Looking back, we'll call this period a renaissance for games that are kind of a pain in the ass. Stalker 2, Kingdom Come, Atomfall on the horizon—the gaming public of 2025 wants nothing more than to die face-down in the mud, victims to clockworld worlds that have their own rules and obey them unsparingly.

I couldn't be happier, and in my Next Fest meandering I think I might have found the true king of the genre: , a cyberpunk immersive sim set in an alt-reality Poland, whose developers were brave enough to ask the question: 'What if had a gun?' Its demo is also, well, not actually part of Next Fest, though I can't recommend strongly enough that you try it anyway. The game hit early access last week, and I'm eager to see where it goes.

Peripeteia feels a little like the beautiful mutant hybrid of Stalker and Deus Ex: things kick off with you—Marie—prone and unconscious on the floor of a warehouse, memories gone but your body bristling with mechanical augmentations. This is a videogame, so you have no memory, but the guy outside isn't much help: he's mostly upset he can't harvest you for parts.

And then, well, do what you like, really. Peripeteia's environments feel cavernous in a way you don't really see since the glory days of Unreal Engine 1. Everywhere is wide and vertiginous, bathed in sickly green light, and gas-masked troopers wield old Mosins and AKs in their spiky mechanical hands. Also, there's a TV in the bar you start off near that just plays the National Anthem of the USSR on loop, so that's great.

You're left to your own devices, but the guy who's upset he can't steal your legs—Filemon—does nudge you in a direction. He offers you an extra augment and gun of your choice and asks you to steal a bulb from the local planetarium. This is the hardest thing you will ever have to do in your actual life.

Because it's not just a simple matter of walking down the road. Peripeteian Poland is like a magical Chongqing: you are constantly exiting buildings only to realise you've been on the 20th, 30th, 40th floor this whole time, or that you're actually underground, or that ground floor is just a state of mind, man. Reaching the Planetarium means traversing across rooftops and balconies that are not arranged in that classic, game-designy way. They do not call attention to themselves. Getting anywhere is a question of eyeballing something that might be a platform, or a ladder, and deciding to give it a punt.

Which is, unironically, great fun if you're of a certain mental bent. Also, I died multiple times just trying to [[link]] reach my destination (the game notes in your quest log that there are alternate paths, but that the one that murdered me repeatedly is the "easiest").

Anyway, once I got there I had to bomb a government building. Naturally. The planetarium was inhabited by a cabal of subculturalists, a gang whose ideology I didn't quite take the time to parse but who were really not keen on the neighbouring government building. If I wanted to get in and filch their bulb, I had to drop a bomb behind the reception at city hall.

I played it cool, sweeping in with my guns holstered and augs switched off, taking the time to browse the literature on the tables—a phrenological treatise on Lenin's biological inferiority, which, okay—before leaping the reception desk. Anyway, long story short I got gunned down for my hubris, and resolved to instead find an alternate means of ingress to the planetarium, sneaking by the Subculturalists rather than getting involved [[link]] in politics.

It all felt great, and had the freestyle jazz, I'm-just-making-this-up-as-I-go-along feel of the great imsims of old. Given that this is just the early access version, I'm very curious to see what the devs at Ninth Exodus do with the game as time goes on. But if you want to get your hands on it now, you could do a lot worse with your time than checking out its demo.