that is later revealed to be your internalization of a nearby incapacitated companion. You play around with their immobilized body for approximately ten to fifteen minutes, trying to find clues about what happened to them, as the game lays out how fruitless and frustrating the situation is. Yes, it plays into ZA/UM's writing chops, but it comes at the cost of the demo's pacing and flow, which I can only imagine will carry over into the full release. And when you have to deliver the news that your partner is out of commission, it involves an incredibly exhausting conversation with a hostel manager, who is on your side, about what will happen to his body. On the flipside, the voice acting is stunning, and the writing is, by all reasonable metrics, compelling. I played the demo twice, each with an entirely different bent and playstyle, and I can affirm that the game is more immediately reactive to your playstyle differences than Disco Elysium.

Luckily, things improve dramatically the minute you get out of the hostel and can explore your surroundings. In expected ZA/UM form, the first environment in the game is packed to the gills with larger-than-life characters and adventurous tasks for you to scour. The main throughline involves you needing to investigate a CD you believe may have been the source of what KO-ed your ally in the hostel, but there are plenty of NPCs in the marketplace you first start in that lead down wild and wacky paths. A personal favorite of mine involved talking to a concerned vendor who had lost track of their father and described how their father was obsessed with a specific pay phone, thinking it was responsible for teleporting people or sending unwitting bystanders to a pocket dimension. It's a completely hairbrained premise that can only work in the hands and direction of ZA/UM, and as you might expect, while things start humorously enough, there's a tragic twist as the game lays in the harsh reality of its world. At the end of the day, you are an undercover spy in a totalitarian state where most of the citizenry are suffering, though to varying degrees. And would you be surprised to learn that ZA/UM has something to say about the human costs of dictatorial power? Trust me, they have a lot to say about that!

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

MAYBE. I am not in a position to say who is right or wrong about everything that has surrounded ZA/UM following the release of Disco Elysium. I hate to come across as a Biden-esque centrist at the worst possible time, but by my metrics, there's blame to be shared among many stakeholders. Nevertheless, when Zero Parades is judged entirely by what it seems to be offering and nothing else, there's no denying the reality that it is less of an on-ramp or retooling of Disco Elysium, and more of a firm re-assertion of ZA/UM's core sensibilities. To borrow a common 2008 game reviewer adage: fans of the genre will like this game—no doubt about it. The studio's writing team LOVES laying in thick tone and mood-setting language, even if that means players have to sit back and listen to a five-paragraph essay about flickering or broken CRTs or people mid-argument in a laundromat. That's what this studio does, and this demo makes clear that, rather than go back to the drawing board, ZA/UM returned to the Disco Elysium well and made it deeper. And to a degree, I respect that more than anything else. Like Supergiant Games, ZA/UM knows exactly what its strengths are and doesn't plan to deviate from that norm for the foreseeable future. And it is praiseworthy that Zero Parades improves on Disco Elysium. You aren't entirely railroaded to play from a specific vantage point, and the game is much more reactive to alternative solutions to problems. So, yeah, it's by all metrics a good game that seems to be shaping up rather nicely. My issue isn't that it is good or bad; it's whether I'll ever be in the right mindset or mood for it, given everything that is happening in the world right now.

Forbidden Solitaire

What is it?

And now for something completely different! After golf clapping ZA/UM for steadfastly playing to their strengths, I find myself sharing my giddiness about the latest work from the fine makers of Regency Solitaire! And boy howdy, their latest title sure isn't a full narrative follow-up to the game that made them a personal favorite among card and solitaire perverts! Forbidden Solitaire is a horror-themed narrative solitaire game in which you play in-universe a "lost game" from 1995, as a friend messages you about its lurid history. In-universe, Forbidden Solitaire was scrubbed from the world due to a variety of reasons, most of all, thanks to its macabre content. The story takes place in the far-flung year of 2019, and as you boot up Forbidden Solitaire, you get some PEAK 90s CD-ROM energy. As you play it, the line between the game and its surrounding controversy and story bleeds into your character's world. As you play the demo, you experience FMV cutscenes that convey fake news reports about protests against Forbidden Solitaire and in-game cutscenes that are highly evocative of rudimentary fifth-generation 3D polygonal enemy and character models. The demo lets you try a handful of upgrades and even shares a boss battle or two to get a better sense of how things play out long term, but the developers have since clarified that the full game will be a three-to-four-hour experience, tops.

What's in the demo?

Though it has a horror veneer, Forbidden Solitaire is still very much a work from Grey Alien Games, the makers of Regency Solitaire. Going into any given match or hand thinking you're just going to play solitaire will only get you so far; eventually, you'll need to take advantage of combo systems and power-ups that shuffle your deck or rearrange the cards on the playfield. What's different here is that most of your hands involve fighting enemies and even bosses. So, if you are not doing enough damage to your opponent, rather than losing due to exhausting your cards or hand, you can die from your HP pool getting expended. In between those fights, you'll have an opportunity to affix gems to your hand, which results in a burst of blood, thus playing into the game's horror vibes. But the act allows you to gain new passive and active abilities. With these abilities and the game not exactly punishing you when you need to try again, this game doesn't exactly seem to be trying to push its difficulty at its default settings, which likely will allow its players to get everything it has to offer in one or two sittings. Furthermore, the mechanics are a fine way to convince you that this is more than a simple game of solitaire when trying to justify why this game interests you to an outsider, but let's not kid ourselves here; this is still solitaire.

And I hate to sound like a broken record, because I know I said this maybe one too many times last time, but the vibes are excellent in Forbidden Solitaire. For a game trying to pretend to be a game from 1995, the game flawlessly captures the mid-'90s multimedia game milieu with audio, graphics, and effects that bleed that energy. The many times the game displays dismembered body parts or horrific enemy encounters, they look terrible with smooth, textureless 3D models, and that's part of the reason I played the game's demo with the biggest smile on my face. The UI/UX is shitty and unreadable at times, though there is a setting that changes that, and it threw me back to the heyday of CD-ROM PC games in the 90s. The game's interjections, wherein a friend sends you text messages to relay more information about the mythos of Forbidden Solitaire, are sometimes annoying. Still, when they unlocked what I can only assume are the developers acting in FMV cutscenes, I found myself punching the air. I'm not always a fan of the "game within a game" trope; I consider it tired and lazy. But given that Forbidden Solitaire is essentially a shitpost, I'll allow it here. This game is dumb, but it knows it is, and it ramps up the stupidity as you progress, which is why I can't wait to see more. The demo ends on a high note, and I am absolutely interested to see how developer Grey Alien Games continues to ratchet up the stakes.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

HELL YES! Regency Solitaire was a great time, and I have full confidence in Grey Alien Games to provide an equally good time here, with a more comedic, referential wrapper. Forbidden Solitaire nails the intangibles of a game pretending to be a forgotten relic of 90s multimedia game design, whether it be its sound design or art aesthetic. Plus, the story is compelling enough that you can squint your eyes and forget that you are playing a solitaire-based game. Nonetheless, with more tools in your toolbox, the game juice with the actual solitaire part of this game is a step above Regency Solitaire. You can't simply buy everything there is whenever you meet up with the merchant, and your hand where you affix your upgrades has only so much room for gemstones. It's hard to imagine Forbidden Solitaire having a ton of replayability. Nonetheless, with some of the abilities being different enough and each playthrough having low enough barriers, replaying the game to test out new power-ups or upgrades would be worth a second or third playthrough at the very least. And if you enjoyed Regency Solitaire, as I did, then this game is a no-brainer.

Everything is Crab

What is it?

Even if the Vampire Survivor developers have shirked the genre they helped revive or resuscitate, Vampire Survivor-likes are still going strong during Next Fest. The lone example I played and felt warranted an entry on this feature was Everything is Crab, an evolution-themed take on the dual-stick shooter/survival game. The premise of the game is rather straightforward: you start as a simple life form that needs to eat other animals to absorb their genetic data so you can unlock new abilities and body parts that allow you to survive in other biomes, so you can continue to feast on increasingly larger and more dangerous prey. As is usually the case with these sorts of games, you can only persist in the starting area for so long until the rewards or drops no longer help you to progress in the game; eventually you'll need to either more vertically in your current environment so you experience more risky prey or you'll have to move horizontally to change the climate to an entirely different environment that incentives specific upgrades and body parts. Regardless of what you opt to do, Everything is Crab is run-based, so if you do die, it's back to the drawing board, and the upgrades are behind RNG. Also, if you persist in the game for long enough, a large boss will spawn, which will require you to utilize dashing and higher-tier abilities to prevail.

What's in the demo?

The demo showcases a few biomes and a portion of the full game's upgrade options. As is the norm with this genre, you'll often need to wrestle between upgrading a body part or ability you already have or gaining a new one. The jump in difficulty is fairly stark when you move from the starting forest biome to the desert or snow one, and if you do not have the proper upgrades to mitigate either of the latter environments' debuffs, entering them can result in an automatic Game Over. So, if there is anything I hope gets a bit more polish between Next Fest and the full release, it is the game's transitions. Knowing when you can move from one tier or environment to the next is fairly difficult, and given the penalty for not nailing when to make that transition is death and needing to restart your progress, that can be a massive bummer. Nonetheless, the game has the same upside as Vampire Survivors in that it doesn't take you too long to go from step one to step twenty, and you can return to the more frenetic and up-tempo action rather quickly. In fact, getting back to where you were after a Game Over is even easier in Everything is Crab because the power-ups and upgrades pop off way quicker.

The movement in the game is fluid and satisfying, and the risk-reward element of needing to decide between trying something new or making something you already have better is a personal favorite game mechanic for me. The boss encounters need a bit of work because of the handful that spawned on me; a lot of them felt downright impossible unless I had the one or two specific upgrades that made beating them even remotely feasible. If anything, there needs to be a tier ranking of bosses, with easier ones spawning at the start, and they get increasingly harder as you spend more time in one biome instead of exploring new ones. And the transitions between biomes need to be more welcoming for at least a nanosecond more than they are presently. The minute you move from the forest to the ice environment, there's no "safe" starting position where you can ease into it; everything is just a fathom or two harder than anything you saw in the previous environment. All that aside, don't let that distract you from the fact that this game has "the juice" and feels and looks great even as our screen gets completely covered in particles and enemy sprites.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

Probably. It definitely won't be winning any awards, but Everything is Crab was a blast to play, and I do look forward to checking out additional bobs and doodads they add to the full release. The game feels great, even with some of the aforementioned balance issues, which I don't find immediately disqualifying of my interest. The game has a sense of pace that sands off some of the rougher edges of lesser games of this type. My biggest issue with Vampire Survivor and its many clones is that transitional period where you were on a nice streak before some bullshit finally killed you, and you feel like you have to spend up to ten minutes getting back to that sweat-inducing action again because you're back to grinding away at the starting handful of waves. That loathsome rigamarole is still in Everything is Crab. Still, it's quicker, and with the wide variety of where and how your character can play due to how character progression works, there are more ways to avoid toiling away doing the most basic attacks for too long.

Vampire Crawlers

What is it?

From the fine makers of Vampire Survivors comes what many people are calling the "highlight" of last Next Fest: Vampire Crawlers. As hinted at in my previous entry, Poncle, the developer of Vampire Survivors, has made it clear they have zero interest in making a game that is mechanically similar to or entirely like Vampire Survivors. So, here we are marveling at the addictive gameplay of their roguelike deckbuilder, Vampire Crawlers, whose full title is Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors. The game is a fairly straightforward deck builder, with you exploring dungeons from the first-person perspective and gaining new cards and upgrades or advancements to your decks and character's stats as you progress. As you explore the dungeon, you'll encounter enemies and bosses, and combat plays out in a turn-based format with you playing a finite number of cards based on how much mana you have and dealing damage listed on your cards, with the possibility of dealing more damage if you take advantage of the game's multiplier mechanic. If you play cards in ascending numerical value, you can double, triple, and even quadruple their value. Even so, you'll have to take note of what the cards in your hand do as well as assess what your immediate needs are as you face upcoming attacks from enemies.

What's in the demo?

The demo includes the first two dungeons and a handful of characters and cards to use with them. Like Vampire Survivors or any rougelike deckbuilders, there are a plethora of characters to unlock and play as in Vampire Crawlers. These characters need to be unlocked by reaching specific milestones and have unique play styles, decks, and mechanics that seem better suited to different challenges you'll face. Also similar to Vampire Survivors, Crawlers has a long list of achievements that unlock rewards that aren't just limited to new heroes; you can unlock new cards and other game-changing upgrades as well. The levels have secrets, which allow you to modify your deck and even add new cards to your hand. One of the most important things you can do when in a dungeon is improve the damage of offensive cards or multiplicatively enhance cards that buff your character. If you can pair up synergies between lower-value cards and higher-value cards, you'll have no problem clearing dungeons and bosses. The issue, as is usually the case, is that you cannot always rely on the same strategies between runs, given that each run has a certain amount of RNG, and the difficulty spikes can be unforgiving. The one major improvement from Vampire Survivors I do want to praise is how passive buffs work in this game. In Vampire Crawlers, you'll find cards like Spinach and Clover, which act as wildcards and can help you create chains like 0->1->W->1->2 or even 0->1->2->W->1->2->3, the latter of which I used to one-shot a boss. So, even if you don't particularly value the passive buffs they provide, almost every card has a use, and this game is way better at keeping different mechanics in the loop than its predecessor.

The levels are fairly basic with clearly marked landmarks and icons for enemies and bosses on your minimap. The two to three hours I played the demo had the lizard part of my brain compulsively trying to get unlocks and assess whether I wanted to prioritize that or make more progress with a solid build I already had on tap. Nevertheless, I don't want this next statement to come across as a burn or attack on the game. Regardless, despite the genre shift, Vampire Crawlers has the same effective "you can play this half-paying attention while cool stuff happens on your screen" feedback loop as Vampire Survivors. My only ding against it is that grinding for new cards and unlocks isn't always the most rewarding affair, as it often means revisiting previous locations and toughing it out against familiar enemies. That, and the game has some downtime if you lose to challenges or bosses in the latter portions of dungeons. For example, if you get wiped on the end-of-level boss of an environment, you'll have to do everything leading up to that boss again before you can have your second or third shot, and sometimes you'll get to those confrontations and know you don't have the health or cards to pull it off. But those are minor quibbles, given that the game hands out unlocks and upgrades fairly generously, and you never, at least in the demo, feel anything in the game is completely impossible.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

HELL YEAH! I have been itching for a game I can mindlessly play while listening to podcasts or while participating in a group voice chat, and this game would fit that niche perfectly. Will this game attain the indie-game cultural zeitgeist that Vampire Survivor did? No, but I don't care, and their developer obviously doesn't either. The feel of the game is great, and the demo accomplished its mission in getting me interested in playing a full release with even more cards and playable characters to try out. Unlike in something like Slay the Spire, you can play cards in Vampire Crawler as fast as you want, and there's virtually no fear of analysis paralysis even with its combo system at play. Can you count from one to five? Yes? Great! That's all you really need to be able to do to pop off big AOE spells that wipe entire trash mobs or drop a massive fireball that one-shots a boss. The game demands you play it quickly, and by hook or by crook, I found myself fully immersed in the game's pace. When dealt a hand of cards, I always knew which order to play them to make my turn as efficient as possible, and the game has fun animations when you really nail a combo similar to Balatro. I know this game is going to suck up dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of my life, and I'm ready for it.