Next Level #1: Iron & Grind

Lately, I’ve been covering a lot of games. Like, a LOT. So, to avoid flooding your feed with every cool game that crosses my path, I’m going to start doing weekly recaps in a few categories. This is the inaugural issue of Next Level, where I’ll cover new and upcoming games that tickle your fancy without clogging your feed.

This week is looking stacked, with a plethora of games that aren’t just reskinned survival slop and cozy time-killers. We’re getting decopunk sky cities, cyberpunk fistfights, cursed fairy tales, haunted terminals, and a next‑gen skatepark built for modders. Clear your backlog accordingly.

Aether & Iron is the one to watch if you like your RPGs wordy, weird, and just a bit dour. Billed as a “decopunk” narrative RPG, it leans into 1920s‑style glamour twisted through fascism, industrial war machines, and authoritarian bureaucracy, with you stuck in the middle as a glorified pencil‑pusher in a militarized sky empire. The hook isn’t grinding XP so much as making choices in dense, reactive dialogue, juggling propaganda, class resentment, and a government that absolutely does not have your best interests at heart. I can’t wait to start filing TPS reports while the world falls apart. This one comes out on March 31st, but has a demo right now.

Replaced is doing the opposite: less talking, more punching, but with that same obsession over atmosphere. This one’s a side‑scrolling cyberpunk action platformer where you play an AI stuck in a human body, moving through a grimy, alternate‑’80s city that looks like a playable VHS tape. The devs name‑check Inside, the Arkham games, and Uncharted as inspirations, and you can see it in the animation priority: counters snap, environmental transitions feel choreographed, and every punch lands like it’s part of a 2D prestige VOD fight scene. It’s gunning for a sweet spot between cinematic and reactive, and it drops on March 12th.

Escape from Ever After plays like a melancholy storybook. Sleepy Castle Studio pitches it as a fairy‑tale action adventure where you’re literally trying to escape the happily‑ever‑after machine: a cartoonish kingdom that really doesn’t want you asking questions. The press kit leans hard into expressive 2D animation, chunky combat, and environmental storytelling (the kind where a cute village has just enough wrong with it that you start checking behind every tavern door for cult activity). This one is out now!

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf is a sequel to what is probably the most cinematic platformer I’ve ever played. Wishfully is bringing Lana and her adorable little cat‑orb companion Mui back on March 5th, this time for Switch and Switch 2 alongside PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, with a free demo hitting non‑Nintendo platforms this week. The sequel expands on the first game’s gentle puzzle‑platforming with more complex companion mechanics. Mui can now transform into things like a fish or flying insect, pilot robots, and channel electricity, while ratcheting up the tribal conflict and planetary stakes. If you’re into hand‑painted vistas, orchestral swells, and occasionally swearing at physics puzzles, this one’s already on your radar

REMOTE CONTROL, meanwhile, looks like playing Alien: Isolation through a terminal. You sit at a computer in a vaguely sinister office, sending disposable “vessels” into a derelict ship by literally typing commands (“move left,” “open door,” “run”) and watching a low‑res camera feed as things inevitably go sideways. The dev describes it as Isolation meets Severance, with the tension split between deep‑space horror and the banal dread of your day job. You only get 12 human attempts to figure out what happened on that ship, each with their own traits and flaws, and they don’t always obey cleanly; you’re technically in control, but you’re also just another cog in some corporate meat‑grinder.

Finally, Skate Style is a game tailor-made to become my newest obsession. With over a thousand hours in Session and Skater XL, I’m itching for someone to push the form further. Built by one of the original Skate City devs (one of the greatest skateboarding games you’ve never played), it’s pitched as a next‑gen skateboarding sim where the headline feature is a custom animation editor, so you can literally define how your flips and grinds look, capture runs with cinematic cameras, and skate ultra‑detailed spots based on real locations like Barcelona and Prague. Full mod support and robust replay‑sharing turn it into a platform for style nerds to one‑up each other on Steam. There is no release date listed, but there is a demo available.

If you’re stuck in a gaming rut, you have no excuse not to try one of these games out. You can role‑play a terrified bureaucrat in a floating fascist state, live out a pixel‑noir cyberpunk movie, crawl out of a fairy‑tale prison, mope through a stunning alien apocalypse, micromanage doomed space janitors, and then blow off steam by scripting the perfect heelflip.