With seconds to spare I hid inside a cupboard, and remained there while they searched the place, adrenaline pumping, wondering if they would ever leave or if they'd open the cupboard door and I'd have to somehow fight my way out - if I even could. Completely under my own steam, I phoned numbers in the deceased's address book, scanned fingerprints, and was about to leave to chase my newfound leads when I heard police at the door. I skulked around for clues on what happened, pinning dozens of tidbits of information to my investigation board, and drawing links between the pins as I saw fit. Following a lead, I journeyed to an apartment where I came across a dead body. I played an hour or so of an admittedly rough demo and it was overwhelming, frequently stressful, but honestly quite staggering in its ambition. That's right - not even the crimes are scripted. It's a sandbox detective game where everything is procedurally generated, from the rain-soaked hyper-industrialised noir city to its hundreds of inhabitants, and even the crimes and cases themselves. Ollie: Shadows Of Doubt is a game you should be interested in even if you don't intend to play it. Shadows Of Doubt Developer: ColePowered Games Alas, the 20-odd minute demo in this year's Next Fest doesn't leave you a lot of room to get to know many of your round lads, but cor, what a great first impression all the same. The more you level them up, the better they become, with my blob guys growing out of bad habits and into newer, more useful ones. Honestly, I should have guessed from the name 'Bandages' Alvarez. What's more, each rotund blob dude you recruit has their set of randomized quirks and personality traits you'll have to deal with too, which includes wigging out at the sight of corpses (of which there are many in a general run of Mr Sun's Hatbox), and having a 'skin condition' where medkits actually hurts you. It's entirely unpredictable, and I absolutely love it. With only a set number of fulton balloons at your disposal, you'll be swapping hats and weapons throughout your run, chucking soup vats for springy punching gloves and baguettes for bow and arrows. This is a platforming roguelike that feels both tightly controlled and wonderfully chaotic in the hands. All you need to worry about is bopping them on the noggin, nicking their headwear, and maybe fulton balloon-ing both them and their weapon back to your underground HQ Metal Gear Solid V-style so you can prepare for your big, end of level hat heist. Who are the other blobs with legs in Mr Moon's employ? Doesn't matter. Katharine: One of this year's IGF nominees for Excellence in Design, Mr Sun's Hatbox is a game with an exceedingly daft premise - Mr Sun's hatbox gets stolen by the dastardly Mr Moon - that's executed to absolute perfection. But, after months of having superhero strength in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, that’s exactly what I need. These little troops barely stand a chance. that guy.īut, even after it threw me out of the frying pan, clobbered me with it, doused me in oil, and chucked me into the fire of a UFO crash site, I came out with a wide grin. My favourite death so far is a soldier whose name I didn’t even get a chance to learn, because they got shot on round one, went berserk, and blew themselves up with a grenade launcher. They might get got by their own teammate, who knew they’d miss a shot but decided to go whole hog and commit anyway. They might shoot your troops through a slim line of sight that you could never have predicted. In fact, much of my time with the demo was spent getting slaughtered by them. It’s an overwhelming game, and one that offers little guidance in learning how to defend the world from aliens. Hayden: Xenonauts 2 is a tough-as-nails split between base management and turn-based tactics that, like its predecessor, harkens back to the X-COMs of old. Xenonauts 2 Developer: Goldhawk Interactive For now, though, here's what we think you should download first in this latest February Next Fest. We'll be playing and writing about more demos across the coming days, so watch out for further highlights later in the week. There are no doubt loads more great demos to play across the next week and a bit that we haven't covered here (as well as some like The Great War: Western Front whose demos we wrote about in more detail last week), so if you happen across something neat, be sure to shout about it in the comments. Like previous Next Fests, we've only had access to a small portion of the full February Next Fest slate ahead of time, and what you'll see below is a selection of games that stood out to us the most in that early slice.
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