A trend of gambling-inspired games has surfaced in the wake of poker-like deckbuilding roguelike Balatro. The recipe? Take a standard game of chance you might find in any casino and mash an uncountable number of bells and whistles and gizmos and weirdnesses into it, then slather it in a "one more turn" roguelike dressing, and make it as tactile and punchy as humanly possible. The ongoing Steam Next Fest has no shortage of these gambley gimmickers, but here's one demo that stood out. Ballionaire is a colourful pachinko-inspired roguelike, but you choose where the wacky widgets will go.
]]>Deep beneath my desk lies a secret shame: impenetrable black thickets of power leads, sprouting forth across two overlapping extension units. Such a failure of cable management pierces my conscience like the beat of Poe's tell-tale heart, and yet I’m forever powerless – as in, I can’t be bothered – to do anything about it. Yet even I was soothed by the Steam Next Fest demo for Plug It In, a chilled-out puzzle game about clicking chunky plugs into the right outlets.
]]>Ever been in a position where two people are really going at each other, hurling pointed jabs and insults back and forth, and you're stuck in the middle? Well then, perhaps you'll empathise with the enemies in Archons, a twin-stick Vampire Survivors-like where you control two characters at once, and attacks bounce between them automatically as they move about the arena. I gave the Steam Next Fest demo a quick whirl today, and after a couple of swift attempts (I died horribly fast), I realised this could become a bit of a danger to my free time, so I've put it away for now.
]]>I punched a cultist in the face in Streets Of Rogue 2, just because. He started running away - something I would not allow. When another robed cultist spotted what was happening, he tried to intervene, and a kind of Benny Hill pursuit chain began. We ran across a beach, through public toilets, and into the surf. In the end I had to knock them both out. As they lay unconscious, I worried they might soon wake and tell someone what I had done. This can't happen, I hate accountability. I punched their unawake bodies toward the sea in an effort to float the evidence away. But after a few punches the first man exploded into chunks of flesh. I am a murderer now. I was supposed to be a chef.
Streets Of Rogue 2 has a demo out for Steam Next Fest, and while a lot of features are locked up behind the word "UNAVAILABLE" in red font, there's still quite a lot of mischief for you to get up to.
]]>The existence of Knights In Tight Spaces, sequel to Fights In Tight Spaces, implies the existence of an unknown quantity or perhaps, an infinity of follow-up games that rhyme with both of those. Frights In Tight Spaces is the obvious horror spin-off. Sleights In Tight Spaces would be an urban pick-pocketing sim. Fights In Trite Spaces is about arguing with people on social media. Ah, you could spend a whole article, indeed, a series of articles, just fleshing out the iterations. Fortunately, Knights In Tight Spaces has a new demo to distract me.
]]>"Do you have a ping of 1000 or something," my opponent asked, during my inaugural bout of Straftat. Ah yes, this is it, that sense of unpleasantly intimate sheepishness. That's the withering late-90s chatbox scorn I've been missing, in this age of glossy live service multiplayer. I hid under a stairwell in order to meditate upon my response, then laboriously typed: "No, I just suck." Right on cue, the other player tumbled into view and shredded me with an AK.
The player I met in my second match was more forgiving. "I honestly think the characters need more HP," they said, generously. My wrists need more HP, actually. My eyes and reflexes need urgent patching.
]]>So maybe it’s just me, but there’s a sense of intense freedom and adventure to Keep Driving's Steam demo that belies its prosaic, tractor-tailing subject matter. The opening minutes are oddly silent, until Westkust’s Swirl blasts out from your radio as soon as you drive off toward your first destination - your mate’s house, to hang out and play console games. It comes on strong and sweet; a rush of wind through an open window on a warm morning.
]]>You might have caught this one during Day Of The Devs earlier this year. It’s stuck with me since because the developer Tanat seemed like a rad dude, and also because there’s nothing I cherish more than taking a bad pun and just absolutely going to town on it, marrow and all. Building Relationships is about buildings forming relationships in a Love Islandy scenario, though without the reality TV framing you might find in say, Crush House. But the real gag here is the commitment to the bit. Besides that, it’s just a really charming and fun N64-style 3D platformer.
It also features the sort wonky physics that definitely wouldn’t get Ninty’s seal of quality, but work brilliantly here, especially since your character consists largely of angles but still insists on, you know, performing motions.
]]>The allure of the sea-green GameBoy screen is difficult to resist. Picking up from where Pokémon left off two decades ago, Letalis is a bleepy-bloopy retro RPG about wandering from town to town and doing battle with dodgy local leaders to prove your worth. But you won't be doing the fighting yourself, God no. Leave that to the squad of Roman gladiators hiding in your back pocket.
]]>My name is Edwinus Evans Thirlwellus, Commander of the News Writers of the North, General of a small lonely box of unpainted Warhammer 40,000 Orc figures I was given for my 21st birthday, and loyal servant to the true emperor, Timmy Mallett. FATHER TO NO MURDERED SONS. HUSBAND OF NO MURDERED WIVES. OWNER OF A BRONZE SWIMMING CERTIFICATE AND A WHITE BELT IN KARATE. Eater of pizza that has fallen on the floor, like a whole minute ago! And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next. Hah, it's much easier to make that last claim in a video game, rather than when standing in a literal circle of swords. The game in question is Dieseldome: Oil And Blood, and it is pretty good fun. There's a demo on Steam, for now is the time of Next Fest.
]]>The developer of Full Fathom describes it as a "thalassophobia sim". You are the lone engineer on a rustbucket submarine exploring the dangerous waters of a submerged country in an alternate reality 1990s. The warning lights on the control panel are flashing, a buzzer is spluttering like a dying bluebottle, and your robotic assistant is about as useful as an umbrella in the Mariana Trench. Things could not get any worse. And then you see it. Something in the green haze outside. Something with a tail.
]]>If I could extend my arm forty times its normal length, while also granting it the flexibility of a sock filled with mince, I’d probably just use it to take the bins out without leaving my chair. But what if someone were to use this power... for evil? That’s the gist of My Arms Are Longer Now, a cartoony "stealth-comedy" game about worming a single stretchy limb into people’s valuables, which has a Steam Next Fest demo out now.
]]>Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today.
Now I'm going to ask you to come back to the present. But prepare for a bit of a shock - there's a sequel coming to that bong huffing shooter. 420BlazeIt 2 has been announced for some months, but now there's a demo you can play too.
]]>Sektori promises to "transport you into another state of consciousness", but what the pulsing soundtrack initially did was transport me to Youtube so I could look up this scene from Spaced, where Michael Smiley raves out to a boiling kettle. By elegant coincidence, that video is about the length of my longest run so far in Sektori's demo - a very busy 60 seconds or so.
]]>Credit where it’s due to Silent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo is out now: even within the confines of a 2.5D platformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema.
]]>One of the most important lessons in skiing is, presumably, to look where you're going. You wouldn't want to ski with your eyes closed or while viewing yourself from a drone pointed back at the mountain from above. That'd be daft.
Or maybe not. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the frosty followup to the mountain biking original, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and like its predecessor it's about going fast while barely able to see what's coming. Yet also like its predecessor, initial frustrations melted away until I was eagerly hitting the slopes in the Snow Riders demo for just one more quick go.
]]>Normal games for normal people, that's what everyone loves. Cosy experiences where nothing goes wrong and you have absolutely zero things to investigate and no otherworldly mysteries to worry about. It may shock you to learn that we were recently duped by "normal" gardening sim Grunn, which was not normal at all. But don't worry, it won't happen again. Today we bring you the ordinary and not-one-bit-suspicious Trip, which sees players wandering from carriage to carriage, chatting pleasantly with passengers during a long train journey. How long? Let me look at the timetable here, let's see... "Forever," it says. Hm. Must be a misprint.
]]>Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we've spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn't that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder - why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? - but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there's a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.
]]>Excuse me, sorry, pardon me, can I just, thank you, ah, sorry, thanks... Phew, made it. Steam Next Fest is pretty crowded, eh? As if the unholy swarm of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest was not enough, this week the fearful megalords at Valve decided to drop their regular cavalcade of coming-soons onto their megastore. The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about Next Fest, of course, is the overwhelming number of demos that come out during the event. A small herd of video games are standing on my toes as we speak. But that's okay, we are expert curators. Here's a handy list of our nine favourite demos of the lot.
]]>Disco Samurai is a game that’s so difficult I’d have given up playing sooner if it didn’t contain so many of my absolute favourite action game things. Tense, decisive duels. Violence that’s both brutal and a little silly. Scalpel-sharp parry n' strike back-and-forths. Short stages that dole out chunky progression hits of dopamine, as quickly as they wrest those hits away from you with another humbling beatdown. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to do one thing - rhythm combat - and does it brilliantly. It's got teeth, but it's also got groove.
]]>I’ve always loved the art of the Metal Slug series of side-scrolling shooters, so I’ve been keeping a keen eye on the fetching grid strategy antics of Metal Slug Tactics ever since it was first announced. For as long as I’ve been excited, I’ve also been worried. It’s been a polarising experience, like being alternately fed delicious sandwiches and those inedible rotlogs they sell at Subway. Still, I’ve remained cautious: is all this great pixel-art just a shroud pulled over a ho-hum tactics game to rescue it from naffness? It’s with this in mind I hungrily dove into the Steam Next Fest demo, as one might hungrily dive into a bin to eat literal garbage if their only other option was Subway.
]]>AI nowadays is big business and it's pretty terrifying, honestly. FACEMINER captures both of these things well, as it sees you build a biometric data processing empire from scratch. And most scary of all, is you'll relish upscaling your organisation as you mine mugshots. I mean, I went from, "Hmmm, this is dubious", to a sicko excited by the fact I didn't have to click much to harvest strangers' portraits. Nic wrote about it a while back, but I'd like to draw attention to it again as it's very good.
]]>The playable area in Caravan SandWitch’s Steam Next Fest demo isn’t all that big, but within seconds you’re plonked at the rusty wheel of an offroading motorhome and let loose to roam it. It’s a figurative "Go nuts," and given how much more this narrative-heavy, third-person exploration yarn seemingly has to give, it's an attitude I’m seriously hoping holds firm throughout the full game.
]]>In my eternal quest to describe games concisely enough that you don’t feel robbed of time you could have just watched a trailer with, I am compelled to use many of the same words and word combinations ad nauseam. So, when a game like horror tower defence Bella Wants Blood comes along and uses some odd nouns, I get all excited. Here, that’s because I get to recklessly spaff out terms like ‘Blood Gutters’, ‘The Rattler’, and your friend and mine, ‘The Stabber’. Barely an atom quivers in Bella Wants Blood that hasn’t been stylised or made odd and alluring in some way.
]]>I’ve been scouring Steam Next Fest demos specifically for something laid back, and Spilled! – despite sounding like the title of a musical about upturned milk – has delivered nicely. It’s a light and breezy ocean cleanup game that has you sailing a cute lil’ boat around polluted seas, cleansing oil patches and scooping up plastic bottles. Even if it doesn’t have the every-last-speck detailing of PowerWash Simulator or Viscera Cleanup Detail, it satisfies in very similar ways, and I would very much like to get back out on the water whenever the full game is complete.
]]>Back in the day I used to be one of those Counter Strike players who'd hop into a custom aim-training 'environment'. I'd spend a good ten minutes or so darting my eyes between blobs or skittish enemy models then whipping my wrist to blast them with an AK.
Glyphica reminds me of those heady days. It's a roguelite horde survival game where you've got to protect your central pewpew from an onslaught of words. I think it's the perfect warm up for someone who's about to do a big essay or maybe defend Dark Souls 2 in an errant comments section. It's fun!
]]>Hollywood Animal is a management sim about turning a bankrupt movie studio into a money printing machine, set in Hollywood’s golden age. While a Frostpunk 2 or Manor Lords might have you grapple with the elements, here it’s all about balancing a fickle audience and Tinseltown’s seedy underbelly. Maybe making some worthwhile art, too? Sorry, did I say ‘worthwhile art’? I meant to say “lots of money.” Let’s get clicking!
First up, I need to name my studio (I settle on Horace's Revenge) as well as my crack new team of business bastards. There’s my chief legal officer, Jebediah End. My CCO, Anne Egg, and CFO, Rummy McLastdrink. He doesn’t have a sauce problem, because obviously I wouldn’t put him in charge of money if he did. In the wreckage of the studio, we find an unedited film reel hidden in the waffles n’ cocaine cupboard. It’s a noir thriller named ‘Messenger Of Death’. Whatever influential critic is currently directing this era’s discourse has chosen to categorise each film as genre percentages (‘60% detective/40% thriller’), and setting (‘modern American city’.) Let’s just hope those pigs in the stands recognise a solid gold picture when they see one!
]]>In Sorry We're Closed, an axe-murdering entrepreneur called Jenny is described in newspaper clippings as both a serial embezzler and as the city's "wealthiest bachelorette". Aside from being a dry reflection of tabloid reporting on women who commit crimes (bad woman! sexy, bad woman!) this is also the kind of incidental character-building you can expect in this perky, retro-styled survival horror. It plays like Silent Hill charged with the hot pink body horror of Porpentine interactive fiction. And judging by my hour of unsettled strolling through the decrepit tube station of the game's demo, it's a powerful combo.
]]>Silkbulb Test is a game in which, going by its demo, you are strapped to a chair and made to answer questions projected onto a screen. You answer the questions by looking ponderously down and pressing the big red and yellow buttons on the desk in front of you. The questions begin with relatively innocuous, CAPTCHA-style inquiries, such as "is this a door?" accompanied by a picture of a face. A few minutes later, there's stuff like "Are you alone?" and "Is it safe to be alone?" and "You are alone" and yep, time to smash Pause or better, throw the Steam Deck behind the sofa and go stare out the window for a while.
]]>Roguelike FPS Wild Bastards is the space western follow up to 2019’s Void Bastards. It takes some of that game’s ideas, mainly those related to shooty and looty, and reforms them into a largely different can o’ campfire beans. This time, it’s less focused on exploration, more on individual, tense shoot-outs. You collect a cast of weirdos, each with different guns and abilities, and form the deadliest dang posse this side of the last tactical overworld map you descision'd your way through. I like what I've played so far, although I think a lot is going to hinge on how much evolution the mid-game offers. As always, here’s a Steam demo, if you want to be all contrary and 'form your own opinions'. Pah.
]]>I usually avoid writing sentences that could easily be quoted on a Steam page, but the exquisitely satisfying sound that Grunn’s garden shears make is the exception. Please feel free to try any of these on for size: Grunn’s shear sound is the Wilhelm Scream of gardening equipment, sure to be referenced for decades to come. Grunn’s shear sound wormed its way past my eyes and into parts of my brain I’d previously assumed could only be accessed by either masterful ASMR or irresponsibly long Q-tips. I used to have anxiety, but now, my only fear in life is that Grunn’s grass will run out, so I no longer have a reason to click away with its shears. Play Grunn, innit. There are, by the way, lots of other things to like about it, although I cannot hear them over the wonderful sound of these shears.
]]>Update: Card Bard appears to be a copy of a game by another developer, Dire Decks by kindanice. Dire Decks was released in 2023 on itch.io and was well received there. Kindanice has pointed out the direct likeness between their game and the one released on Steam under another name. Yikes. Thanks to our diligent commenters for catching this. We'll try to find out more.
Original article: The onslaught of fun Steam Next Fest demos you can play right now continues and will not relent. Card Bard is a deckbuilding roguelike shooter in which your wee gunman is seemingly frozen in abject terror as little pill-shaped baddies creep towards him like bacteria on a petri dish. Good thing you have a hand of cards, each one showing how many bullets will bop forth from your body when you select it. It's surprisingly tough for something so pastel-paletted. I'm 10th on the leaderboard. You can probably beat that, right?
]]>In EA's Desert Strike - released way back in the dim salvages of 1992 - you are a helicopter pilot scooting around a Sylvester Stallone reinvention of Iraq, shooting down tanks and fighters with guns and missiles while rescuing VIPs and fretting constantly about your wafer-thin armour and espresso-sized fuel reserves. It was a no-frills piece of Gulf War fanfic, complete with George Bush ending cameo, and a well-made shooter that used to drive me nuts on Sega Mega Drive.
Megacopter: Blades Of The Goddess is Desert Strike, but heavily Blood-Dragonified and with a big dollop of Airwolf to boot. Here, the enemy troops are naughty Reptoid aliens, the writing is scattershot-satirical (upgrades are bought with pizza tokens) and your helicopter houses the soul of a blood-drinking "AZ-TECH" goddess. Is it a nuanced parody of the Strike series? It doesn't feel like it. Did I enjoy the demo? Yes. Does it have a crawling tentacle boss called Queen Oildusa? Also yes, and will you please stop asking questions so I can write the rest of this article.
]]>If you love cosy games where the biggest challenge is choosing between which farm utensil to place next to your barn doors, then Tiny Glade may be just the game for you. It's a creative building game like The Sims 4 but with none of the fuss of actually controlling lives - and no quests, combat or arbitrary challenges of any kind.
Instead, Tiny Glade simply offers a meadow and tools with which to build. The vibe of the game is cottage-core at its finest, with enough whimsigoth finery that you'll soon lament that you can't actually live inside your glorious creations. I've played the charming demo as part of Steam Next Fest, and you'll find some thoughts from my time with it below.
]]>In the event that I walk in front of a particle accelerator, get converted into digital data and am promptly isekai-ed into a gameworld, I hope that gameworld is the opening port town from the original Grandia, released on PS1 way back in 1997 (and ported to PC in 2019). There's something about that game's isometricky vantage point and precise combination of 2D pixel characters and 3D environments. The last sentence describes many virtual worlds of the late 90s, but none have stuck in my mind like Port Parm: that hodgepodge of green and rusty roofs, the canals cutting through the cobblestones, the smoky chimneys and people filling the alleyways. Bliss. I can still hear the seagulls blowing around the screen.
Oh sorry, I rhetorically lost myself for a minute there! I'm supposed to be telling you about Terra Memoria, a new RPG featuring time travel, magic crystals and animal wizards. Here's a trailer.
]]>One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That's one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it's a helmet). He's like if Hand Of Fate's dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.
]]>Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems - which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away - or rather, a sheep that's been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves' hot pursuit - not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them - and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.
]]>When I first saw Never Grave: The Witch And The Curse rising up the Steam Next Fest charts at the end of last week, I thought, "Oh! That's a neat Hollow Knight-looking Metroivanida roguelike, I'll definitely give that a go." And having played its demo over the weekend, I can confirm: it's certainly an intriguing little thing that I'll be keen to keep an eye on when it launches into early access, possibly sometime next month.
The biggest surprise was that, despite its very Hollow Knight-looking visuals, it actually plays more like Dead Cells in practice. Instead of being a sentient lump of flesh able to inhabit infinite bodies, you're a magical witch's hat that can possess, discard and rematerialise your chosen sack of limbs at the touch of a button. The second thing that surprised me was that it also has quite a substantial base/village building aspect to it on the side, and the third - well, perhaps this isn't so much of a surprise given everything I've just said, because it also turns out this is the next game from Palworld developers Pocketpair. Yep, it all makes a bit more sense now.
]]>Take your protein pill and put your headphones on for the free demo of Asterism, an "interactive music album" exploring a solar system one song at a time. Each visit to a planet lasts as long as the song, whisking us through scenes reflecting the lyrics and mood, rendered with a mix of 3D computer art and a range of handmade physical mediums. I was delighted from the first twang. And impressively, it's mostly the work of one developer, Claire Morwood. Do have a look!
]]>Ah sure I've enjoyed the nostalgic resurgence of Quake/PlayStation-grade 3D art in video games, but I am fully blown away by indie game Fragrance Point looking like the truest classic 3D computer graphics: the shiny pre-rendered CGI from TV show transition cards, adverts for double-disc dance music compilations, and Windows Media Player skins. My eyes are still reeling from the gloss and glitz and pulsating lights of the Steam Next Fest demo, and I welcome this pain. Grab the demo now and set out to explore a space station as a bopping security bot with snazzy boots and endless projectile lipstick.
]]>The success of Baldur's Gate 3 is a double-edged sword for other CRPGs launching in its wake. On the one hand, there's arguably a hungry new audience for such games; on the other, you're going up against one of the best RPGs ever made. Expectations are high, but Tiny Trinket Games' co-founder Stefan Nitescu remains unfazed as his three-strong team prepare to release Zoria: Age Of Shattering on March 7th. Zoria is carving an altogether different path through the RPG landscape, fusing isometric exploration with XCOM-like combat and 50 playable characters who are more like unit classes than personalities. The latter is a decision that comes with its own "repercussions", says Nitescu, but he's confident that it will help Zoria stand apart, with character abilities being unusually central to exploration.
]]>I've long been enamoured with the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, from the Douglas firs and waterfalls of Twin Peaks to the redwoods I once swam beneath on a road trip. Thanks to Pacific Drive's Steam Next Fest demo, I have now also barrelled through the woods and backroads of a spooky alt-history PNW in a banged-up car which is itself a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque artifact. I've had my eye on Pacific Drive for a few years and after playing the demo, I am delighted by parts of it but not entirely sold on its roguelikelike survival scavenge-o-rama structure. Hmm! Give it a go and tell me what you think.
]]>This week The Electronic Wireless Show podcast is a bit shorter because I accidentally stopped recording in the middle of it, and then had to sort of restart. Though movie magic you will never know the difference, except I just told you. Oh no! Anyway, with the Steam Next Fest ongoing, I noticed an uptick in games and demos for games that are just about making a nice diorama, and have no goals or real restrictions. Interesting! I ask my co-hosts why they think this is, if that even makes a game a game, is making your own play less fun if you're not breaking someone else's rules, and so on. Plus: we reveal why James was in LA before!
]]>Good news, star admirals with decent CPM! Gearbox and Blackbird Interactive's strategy escapade Homeworld 3 has a demo on Steam. It's been live for a few days, actually, but whether due to the bombardment of other Steam Fest goodies or my being led astray by the similar-but-nerdier Nebulous: Fleet Command, I didn't try it till last night. The demo includes a tutorial mission, four maps and the War Games mode, a one-to-three player affair which essentially turns Homeworld into a roguelike - pitching you up against unpredictable opposition while unlocking new fleets and doling out Artifacts that augment your vessels.
]]>If you played and liked last year's excellent slice-of-life adventure A Space For The Unbound, stop what you're doing and go and download the Steam Next Fest demo for Until Then. Go on, I'll wait. Right, sorted? Let's continue. Like A Space For The Unbound, Until Then is a coming of age story where the ups and downs of everyday high school life start intermingling with strange, supernatural occurences.
]]>Dusky Depths - what a pleasant name for a game. It makes me think of sleepy suburban soap operas, slightly worrying brands of shampoo or chocolate, and easy listening radio shows on long-haul train journeys. It doesn't make me think of getting vapourised by laser beams in an exoplanetary cave system, which is what happened when I gave the demo a try.
]]>A story about a girl who has a ghost best friend nobody else can see, and has to juggle that relationship with her interactions with living people? Sounds fake. Haha, but seriously folks. There's a demo for Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open in the Steam Next Fest, and boy howdy did I like just looking at this game in motion. The clue is in the name, as all the characters look like 2D paper cut out dolls, and all the environments are like papercraft models. It's pretty gorge.
Third Eye Open, out this year, is inspired by the Joss-Papercraft of Southeast Asia (indeed, the start menu is a stage). You play as Ting, a pre-adolescent girl living in Malaysia with her parents. Ting discovers her supernatural ability to see ghosts at a camp, where she meets Xiu, a ghost girl about her own age. The two become friends, and the demo starts in media res when the two are back home.
]]>You know those wee indie games about opening boxes and organising items and assembling furniture and they're all very cute and colourful and fun and "wholesome"? Miniatures is not one of those games. Oh certainly you will open boxes and organise items and assemble furniture in its Steam Next Fest demo, but it's not cute or colourful or wholesome. Miniatures is more of a psychological horror game, laden with tension and uncertainty. For such a short demo, it built a great mood, and I'm excited for the full game to come later this year.
]]>Many a Survivors-like has come and gone over the last couple of years, but Bore Blasters might be the first one that's really struck a chord with me. Or maybe that should be struck gold, as this mining roguelike is all about collecting little gem-like nuggets while boring deep underground for treasure and fending off all manner of flying eyeballs, bats and other unmentionable horrors with wings. I've been playing its Steam Next Fest demo this morning, and my initial impression is that it's a little bit Dome Keeper, a little bit SteamWorld Dig, and very, very good. Even better, developers 8BitSkull have just announced it's coming out in full next month.
]]>According to Steam, I've spent about 2000 hours playing factory games. Terms like throughput, modularity, and automation are like dog-whistles to me, so when I heard that Shapez 2 was getting a demo for Steam Next Fest this month, I knew my weekend plans were instantly sorted. Well, here we are in the new week. I've finished the Shapez 2 demo twice and logged 10 hours into the game. I see conveyor belts of circles and squares behind my eyelids and the reward system of my brain has been well and truly hijacked. The only way I can continue to do my job effectively is by making my job be about Shapez 2. So here I am.
]]>If you've been dreaming of a hyper-agile FPS set on the sky islands from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Echo Point Nova could be your jam. It casts you as a space pilot who crashlands on a floating archipelago planet during a research expedition. I'm not sure what you're researching, exactly, but going by your character's loadout, it's the Science of Sick Moves.
]]>The first Steam Next Fest of 2024 is officially upon us, though this year there have been so many demos going live early that you may well have played a bunch of them already without even knowing it. Still, in case you need a helping hand cutting through the many hundreds, if not thousands of free demos that are currently jostling for your eyeballs on Steam, we've put together this shortlist of recommendations to get your started.
There are 15 picks here, covering everything from citybuilders to horror games - and a lot of these are games we've never written about before, either. But, in case you are looking for demos of more well-known PC games, we've also listed some of the big obvious choices you might want to check out as well (and all the other demos we've written about over the last couple of weeks). You know, because we're nice like that. So come and join us for 15 (plus!) Next Fest demos to get you going.
]]>If you'd told me back in 1999 that a rudimentary grasp of sound editing software would stand me in surprisingly good stead as a strategy game player, I'd have asked you who the hell you are and what you're doing in my house. But in the years that followed, after you'd been sent to the slammer for crashing through my window bellowing about cheap Audible subscriptions, I might have checked out games like Ghost Trick and Phantom Brigade - each sort of an exercise in placing actions on a timeline like audio layers to produce a winning composition - and thought "hey, that hysterical burglar was onto something".
I wouldn't say there's an abundance of games in which you place actions on timelines, mind you. But those that do exist are neat, as Marge Simpson would say. Take Tarnished Blood.
]]>Final Factory seems expansive as far as factory builders go, given that it features not just the sprawling bases you expect but also spaceship construction, interstellar exploration and fleet combat. On the other hand, as far as 2D, topdown space games go, it seems much more approachable than most.
There's a demo available right now.
]]>Steam Next Fest doesn't officially start until next Monday, February 5th, but what the heck, everyone's putting their demos live early this year, it seems, and another one that's just popped the cork ahead of time is Pepper Grinder, the excellent-looking pixel platformer where you're burrowing through bedrock with a heckin' great drill in your hands as you attempt to steal back your treasure from some pesky pirates. I was instantly smitten with this one when it was first unveiled at the end of 2022, and the more I've seen of it, the more it's risen into becoming one of my most anticipated games of 2024. Happily, its Next Fest demo doesn't disappoint, as it not only feels wonderful in the hands, but ooof, it really knows how to do a good plinky plink coin jostle. My word.
]]>Confession time, folks. Of all the games shown off during The Game Awards last December, Tales Of Kenzera: Zau was the one I glossed over the most. Listen, it was very early in the morning at the time, and it must have come at a peak eyes-glazing-over moment for me. However, having now played the first 30 minutes of Tales Of Kenzera thanks to its just-released early Steam Next Fest demo, I have seen the error of my ways. The demo might only cover the game's opening, but this 2.5D Metroidvania already looks to be quite the promising newcomer in this ever-crowded genre - so much so that it may even be able to go toe to toe with Ubisoft's Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown. Yep, I went there.
]]>They say ammo scarcity is an artform in FPS games, but I'd argue no game makes a single sniper bullet work harder than the freshly announced Children Of The Sun. I mean, why waste them when you're a young telekinetic hellbent on getting your revenge on the cult that raised you and held you hostage for your entire life? One bullet goes a long way when you can alter the path of its trajectory with each fresh kill you land - as long as they're visible in your immediate eyeline, that is. There are no swoopy swerves going on here, and the thrill of each level is working out the best (and quite literal) angle of attack to take down every last target. I've been playing the first handful of levels of Children Of The Sun over the last week or so, and no word of a lie, this murderous mix of Hitman, Holedown and Sniper Elite has shot straight into my gooey, beating heart.
]]>I've played certain demos for longer than I have many full games, eking every last atom of enjoyment out of a single level or character, to the point that the final release felt like unnecessary bloat. I am already concerned the same might be true of Arco's demo, which is now available on Steam. You've hopefully read Katharine's breakdown of this "triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape". Well, now's your chance to get to grips with its nifty combat system, which is broken into turns with each turn's actions unfolding in real time.
]]>Graham has been bandying Abiotic Factor around the Treehouse as "Half-Life designed for co-op survival japes", which is obviously a noteworthy combination of words, so let's have a look at the Steam page, trailer, and gosh, there's a demo here too. That's Friday night sorted.
]]>When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I'm just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I've had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro's demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you're into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who's never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let's face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that's turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it's coming out in full real soon, too.
]]>Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.
]]>As much as I love looking at and admiring sandbox citybuilders like Townscaper, I am terrible at actually playing them. I get the same kind of blank canvas choice paralysis I do in games like Minecraft, or anything where there's no real clear objective for what I'm meant to be building. I sit there with a big toybox of lovely things to stick together, but always end up deflated and disappointed with my own lack of imagination. But Summerhouse, the sandbox citybuilder (or townbuilder, more like) from solo developer Friedemann is just teeny-tiny enough to give me a sense of creative satisfaction. I've been playing its gorgeous little demo this week in between Palworld sessions, and yes, more of this please, this is utterly delightful. Happily, we don't have to wait too long for the final game now either, as it's coming to Steam on March 8th.
]]>When Edwin popped the reveal trailer for new Metroidvania Deviator into The Maw this morning, he really wasn't kidding about it looking a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight. You've got a small, diminutive hero with a nasty little blade up his sleeve, a haunting and melancholy piano score, a beautiful hand-drawn animation style, and lots of mean-looking creatures to fight. Then again, the trailer also makes it clear there are lots and lots of spikes and traps to navigate here, which puts me more in the mind of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Either way, I'm well up for another platforming-Metroidy hybrid, and developers Gami Studio have announced that there's Steam demo coming in February.
]]>Despite the extremely upsetting news about what nate has been having for breakfast this year, we maintain our composure to deliver an episode of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast all about the Steam Next Fest, currently running until next Monday the 16th. You've got a whole weekend of free demos to try, and we've knocked back a few to regurgitate into your open mouths as suggestions for what to try first. Plus, we've been playing a few current games, and have some juicy recommendations of non-game things.
]]>We recommended a dozen Steam Next Fest demos out the gate but that barely scratched the surface of the demo-o-rama. So after diving back into the demo pile myself, I have another recommendation for you: adventuring across the galaxy in roguelikelike spaceship deck-building dungeon-crawler Cobalt Core. If you enjoy Slay The Spire and FTL, do have a look, though I might argue that FTL's follow-up, Into The Breach seems a stronger influence. Ah, play the demo and see for yourself!
]]>The latest Steam Next Fest is upon us, bringing with it a freshly packed week of new, free demos to try until Monday October 16th. There are literally hundreds you could try installing if you were that way inclined - you can view the full list right here if you'd rather browse through it at your own leisure - but we've been playing some of these demos in advance to help make wading through its torrent of shiny new games a little bit easier. Below, you'll find 12 of our favourites so far, ranging from snazzy-looking shooters and big RTS games to neat little autobattlers, indie immersive sims and retro puzzle platformers. If you're in need of some guidance this Steam Next Fest, read on.
]]>These days, weeks often feel like years, so if you told me Steam Next Fest happened back at the start of the year, I’d believe you. And yet, it was little under a month ago that Valve kicked off its annual demo-filled celebration of upcoming PC games. Now, it’s checking back in with a ranking of the most popular demos that people played - and it’s a doozy of a list.
]]>As Steam Next Fests go, I think the one this June has easily been one of the best Next Fests in a little while. Seeing all the great demos this week has made me far more excited about the future of video games than any of the notE3 streams did the other week, and I'm not gonna lie, a large part of my excitement stems from the brilliant Let's! Revolution!, a beautifully animated tile-based roguelite that has a touch of Minesweeper about it. I highlighted it in our big demo rec list at the start of the week, but 150-odd words simply wasn't enough to really get across just how excellent this is. So indulge me a bit while I tell you more about it.
]]>You know when the look of a game instantly captures your attention, and then you play a demo for it and it's even better? That's the journey I've been on with deckbuilding RPG Cross Blitz this week. I first heard about it last month back when word hit that it was coming to early access this year, and I was instantly taken with its chunky animal character sprites. There was something a bit Advance Wars about the look and style about its burly lion pirate captain, but just, you know, in a high seas card battle kind of setting instead of dealing with sergeants, tanks and air support. But its Steam Next Fest demo has really sunk its teeth into me this week, offering up turn-based card duels that scratch exactly the same kind of itch as Inscryption did for me a couple of years ago.
]]>"Olivia, get the bowls and chopsticks ready to eat dinner," my mum asks 10 year old me. I do as I'm told, taking them to the dinner table. In childish, whimsical fashion as a childish, whimsical child, I grab my pair of chopsticks and start hitting them together as if I'm a drummer. "Olivia, don't do that," my mum scolds me. "Your grandma always used to tell me off when I did that as a child." Sullenly, I put the chopsticks back down on the table.
Well, 10 year old me, you're in for a treat. If you wait a couple of decades, you'll learn of Nour: Play With Your Food, a game which allows you to bang together chopsticks. The game wants you to. Nour is a physics simulation of a variety of foods, where you can choose the ingredients for the dish and add various "effects" of a non-culinary nature.
]]>It's no secret that I love Dorfromantik. It opened my eyes to the world of tile-based puzzler strategy games, and I've looked out for similar ones ever since. Thankfully for me, there's been a fair few riffs on Dorformantik's formula recently - a focus on nature, a soothing soundtrack, and some good old puzzling. Growth is one of these, and I'm hooked on the demo that's playable as part of Steam Next Fest. Taking place on a hexagonal grid, the aim is to uncover the map using a range of wildlife, fertilising the land in the process. Each tile you reveal gives you points, and you'll have to navigate around mountains, water, and special landmarks.
]]>El Paso, Elsewhere, the Max Payne inspired shooter where you fight werewolves and vampires in a reality-shifting motel, has a demo now, and it's looking pretty promising so far. It's the next title on the docket for developer Strange Scaffold, a team whose projects just constantly have strong hooks (how good is An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs as a title though). El Paso, Elsewhere is no different, and you can even try it out now as part of this season's Steam Next Fest in a new demo. And yeah, the vibes are about as tight as you'd expect.
]]>Just in case your Steam wishlists weren't already stocked up from this year's Summer Geoff Fest bonanza, here we are with another edition of Valve's Steam Next Fest, which has unleashed hundreds, if not thousands of free game demos on us, starting from today, June 19th, until Monday June 26th. You can view the entire June Next Fest line-up right here if you'd rather browse at your leisure, but we've also been playing some of the demos in advance to bring you some curated highlights of what we've enjoyed so far. We haven't have access to every demo in this year's Next Fest, I should note, but think of these more as some initial tasting suggestions to get you started, rather than a complete overview of what's worth playing.
]]>You know me, folks: I love management sims, and I love people in physical distress. Wasn't I only delighted, then, to play a bit of Galacticare, an upcoming hospital management sim in the same sticky vein as the hospitals Theme or Two Point. The twist? These hopsitals are in space! Like those managment games, your task is to build a hospital that runs as smooth as some kind of alien baby's bottom (the alien probably has tentacles), where you want to treat people and prevent them from dying as much as possible, but largely because death is bad for your profit margin more than any altruistic impulse. I mean you can be altruistic if you want, I suppose, but if you run out of money it's harder to build more weird bone-fixing machines.
The tone - though Galacticare has strange diseases like being eaten from the inside out by a singularity, and wacky treatments including a sort of laser disco machine - is actually much closer to kind of satire-ish hijinks of spacestation management game Startopia than I had expected, thanks in part to the extremely dry AI helper offering input, and the many alien species who'll come to you for treatment.
]]>My backlog is practically overflowing at this point, hence my New Year's resolution to avoid buying a game until I’d actually play it. But, every now and then, an especially deep discount will catch my eye, my bad impulses wake up, and I spend a few quid on something I won’t touch for six months (seriously, Abzu has been floating on my hard drive for years.) My New Year's resolution won’t hold out for much longer, as Valve have announced their schedule for all of 2023’s Steam Fests and sales events.
]]>Most great platforming games dabble with gravity at some point. It's one of those classic, age-old moments where you're suddenly walking on the ceilings and jumping over gaps upside down to further test your skill and overall dexterity. Gravity Castle, on the other hand, has seemingly made it its entire premise, making for a brilliant Next Fest demo that's still available to download on Steam right now. It also looks absolutely gorgeous, channelling Ico and the rest of Fumito Ueda's oeuvre in all the right ways.
]]>Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but luckily some game demos are still alive and kicking. This is excellent news, as it means you've still got time to give Roots Of Yggdrasil a go, a chill, Viking citybuilder that has such strong Okami vibes with its inky, cell-shaded visuals, strong black outlines, and flute and harp-driven soundtrack that I kept having to remind myself I wasn't just playing a spin-off of Clover's seminal Zelda-like. I swear, if it weren't for the smattering of autumnal trees in the tutorial level, its grassy plains, tall mountains and bright blue river would have been a dead ringer for Okami's Kamiki Village.
]]>Although the demo is relatively short, I’ve really been getting into the roguelike deckbuilding of Dungeon Drafters. I like the colourful pixel art, the classic fantasy enemy archetypes, how spell cards feel super punchy when activated, and I love love love the magical, fluffy wizard rabbit.
Called The Explorer, this rabbit is not only super cute - his little brown booties are adorable, as is his helmet which has holes so his massive fluffy ears can poke through - but a bonafide badass in magic casting. This rabbit can majorly throw down.
]]>We’ve all been busy here at RPS picking out our favourite demos in this spring’s Steam Next Fest. Looking at both the popular upcoming demo list and the most wishlisted list, survival crafting game Voidtrain sits comfortably in second place on both. I decided to download the demo and see what the fuss was about, and wow, is Voidtrain completely wild.
I thought Voidtrain might be relatively new, but it's actually been knocking around for a couple of years. It’s been in early access on the Epic Games Store since 2021, and after announcing a Steam release for October 2022, the game got indefinitely delayed. Voidtrain's Steam page currently has a vague release date of sometime in 2023, but the demo is a good reason enough to check it out while the team is still tightening some loose screws.
]]>I don't mean to alarm anyone, but I think Urbo might be my Dorfromantik of 2023. It's a chill, citybuilding puzzle game from the devs behind the altogether more violent Diplomacy Is Not An Option, and it's all about building tiny little villages on top of rocky outcrops. Except when you stick three of the same building type together, they all zhuup together to create an even bigger one. And a bigger one, and a bigger one. It's very satisfying. The smooshing lights up all the same parts of my brain that Threes did when I became obsessed with it about five years ago, while the tile planning hits scratches that big Dorfromantik itch, making for an excellent Steam Next Fest demo experience.
]]>Wow, is it episode three of RPS’ indie podcast Indiescovery already? How time flies! In this episode, the Indiescovery squad reccomend a handful of awesome demos from this spring’s Steam Next Fest for our lovely listeners to check out - six demos to be exact! We recorded this episode on a Friday instead of our usual Wednesdays so, yeah, major end-of-week vibes in this one. Have a listen below!
]]>Some of my favourite games involve visiting a fantastical town, befriending the residents, discovering their stories, and trading with them. Too often those same games also have too-difficult turn-based murderfests in-between, though. Here comes Townseek to fix that. It's an adorable and "relaxing" exploration-trading game in which you pilot an airship, customise your balloon, and visit eg. some sort of bee kingdom, as per the screenshot above.
]]>Steam Next Fest is back with a veritable truck ton of fresh game demos to sample, and we've been plunging our eager little mitts into the latest batch of indie delights to unearth some handy recommendations for you to hit first. Running from now until February 13th, there are always oodles of demos to try in a Next Fest, so sometimes it's nice to have a helping hand in working out what's worth sinking your time into. Below, we've rounded up 16 of our favourites so far, and we'll be writing about plenty more demos we've yet to try over the coming week.
]]>I picked up the Romancelvania demo at Steam Next Fest on Alice Bee's recommendation, and she was quite correct when she described it as "extremely relevant to [my] interests". So relevant, in fact, that I'm starting to wonder if this wasn't an attempt at psychological sabotage disguised as a friendly gesture. (You wouldn't do that to me, would you, Alice?)
]]>When the mysterious sci-fi action shooter Scars Above was first unveiled during Geoffcom's Opening Night Live at the end of August, I thought it had big Returnal energy. Based on the reveal trailer, it certainly seemed to be riffing on several of the same themes as Housemarque's challenging PlayStation exclusive - what with its lone female scientist stranded on an alien planet schtick, third-person shooting, and big eerie alien monsters after her etc. - so when I saw it was part of this month's Steam Next Fest demo bonanza, I knew I had to give it a try. And while it certainly captures the same kind of atmosphere as Returnal, I'm sorry to say that's about as far as the comparison goes, as the rest of Scars Above is a much slower, more traditional kind of space action game.
]]>Somewhere at the edges of the galaxy in No Man's Sky lies a large, verdant planet with an abandoned, but functioning, starter ship on it. I left it there in 2016 after discovering a larger ship out in the wilds, but it's a decision that still haunts me to this very day. You see, I was so taken with my new set of wings that I failed to notice it didn't have a functioning hyperdrive attached, which is needed to punch through the atmosphere to visit another solar system. It also turned out that this particular planet didn't have any of the necessary resources to craft a new one either, leaving my only form of escape back in my tiny little starter ship – which, of course, was now nowhere to be seen. I spent hours looking for that little ship, but the planet was so vast that I never saw it again.
Upcoming aerial survival game Forever Skies doesn't have lots of large planets to lose your only means of transportation in, thankfully. In its Steam Next Fest demo at least, the only things I was able to land my makeshift aircraft on were tiny, rusty platforms perched atop decaying skyscrapers on an Earth ruined by disease and an ecological apocalypse. But that fear of getting stranded somewhere I shouldn't be has never left me, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a teensy bit scared of jumping down from my ship and finding I wasn't able to get back up to it again.
]]>I love Steam Next Fest season, because you can go from "Oh this is from those devs who did that thing? Huh. Hadn't heard of this," to "holy video game, Batman, this is the absolute business" in the space of a free demo. This is what I experienced with Flat Eye, a story-heavy management sim where you're in charge of a super-advanced gas station, where you harvest personal data from the port-a-loos, and feed the biological matter from those same toilets into your high-tech vending machine. Mmmmm. Flat Eye, the Next Fest demo for which you can download and play right now, is from Night Call devs Monkey Moon. I liked Night Call fine, but I really love the Flat Eye demo.
]]>In case September didn't add enough new indie games to your burgeoning Steam wishlists, Valve are back today with another edition of their demo-packed Steam Next Fest, and we've been playing some of its many, many, many demos to help give you a few pointers on where to start. You can view the whole of October's Steam Next Fest right here if you'd rather just dive in headfirst, but below you'll find some hand-picked highlights we've been enjoying ahead of time - including a new Return Of The Obra Dinn-alike, a first-person skeleton shooter, an underwater citybuilders and a platformer where your gun is also an umbrella.
]]>It’s August! How did humanity manage to get ourselves to this point in the year? Well, Valve are celebrating with Steam Survival Fest from today through until August 8th, so good job for stocking up on all those cans of beans and endless loo roll. Although they do increasingly seem to be making trailers for these things, there isn’t one yet, so here’s vid bud Liam trying to claw back his three quid for survival horror Refund Me If You Can instead.
]]>Valve are staging their first Steam VR Fest starting on July 18th. Gabe and friends don’t seem to have made much song and dance about the event yet, with details emerging today via the company’s Steamworks site. The festival promises discounts, demos and details of upcoming releases from the giddy world of virtual reality.
]]>Yesterday I wrote about eco-strategy game Terra Nil’s demo, which went gangbusters during last week’s Steam Next Fest and shot up into the top 50 most played games on Valve’s storefront. Well, turns out that might be at least partly down to a practice called badge-farming. That’s according to industry pundit Simon Carless’ latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter, anyway.
]]>I realised earlier that today was the last day of Steam Next Fest, and I panicked. I remembered seeing one particular demo on Steam which made my ears prick up and my eyes expand to thrice their usual size, and until now I hadn't the time to try it out. So today I carved out a small portion of the day to download and play the demo for Dome Keeper, a wave-based survival game about protecting your glass dome home from alien invaders using a gigantic laser.
Unfortunately, I ended up playing it a little too long, and now I've left myself no time at all to write about why it was so great. Argh. Let me try anyway.
]]>Of all the demos featured in this past week’s Steam Next Fest, indie environmental ‘reverse city-builder’ Terra Nil has performed exceedingly well for itself. The demo has cropped up among the top 50 on the most-played games on Steam over the weekend, and is currently nestled between Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and Vampire Survivors. Not bad for a chill game about rewilding a barren planet.
]]>Throwback first-person shooters are penny a bushel at the moment, but while most aim to replicate the boomsticks of Quake, Agent 64: Spies Never Die mimics the PPKs and hacking gadgetry of another 90's classic. Maybe the name gives it away: it's Rare's GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64, and there's currently a demo available to play as part of the Steam Next Fest.
]]>There's something so intriguing about a new survival game. You just never know what you might find, with some becoming the best thing since cubed diamonds and others getting left in a state of endless early-access jank. Partly to help you all avoid the duds and partly to satisfy my own morbid curiosity, I trawled through this Summer's Steam Next Fest demo list to test out a bunch. As you might expect, I got subjected to some chugging framerates and a bit of body horror, but also found some great multiplayer shooting in Dysterra and terrific tile-placement in Above Snakes, which might just become a new personal favourite.
]]>As I might have mentioned once or twice, one of my joys in life is dipping and drifting around rivers and ponds, lochs and seas. I am delighted to see some of the gentle pleasure and wonder of that captured in Naiad, an upcoming game about a water spirit adventuring downstream. It has a free demo in the Steam Next Fest, and it is quite lovely. I believe it to be what the youth call 'wholesome'.
]]>The auto-attacking action of Vampire Survivors and rude 'tude of Flash games combines in Brotato, an upcoming indie game with a free demo available in the Steam Next Fest right now. We play as a potato dodging around waves of aliens while blasting them with sticks, stones, guns, knives, rocket launchers, and weird mutations. I mean it as a great compliment when I say the roguelikelike arena survive 'em up feels like a Newgrounds game.
]]>Listen, there’s no reason to beat around the bush with this one. Anger Foot is amazing. It was amazing when I played its early build last year, and its Steam Next Fest demo is somehow even better. How could it not be! Have you seen it? Anger Foot is a game about kicking doors at muppet men. That’s it. That’s the pitch. It rules.
]]>Dear Esther meets Amnesia in The Silent Swan, an open-world walk-o-story set inside a mysterious walled land with two towering empty cities. It has a demo in the Steam Next Fest and I think I want more? I was drawn in by screenshots of vast Gothic architecture, put off by frustrating slowness, then kept interested by the mysteries of our fella adrift in his former home. It does, at the very least, have pleasingly giant buildings rising from fog.
]]>Barbarian-tinged match-3 puzzler Grindstone is abandoning its exclusivity to the Epic Games Store and venturing into the untamed wilderness of Steam on June 20th, developers Capybara Games have revealed. All updates to the game that released on other platforms such as Apple Arcade and Nintendo Switch will be included. There’s a helpfully explanatory animated trailer to watch below.
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