This ends my shallow dive into February’s Next Fest.

I kind of feel bad that I didn’t spend hours with each game before I threw up my notes, but I won’t call these posts “reviews” or “previews”. They are literally notes. Since I didn’t find a whole lot of titles that really grabbed me by the shirtfront and screamed in my face, I picked a few I thought I’d like and played them for as long as I was able.

Some, however, didn’t work at all, either literally or metaphorically.

Witchspire

From what little I was able to manage with this title, it looks a lot like Aloft in both design and purpose. Sadly, the UI was hamstrung by my HOSAS setup. Some games simply latch on to any connected controllers and refuse to ignore them, and that can wreak havoc when trying to work with KBM. For example, I couldn’t access any drop down boxes in the settings because they’d close right up as soon as I clicked on them.

“Just disconnect your HOSAS!” you might mutter, but it would take a while to do that, and it would screw up how Windows organizes the flight controllers in ways that would result in an hour or so of setting them up again, and it’s just not worth it.

The Guiding Spirit

I had been on the fence about this one as it’s one of those skeuomorphic text adventure games that looks like it’s drawn on parchment and has you rolling dice while reading outcomes. I’m OK with reading games, and these Steve Jackson-style adventure RPGs so I was willing to give it a shot, but I couldn’t get any UI interaction whatsoever. The game did tell me to disconnect any connected controllers, and as such the previous entry’s disclaimer applies here as well.

I mean, if the game recognizes that there’s a problem with connected controllers, and other games don’t have this issue, maybe these devs should look into resolving the issue on their end? There’s too many games available that can successfully ignore peripherals, and I shouldn’t have to re-arrange my physical setup to play your game, folks.

Beltlife: Prospector

This is another one of those “inspired by The Expanse” style games which aim for as realistic a presentation as one can provide having never actually been in space, and who throw out “NEWTONIAN PHYSICS!” any time someone mentions a game set in space despite not actually knowing anything about physics. It’s all menu based and involves a crap-ton of reading, and I was losing my mind just trying to get out of space dock that I quit and was driven to do something else — anything else — with my life.

MMO 98

I did not like this game, but I appreciate it when devs go for this late 90’s/early 2000’s aesthetic.

The “goal” here is to create a MMO, and by “create an MMO” I mean pick a name for the company, a name for the game, and then spend the next several…minutes? HOURS?! doing the most mind-numbing tasks imaginable.

In theory, I’d be doing things like expanding servers and keeping on top of situations so my players — whom I can see chatting the lower-left corner of the screen, alerting me to issues I might be having — can keep spending money and telling their friends to do the same. In reality, I just kept jumping between dumpster fires without any hope of getting any of the under control. If that’s not a metaphor for 2026, I don’t know what is.

This is the “debugging interface”. It doesn’t show well here, but some of the values “shake”. Clicking on the shaking values put them into the staging patch, and I can deploy a quick hotfix or a slower compiled patch. I ended up with over 125 bugs by the time I quit, and I could never get on top of them.

I could also provision new servers to take the load off the original launch server, but they quickly spiral out of control, forcing me to hire engineers who could never fix the servers quickly enough. Meanwhile, customers get angry and my revenue declines.

Honestly, I appreciate the aesthetic — including the Clippy-like assistant in the corner who is actually useful, unlike Clippy — but there’s literally no gameplay here except to tear one’s hair out.