So far during this Steam NEXT FEST, I have looked at:

• Soulstone Survivors
• Aka
• Diluvian Winds

Which you can find my first impressions of behind these blue words!

and also:

• ZERO Sievert
• Earth From Another Sun
• Against the Storm

Which you can find my first impressions of behind THESE blue words!

For a very quick recap, Soulstone Survivors is a fantastic bullet-hell rogue-lite that I immediately threw onto my wishlist. Aka is a cute, polished farm sim of a sorts but wasn't really my cup o' tea. And Diluvian Winds is a very interesting colony/resource management game.

ZERO Sievert isn't worth even peeking at right now, it desperately needs to cook for a while longer. Against the Storm is a wonderful city-builder colony-sim that I'm planning on buying the very second I can. And it's very possible that Earth From Another Sun could be theeeeee space sim of my dreams.

Now, onward towards my final first impressions of this Steam NEXT FEST! In this final post I'll be looking at DREDGE which is a mysterious fishing game, Aquatico which is an under-the-sea city-builder, and Forever Skies which is a survival base-builder.

 

DREDGE: CHAPTER ONE

DREDGE is a different type of game. I'm not even really sure what genre it would be considered to be. The game's description bills it as a fishing adventure with a sinister undercurrent, which sounded intriguing to me.

I only found out about this game a couple of months back because I was looking for fishing games or aquarium simulators, and DREDGE popped up during that search. Now it's featured in NEXT FEST so it was time to have a looksie.

We begin the game with a cutscene. We're on a boat, on our way to a town to become their new fisherman. On the way there, we crash into the shore and ruin our boat and damage a little bit of the town.

The next morning my fisherman wakes up to the mayor standing over him. He seems to be a jolly ol' chap who welcomes me to town, says that since my boat is all bashed and battered I can use the town's old vessel instead, and then berates me for causing structural damage.

I now have a debt to pay back. A percentage of each of my fishing adventures will be used to repair the town.

So I undock my new/old boat and sail into the bay, to find some fishies. I'm warned that I should return before nightfall, as there is a horrid mist at night...

Controls are pretty standard. And the graphics are nicer than I thought they would be! I spent a lot of time just angling my boat against the backdrop, getting nice screenshots of it and admiring the view. 😅

See what I mean? The graphics are lovely.

It was hard to get a screenshot of the fishing puzzle, but you basically just click whenever the arrow on the circle hits a green spot. If there's a yellow spot, you get a trophy fish which is worth more. Woo!

Once you catch the fish, you need to place them into your cargo using a Tetris-styled system.

Now that I've caught a bunch of fish, it was time to sell the fish!

The mayor introduces me to the local shipwright who can install a bunch of stuff into my ship, if I have the money to spend and time to wait. And I also learn about being able to research stuff for my boat. However, none of it is available in the demo.

The fishmonger has customers who want certain fish, so sends me out on quests to find them. Some fish only appear at night. But I found them!

At night, you start to panic. I'm not too sure how that affects the game. I deliberately roamed around a lot during the night, just to see what would happen, and all that did was the eyeball on the compass — my fisherman's worried eye — spazzing out.

As we fish and complete quests, things happen. I found a note in a floating bottle. There are books to read that give you permanent perks. You can find shipwrecks and loot treasure and scrap from them. And I also found a mysterious item, that I guess furthers the story.

The map also looks nicely sized, but I can't get very far in the demo.

The game seems alright. Has a bit of a mysterious feel to it as you just plod along and fish up all the things. I'm not too sure I'd rush out to buy it, but on special it might be a decent time-waster.

I wish there was a little more in the demo that I could do, but it is a demo after all. 🤷‍♀

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

Aquatico

Aquatico is a city-builder where you get to build your city under the sea!

That sounded interesting to me, and I usually enjoy city-builders, so Aquatico was an easy choice for this Demo-fest.

We start off choosing a name and banner for our upcoming sea-society. There are quite a few symbols to choose from and you can make them various colours. Then we choose a map to play on.

There are only two maps available during the demo, so I just chose the first, basic, default map which has a "normal" difficulty.

After choosing your map, you can tweak your game settings. The options pictured above are the default options. A beginning population, high resources, medium ore, and a normal rate for events and disasters.

I also chose to start in March, since that's apparently spring. I was about to set it to January so I could start at the start of the year, but then remembered this was likely northern hemisphere and it'd be a bad idea to start in the middle of winter.

We get to choose exactly where we would like to start our city. I thought this little cul-de-sac type area looked nice. It seemed to have a reasonable variety of resources around.

The tutorial begins!

It's very hand-holdy. That was my first thought. When tutorials literally tell you how to do all the things like this, my brain goes fuzzy and I immediately get bored. Some games do tutorials really well; this game? It's a slog of a tutorial. A slow and painful slog.

The game has a very Banished-style job board where you can assign all of your drones and human workers. It doesn't really seem to matter though since you can automatically assign the workforce with no micro-management on your part.

With a simple press of a button, you have an alternating view of the region so you can meticulously place certain buildings in better locations. Unfortunately the perfect spot for my oil platform was a bit too far away, but I built it anyway! The drones can move their little droney wings and get to it.

Next we have to connect pipelines to and from certain buildings.

This was a pain in the butt. Unless you zoom right in, you can't really see where you're placing the pipeline, and even then it's a struggle to attach the damn thing to buildings.

We have a boring-arse tutorial, and shoddy placement abilities.

And the research tree is uninspiring to boot.

I don't know. I like citybuilders and all, but this one didn't take my fancy. I really like the idea of a citybuilder under the sea and building my very own Atlantis... but this one needs a lot of work. It's not for me.

I didn't get much further than this. I closed the game with a disgruntled grunt. "Ugh."

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

Forever Skies

I first heard about Forever Skies when my partner was looking up a bunch of game videos and there was a short gameplay video of this intriguing base-builder where the player was up in an airship.

Building your base up in an airship and exploring a ruined city sounded interesting! I rushed to Steam to wishlist it, and this fortnight the demo was available during NEXT FEST.

Starting a new game, I crash-landed on the top of a building. My directive to find a virus sample so a cure for some disease could be synthesised. Apparently people were sent here before me but haven't been heard from. What awaits me is an unknown.

This game doesn't hold your hand. There are no compass points or markers telling you where to go. There is a quest-log telling you basically what you need to do, but you need to work it out yourself.

That is quite refreshing! But I bet there'll be early access people who complain about it and by the time it's a released game there'll be compass markers everywhere.

I find a scanner beside a computer. Also a few dead bodies. This is all that remains of the expedition that came before me. There is some bottled water and some fruit growing on the rooftop. I drink and eat, hurriedly. My person is hungry.

As soon as the fruit hits my tongue, I am diseased. Now I have a personal reason to look for this virus sample, too.

With the scanner I can see interactables a little clearer, like metal debris on the ground, and I can also scan the dead bodies to learn more about who they were and scan various items to learn about what it is exactly and what it's useful for.

The previous expedition had an airship that they were working on to better investigate their surroundings and search for virus samples.

I'm tasked with basic repairs to get it up and running again.

Once the engine is installed, I'm able to fuel her up and start exploring!

It's at this point the devs welcome me to the game and inform me that I now have a timer. I have 20 minutes to play before the demo expires.

Yay. Just what I want. A tiny amount of time in which to zoom around and discover if I will enjoy this or not.

I hop into the driver's seat of my airship and try to find a building to land on so I can explore.

Most of the buildings are falling apart, but as I get closer to the blinking light in the distance I find somewhere I can land.

The airship flies incredibly slowly though and by the time I get there — in between stopping to collect materials in the air and purifying water so I can drink it and not be hydrated — I only have 6 minutes remaining of my demo time.

I couldn't work out how to land my airship, so I kind of just left it hovering close to some flooring... I doubt I'll be able to get back onto it.

In my attempt to get back on my airship, I ended up falling to my death. xD

Which was good timing anyway because I had ran out of demo time.

I'm not really sure what I think about this game. I feel like I didn't get enough time to dive in and test things out. Movement was floaty, but it is still in alpha so whatever. There were a few framedrops here and there, but once again, alpha demo. The hunger and thirst meters moved far too quickly.

The graphics were nice enough and I wanted to work things out and keep exploring, but just didn't get given enough time.

I feel as though I won't be jumping on this as soon as possible, but might be interested in grabbing it once its released if it goes on a decent sale. I'm not overly excited about it, now that I've tried it out a teeny bit, but I'll be happy to give it a shot if I can grab it for $15 or so.

 

⭐️ ⭐️ 🌈 ⭐️ ⭐️

 

It's very exhausting playing so many games in such a short period of time, even if they were only tiny demos. I almost didn't complete this final post and these last three games. 😅

I hope that you found some value in my first impressions over these past few days and perhaps found a game or two that you, too, might enjoy!! Cheers.
 

Until next time!! 😊

 

---

 

_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the games: Forever Skies, Aquatico, and DREDGE: CHAPTER ONE}