The Horrors of Next Fest - IRE: A Prologue
In my endless search for interesting horror games I decided to use the October 2025 Next Fest as an opportunity to dive into as many of their demos as I could. This wound up being 35 demos that I have ploughed through in just under a week, running the gamut of ideas and approaches.
My aim with my impressions is to meet the games where they're at. There are a lot of small or solo devs who've put their work up for criticism and while I want to be honest, I also want to be constructive. Depending on the length of my impressions there may be single game or a batch in each post.
A first person hide-em-up in the Amnesia vein that uses looping through a single location with gradual changes and expansion as you go for its core conceit. You play Emily, a woman trapped on her father’s ship in the Bermuda triangle looking for answers to everyone’s sudden disappearance. The gameplay feels fairly standard for this type: solve puzzles, pick up lore documents and get stalked by a, possible invincible, monster. It’s well executed with a detailed, visually compelling location, controls that feel appropriately weighty without being clunky, and great voice acting. There’s not enough in the demo to judge the quality of the puzzles or the stealth mechanic, but my impression is that they'll work.
My only gripe was some of the main character’s dialogue and the frequency of it. Her somewhat self-aware commentary feels a tad cliché at this point in time and she narrates a little too often. The latter is a tough balancing act for any dev, too little and the character isn’t much of a character at all, too much and it can feel like we’re hearing her every thought, creating a sense of redundancy. It’s something that can be tweaked though
As a prologue to an intended larger series there’s a lot to like and I’m expecting it to be a solid entry in the genre. It also has an excellent logo animation, which isn’t important but, damn, I really want people to notice it.