End of the Line New Age
The End of the Line: New Age by Legio Vox Studios introduces a gacha title with a twist: traditional turn-based RPG combat paired with a unique hexagonal tile exploration system. As a fresh take on gacha gameplay, it’s captivating enough to make players curious despite the usual unpredictability of such games. The demo started with a tutorial area, offering a glimpse of combat and exploration. The turn-based fights involve a party of four active characters and two supports, each with distinct skills. Players must weigh tactical decisions, like choosing attacks targeting a single enemy or entire lines, affecting how battles unfold. Combat here demands timed taps when launching attacks or buffs, enhancing skill effects if you nail the timing. This mechanic adds a reactive flair to the turn-based pacing and can shift the tide of battle, but it requires focus as the timing windows vary across characters. A major sticking point is the painfully slow combat animations. While the deliberate pace likely supports the timing mechanic, it drags down the overall momentum of fights. This slowdown makes battles feel longer than necessary, which may test players’ patience despite the strategic charm. Exploration unfolds on hexagonal tiles, allowing you to navigate the world by tapping adjacent spaces. Enemies roam these tiles as well, making every move a choice between engagement or avoidance. This dynamic adds a layer of strategy uncommon in most gacha games, inviting players to plan their encounters carefully. The character designs, particularly the standout Iris, bring a fresh aesthetic to the familiar genre, hinting at strong artistic direction that could help the game carve out its own identity among the crowded gacha market. Despite the slow battle pace, the demo provided enough hooks to keep me interested. Its blend of classic RPG turn-based combat with smart, movement-based exploration could appeal to players who want more substance and control from their gacha experience.Overall, I had a decent time trying out The End of the Line: New Age despite issues with how slow the combat animations were, and I wish the developers luck in reaching an audience that enjoys both gacha games and turn-based RPGs.
Never’s End
Next, I would like to highlight an upcoming SRPG called Never’s End from Hypersect. This isometric strategy game sees the player take control of a spirit to possess various villagers to make them fight against monsters in turn-based combat. Instead of being stage-based, Never’s End takes place on a semi-open world grid where the player will be walking from area to area and getting into encounters.
While that concept alone would have made this game unique, what truly makes this Never’s End shine is the combat system and how much freedom the player is given to use their arsenal however they wish.
The number of ways the environment can be utilized to the player’s advantage and disadvantage in this game is awe-inspiring. Despite only having access to a single spell in the demo, I felt like an entire world of possibilities was open to me.
This spell, one which allowed me to transplant the heat from one tile to another, could be used to create wind that pushes an enemy due to the change in humidity. This can, of course, be chained multiple times to send enemies far away and into obstacles that may harm them.
That spell and the ways it can be used are only one example of how versatile Never’s Ends‘ combat and environment system will be. While talking with one of the game’s developers, they told me about other mechanics, such as breaking apart cacti to use their water to cure characters who have been set aflame or cast fire on characters who have the bleed status to cauterize their wounds, taking a heavy amount of damage in the moment in order to prevent taking continuous damage throughout the fight.
Time of day is also an important factor in the environment that will play a role in combat. During the night, each tile is colder by default. Characters who are too cold or get hit with an ice spell may be frozen. Like every other aspect of the game, the player can make use of this in multiple ways. A frozen character will be unable to move, and therefore will have their turn skipped, but they will also be kept safe from damage, as enemies will need to spend time breaking the ice to get to them. This will give you a short opportunity to heal and save said character.
There is no shortage of ways the player can take advantage of the environment and their spells in this game. I feel that even with the time I have spent with the demo, I have only scratched the surface of what this game will have to offer.
The fights I got to try in the Never’s End demo let me know right away that this game is for those who are veterans of the SRPG genre. Even I, someone who has played this style of game for decades, had quite a bit of trouble and even died to the boss due to a few careless moves. However, at no point did the game feel unfair, and even now I’m wishing I had just played slightly differently in order to win.
With an incredibly complex battle system that rewards experimentation and isn’t afraid to pull its punches, any veteran of the SRPG genre will find themselves at home with Never’s End, which is scheduled to release in 2026 and currently has a demo available to play on Steam.
The Piper of Dawn
When I walked up to the booth for The Piper of Dawn by Bone Nail and saw the game’s key art, I would have never guessed what genre of game this was. Especially after the lengthy Visual Novel-esque opening sequence. The amount of tonal whiplash one will experience after transitioning from the tense opening sequence, where you are playing a card game with death, into the actual gameplay, where you must tend to your brightly colored farm, cannot be overstated. The Piper of Dawn appears to be a game that thrives on tonal changes like this, as it was not the last of its kind.
Later in the demo, the player will encounter a corpse in their garden. This won’t affect your day-to-day life, though, as there is a rule in this town about how if an impossible crime is discovered, then it should be ignored for at least a month. This immediately sets the stage that the player has awoken in a strange world with strange rules, but what could you do about them other than wake up and get to work on farming your crops?
As for the gameplay itself, it is about what one would expect from an idle farming game. The player is expected to take care of their farm by clearing away weeds, planting seeds, and, of course, watering them. Gameplay is done entirely by clicking on objects with no walking around required for the player.
After a crop is planted and watered, all the player needs to do is wait for the timer to clear and then harvest it. While waiting for these timers, the player can occupy themselves with either clearing out more space on their farm or building new tools that can produce other types of produce. This led to an experience where, even while I was waiting to harvest my crops, I still had busywork to handle.
While you are free to plant whatever you wish, the game has a menu full of quests that require you to deliver specific items in order to get paid, and more importantly, to progress the story. This creates a simple and satisfying gameplay loop where the player gets to read a small amount of story after every crop waiting session.
