Steam Next Fest, if you weren't aware, is an event on Steam (duh) held to promote upcoming games and for the average consumer, like me, that means a whole lot of demos. I played a few things last year (ADACA being my highlight) so I was excited when I saw it was happening again this year.
Beyond this list, there were quite a few other games I played that I also enjoyed (Blue Wednesday, Highwater, Affogato, VIVIDLOPE, and City of Beats, to name a few) but I really only had strong feelings about the ones on this list below. Lots of those other games seemed neat though.
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| I don't know how much time I'd spend with it realistically, but VIVIDLOPE was fun |
I've included clips that I felt were representative of what I liked about each of these games in the event my descriptions aren't enough for you.
Reading the store page for this game initially made me think it'd play similarly to The Swapper, and in a very general sense it does share a mechanic with that, but this is fundamentally a different sort of game. In this, you're able to tag objects so you can later swap places with said objects, but it's far more of a platformer than The Swapper was. There's an intensity and a mobility to this game that came as a surprise to me, and for whatever reason, I was reminded of Flash games from my youth like N (or N+, or N++) or any of Brad Borne's games. Bionic Bay also forces you to think about momentum in a way that's not entirely dissimilar to Portal. You have near-instant restarts, similar to Super Meat Boy or Celeste, and if the demo's any indication there should be a whole lot of variety to the environments and puzzles in the final game.
This game had been on my radar for a while but now that I've played it I am even more interested. It's billed as a procedurally generated detective game set in a living city that moves with or without your involvement, and that certainly seems to be the case. You need to track down leads, investigate people, break into apartments or offices, defend yourself in fights, basically everything your run-of-the-mill noir protagonist would do. It's a bit buggy and it didn't run incredibly well on my computer, but what this game promises sounds incredibly enticing.
Have you ever seen a 3D platformer about a spider crawling its way around everyday objects and furniture but were too scared of spiders to ever check it out? If so, I have good news for you: this game lets you scale walls as a detached, not-at-all unsettling hand instead. Once I got over the initial shock and discomfort of watching myself wiggle about the environment I realized that the 3D platforming and environmental design in this game was incredibly solid. It seems like a very good platformer that just has an, uh, odd player character.
There are a lot of twin stick roguelites out there and admittedly I haven't played many of them, but the demo for this grabbed me. You play as a robot cowboy and the gameplay largely consists of rolling around and hiding behind cover to participate in shootouts. In some ways the design feels more like what I'd expect out of an FPS or third-person shooter, only from a top-down perspective, but I really liked how it played. Sometimes a game comes down to something as subjective as "feel" and this one feels good.
I'd previously seen this recommended (on the YouTube channel GetIndieGaming) but I didn't really know what it was until now. In incredibly broad terms it's sort of a Zelda-y thing (think Hyper Light Drifter or Tunic) but it has a striking aesthetic and a combat system that, once you get the hang of it, is pretty darn fun. You only get experience for enemies you take down to exactly zero health, so it incentivizes you to mix up your attacks if you don't want to overshoot and miss hitting that magic number. All in all it's got a good rhythm to the combat which I really enjoyed.
After the first ten or so minutes of this game I had assumed it'd be a peaceful, if moody and occasionally spooky, platforming thing, and it's not not that, but there's a point in the demo where it becomes very intense very suddenly. It has you playing as a Borrower (or something similar) roaming the countryside while encountering various mythical and fantastical creatures and if the demo's any indication it seems like it could get pretty hairy. Imagine trying to evade a Witcher monster when you're just a Picori, essentially, and you might have an idea what I mean.
I've been following the developer of this on Twitter for a while because clips of this game kept crossing my timeline and I've been meaning to check it out for a while, so Next Fest was a good excuse to (finally) play that demo I'd installed. It's a sort of open, vaguely Metroid-y game largely designed around a grappling hook. It has an elasticity to it and there are only certain areas you can attach to, so I needed to start thinking about locations in the context of how my tether could interact with them, almost like how Celeste or Portal force you to internalize their core mechanics.
One of my favorite things in games is when there's a mix of big-picture planning and real-time execution of said plans, and this game puts all of that in the framework of a puzzle-platformer. You play as a stuntman who needs to adjust the timing on various props and pyrotechnics to set up a scene that you'll then need to run through (according to what the script demands). There are only a handful of levels in the demo but it was charming and inventive enough that I think I want to see more of this game.
Admittedly I'm still somewhat on the fence with this game, but the final few minutes were engaging enough that I could easily see myself getting hooked. You play as a revolutionary with a cadre of allies trying to overthrow a fascist leader but what I found novel was the fact that the game seems to be placing an emphasis on the murkiness of attempting such a thing. Do you want to violently usurp the leader, should you try to play the diplomat, those seem like the questions at the heart of this and if it can deliver on its premise it has a lot of potential. It also seems to be applying that complicated worldview to its relationships (it's maybe got some dating sim elements, apparently?) but I'm honestly more interested in the bigger-picture stuff. Admittedly every visual novel lives or dies by its writing and most of this demo was setup and worldbuilding, but it ends on a strong enough note that I want to hear more.
To be a bit reductive this game seems like steampunk XCOM, but if you're anything like me you might enjoy steampunk XCOM. You have a lot of the mechanics you've come to expect from Firaxis's recent XCOMs (full and half-cover, two actions per turn, enemy pods, etc.) but it's all wrapped up in a steampunk-y loose fantasy aesthetic that I still happen to like. The tutorial recommends running from fights whenever possible and given how tense that opening mission got for me by the end that sort of encouragement could be a good way to spice up the XCOM formula.
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