Accessed Archive: Nextfest Winter 2026

This is a whodunnit with some definite Obra Dinn blood, where the gameplay sets you as a thankless window cleaner in a dystopian future where visibility is constantly hindered by a toxic miasma. You take advantage of your position to peek into office buildings for information solving mysteries, murders, and the nature of the hazards that threaten your city. If I have one complaint, the game is not always super clear on what kind of things you should be looking for as evidence, but there is definite potential here.

Score: 6/10    Tags: Whodunnit, Job Sim, Time Loop

This game... has an identity crisis. It's a simple puzzler where you have to use clues to puzzle out where suspects for a murder are located on a sudoku style house map and figure out whodunnit. Despite being about solving murders, the game went for really cutesy aesthetics and music in a way that feels... just kind of bizarre, and not in an intentional way. Either way, even as a sudoku lover, I found the gameplay unexciting, even if its a fun premise.

Score: 4/10    Tags: Puzzler, Whodunnit, Sudoku

What I expected to be a fairly straightforward physics puzzler ended up pleasantly surprising my with its atmosphere and manual navigations, really making you feel like you're exploring an abandoned island. On this island are test chambers experimenting with some strange wave technology, which ramp up in difficulty VERY quickly towards the end of the demo. For the last two puzzles, I felt like the game kind of tripped on what the puzzles were about- you needed to perfectly merge and align peaks and valleys of multple waves in multiple directions, without any tools to accurately measure where those peaks actually line up. Some great potential, and with some additional tools, I think this game could stick its landing

Score: 7/10    Tags: Manual Navigation, Atmospheric, Puzzler

Have you ever wanted to cut the hair of a two headed poli-sci student that is also a dragon? Well, now's your chance! This is a charming narrative game where you play as a all-species-accepted barber in a formerly human city that is now over half beastfolk, and the game uses it's veneer of separation from humanity to represent a lot of social issues through its large cast. The writing is quite good and the conversations you have while finding the right haircuts for your clients genuinely make the world feel alive. To set your expectations, this narrative game was heavy on the narrative and very light on the game, and each haircut only actually consists of a few sparse interactions; really more of a framing device to keep you engaged with the writing than anything else. That will work for other players, especially enjoyers of VNs and the like; for me, I found myself a little restless and wished it was a bit more active. I'll likely end up watching someone play the full release rather than picking it up myself.

Score: 7.5/10    Tags: Narrative, Job Sim, Gameplay-Light

Hextracer is a pure and simple puzzler of trying to navigate on a hexagonal grid. Each puzzle is very snappy, only taking a few seconds, and you set the number of puzzles in a run. As someone who does often enjoy replayable geometric puzzlers, I unfortunately didn't find this one very grippy. Playing on a 6 directional grid with a predominantly 4-dimensional controller scheme leads to some clunky interactions, and the modifiers scattered throughout levels don't have as much of an impact as I might like. Elegant in its simplicity, but unremarkable for the same reasons.

Score: 5/10    Tags: Geometric Puzzler, Fast-Paced

Dredge is a game that holds a special place in my heart- I've always connected with games about the expanse of the ocean, and the atmosphere of mystery made it one of my top games of the last five years. It is not lightly, then, that I say that Dreadmoor carries its legacy elegantly. Despite proudly showing its Dredge blood, Dreadmoor nonetheless carves itself a unique identity. It boasts fluid land and sea-based mechanics, first-person immersion, tactile interactions with your ship and tools, and an incredibly unique visual atmosphere. The pacing in demo activities felt slow at times, but in a likely intentional way to prvide friction to overcome with upgrades. After a generous two and a half hour gameplay loop taking you through the first area, I'm happy to say the game stuck the landing and left me looking forward to its release this november.

Score: 8.5/10    Tags: Fishing, Tactile Immersion, Atmospheric

Boasting itself as the "worlds first 5D platformer", Screenbound has you simultaneously navigate some fairly classic 3D platforming while simultaneously moving through a 2D projection of that same world on a totall-not-game-boy in your hands. Some things in the world are only visible in one or the other, so the central conceit of the game is balancing where you will direct your attention to complete these puzzles and eventually get your mom back (who is now trapped in the not-game boy? this story is pretty thin.) While I enjoyed the time I played, I'm not certain the mechanic is used to its greatest effect. The Q-boy is mostly used for navigation by spotting things you need to interact with and ends up feeling more like a UI element than an actual second version of the world to navigate, so it ends up more like a standard 3D platformer with some extra bells and whistles rather than the true hybrid it wants to be. It's well polished for this stage of development and has a charming aesthetic, but in a well-saturated genre, I'm not sure it carves out the niche I was hoping for.

Score: 6/10    Tags: 3D platformer, 3D platformer, Secret Hunter

Trailblazers is a game that feels older than it is, and I say this mostly positively. It's a crew management sim that sits in a unique not-quite roguelike space, taking some cues from the likes of Rimworld and FTL with a really lovely coat of paint. Your animal-inspired landships have a lot of soul and the interactions between the crew and the wild spirit at the ships soul are interesting. If I'm being honest, crew sims have never really been my cup of tea, but something about this game compelled me to see my run through, and even if I'm still not the target audience, I'm glad I did. It has a refreshing senes of identity and mix of mechanics that I think will work well for fans of the genre- there seems to be quite a bit of depth to crew and ship choices, and I found the decisions you had to make genuinely difficult and the balance of risk compelling. I won't be picking this up myself, but if you're a fan of the genre, it's worth a look for certain.

Score: 7/10    Tags: Crew Management, Roguelike

For a classic dungeon crawler, this has a lot of pieces that should be points in its favour. A dynamic, switch-on-the-fly class system, weapons that feel meaningfully different to each other, and a nice pixel artstyle (which is what drew me to the demo to start with). Despite this, I spent the entirety of my playtime kind of hovering just below the point in which I was sold, and never quite got there. It made me ask myself, well, what *do* I want from a dungeon crawler to hit that mark? And I think the genuine answer is that so many icons from the past have come out of the genre that today I need something truly exceptional to feel novel. In that way, I feel like I was biased against games like Emberville from the start. There is nothing wrong with this game- it's probably, strictly speaking, one of the better put-together crawlers I've played in recent years. Almost all of its mechanics are satisfactory, but none are exceptional- and in this genre, if you're not exceptional, you're boring.

Score: 6/10    Tags: Dungeon Crawler, Loot-em-up

Every now and then, I encounter a demo where I cannot begin to guess how it was conceptualized, but I am delighted that it was. I almost skipped over Towers of Babble until a friend who knows my tastes well said he wanted to watch me try it out, and I am SO GLAD I did. Towers of Babble turns scrabble into a tower defense game- every word you put together turns into either a tower (noun) or a modifier (verb or averb), with its general power level determined by the points value of the word and the secondary effects of the tower are determined by its semantic meaning. This creates a super compelling gameplay balance- you want large words in play, but you're also trying to puzzle out what words you can make that might give you a certain effect (say, armour or a healing aura). The game goes way deeper with this mechanic than it needs to- applying modifiers to nouns they are associated with (like 'Sizzling' on 'Soup') gives an extra combo bonus, and you can arrange towers (represented by their first letter) like a crossword to gain even MORE extra abilities deriving from the words made between them. All in all, this is a game that allows a delightful amount of creativity. It provides ample places to strategize, multiple solutions for problems, and makes you feel fantastic for piecing things together in each battle. Easy recccomendation.

Score: 9/10    Tags: Scrabble, Tower Defense