Jeff's end-of-week Next Fest roundup

It's been a busy Next Fest week here at Rogue. We've each done multiple roundups of our favorite demos and I'm sure we'll do at least one more next week.

Next Fest is just a firehose of demos, and, frankly, they're not all great. We've spent the week sifting through as many as we could. Here are six more of my favorites.

Bioeden

Bioeden is a mix of a lot of things I like. It's a cozy management sim, a base-builder, a laid-back terraforming game, and a zoo management game all in one.

Your job is to restore life to a polluted and devastated planet. And you do that by playing two games at once. One is a colony sim not unlike Surviving Mars where you lay out resource lines and power generators. The other is a Planet Zoo-like creature collector where you're trying to make animals happy enough to reproduce.

I don't know that it's a game for everybody, but it's 100% a game for me.

Cornerfall

It's weird to recommend a game you don't actually play, but Cornerfall won me over. It's a hands-off dungeon crawler where you only have to check in periodically. It's like a stripped-bare version of D&D where you don't even have to do the dice rolling. All you're doing is managing inventory and boosting stats periodically.

I'm sure there are other barebones, text-based game simulations out there, but there's a weird, dystopian sadness to relegating a game to idling on a second screen where it plays itself while you go back to working. And it's fascinating.

Deer & Boy

Deer & Boy is a side-scrolling puzzle game where you play as the titular boy who is accompanied by his friend, (a) deer. Sometimes you have to ask the deer to help you do things like push buttons or distract grownups. Sometimes you have to rescue the deer from a predicament.

Also, the deer's antlers glow sometimes?

Above anything else, Deer & Boy is charming as all hell. And, if the trailer that plays at the end of the demo is any indication, it's going to be an emotional gutpunch as well.

Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator

Iron Nest takes an fantastic(al) concept — you're the gunner in a gigantic walking battletank — and gives it the immersive sim reality treatment. Yeah, you're waging war in a building-sized howitzer, but you're also miles from the action. You get orders, you do some math, you turn some wheels, you pull the trigger, and then … someone else tells you if you were successful or not. You literally don't see action.

Everything about Iron Nest is satisfyingly tactile. You plot bearings and distances with a map and a ruler. You adjust angles with wheels and levers. Loading the cannon involves lots of dials and knobs.

Iron Nest is just an amazing execution of a great concept.

Press a Button Simulator

I recognize that I have a weakness for games that start out as one thing and slowly reveal a secret metanarrative underneath. Press a Button Simulator is one of those games and I'm fine with that.

Yes, it's about pushing a button as many times as you like in a sparse room. But, when a floating chair appears in the featureless void beyond the window and the walls of reality break down, it becomes a much more meaningful conversation.

Or, you know, you can just stay in the room and keep pushing the button like you're supposed to.

Worming from Home

It's always fun when you can see the seed that generates an idea. Like, you just know that Zach Northrop mistyped "working" one day and was struck by inspiration.

Worming from Home is a job simulator where you have to do just enough to convince your boss you're actually working. Also, you're a worm ragdolling across your desk and hitting the keyboard with your head.

You can write your own joke here about corporate jobs and spinelessness.