The demo for Key Fairy ends in a ‘boss fight’ that I lost too, but I wanted to dive back in straight away. Alas, the demo kicks you off, justifiably, for the next player to have a turn. Nonetheless, the ten-fifteen minutes of Key Fair I played were enough for me to feel like the game I’d, over the past year, seen screenshots and videos of, is as exciting as it sounds on paper.

The pitch for Key Fairy is that it’s a hand-drawn pacifist bullet-hell, which is a combination of words that don’t make much sense. Until you think about how Undertale exists as an RPG that you do ‘battles’ in, but don’t actually need to attack your opponents. You very quickly get an idea of how the game works.

In the first room, you encounter an enemy. You dance around them, using the left stick to move, the right flinging you along with a grapple-hook-like item, and picking up little heart-pieces that fall off them periodically. Eventually, they stop moving about and attacking you and apologise. In that moment, I went, “Oh, I get it.”

The hand-drawn part is the other very enticing part for this game, as its visual style is like nothing else you could see at PAX AUS 2025, or for that matter, like most games you’ll see on Steam at the moment. And it truly looks like a sketchbook of ideas has come to life in a video game form. No two elements look the same, and everything on the screen has a hand-touched feel.

You have options to change the colours. Although I played it in black and white, I thought having the other options would surely help some players with accessibility needs who require something more for their eyes to pick up on the screen.

Another exciting aspect of this short demo was the game’s vibe. It has style and personality, unlike anything else I played over the weekend. It’s weird, but in a way, I currently trust it to take me through to some fulfilling narrative. You can experience that too if you want to check out the Key Fairy demo that’s on Steam currently.

[Explosion Network attended PAX Australia 2025 with a provided Media Pass.]