Steam Next Fest 2023 (June, this time)

Steam held another "Next Fest" so I thought I'd talk about some of the demos I enjoyed playing.  The event ended earlier today so some of these may no longer be available but I still wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some upcoming games that were able to pique my interest.

Blue June

The first of the demos I checked out, this was a sidescroller that seemed to be taking cues from Silent Hill. There are dream sequences filled with strange shadowy beasts and daytime sections following the protagonist as she goes about her day at college, and here the presentation reminded me a bit of Life is Strange. There was really only one puzzle in the demo and it was pretty straightforward, but it cultivated a pretty tense atmosphere throughout that could make for a spooky time.

Venba

 

 

This was a relatively short demo but it left me with a decent idea of what to expect from the final game. Perhaps akin to something like Florence, this appears to be a narrative stitched together with cooking minigames and puzzles. The demo has you preparing a meal for you and your husband and, while simple, was pleasant and I could easily see how this structure could be stretched out into a few-hours-long game.

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue

This got on my radar due to Shinji Hosoe's involvement and, after playing the demo, yep, this sure feels like Zero Escape. The writing doesn't quite seem on par with those games and some of the characters feel... a bit much, but the structure and setup makes this seem like it lands somewhere between Danganronpa and Virtue's Last Reward. Given that Uchikoshi's moved on to his AI: The Somnium Files games we probably won't be getting any more Zero Escape, so even if this new thing feels a bit derivative it might still be worth a look.

El Paso, Elsewhere

Even through its supernatural set-dressing this game is an obvious homage to Max Payne. While the art skews a bit closer to PS1 than PS2, just about everything else in the presentation is clearly designed to evoke those classic games. The demo has you shootdodging your way through a hotel and a cemetery while making sure you have enough pills to down should your health ever get too low. It's got a moody monologuing protagonist and is simply oozing with style. This game seemed real cool.

En Garde!

This demo took a bit of time to get going but once the training wheels come off the mechanics of it finally clicked. It follows a swashbuckler as she runs through city streets and fights off guards with her rapier. There is some simplistic platforming but, once the tutorial is out of the way, the fencing mechanics revealed a surprising amount of depth. Combat largely consists of countering and dodging attacks a la Rocksteady's Arkham games but it also forces you to manage your environment to split up and temporarily stun the groups closing in on you. A colorful setting and some intuitive combat can go a long way.

Jusant

This may seem like an odd pitch but bear with me: this feels like someone took the manual hand-control from Death Stranding and used it to make a more fleshed out version of Bennett Foddy's GIRP. Jusant is a game about scaling a mountain where you need to move between handholds to work your way up, moving one arm at a time. It's a relatively calm experience with occasional rest areas reminiscent of DONT NOD's earlier Life Is Strange games.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical

To put it simply, imagine a Telltale style dialogue-heavy game where most of the important conversations are delivered via song. You'll be given a choice between a few vague options (what's the tone of your response, what's the gist of what you want to say) and your character will respond with rhyming lyrics that fit that decision. It's filled with voice actors you've all heard before (people I like, to be fair) but I'm a bit worried some of those people might be better actors than they are singers. A musical lives or dies by its music so I just have to hope the songs are up to snuff.

Viewfinder

In some ways this feels like a throwback to the sort of puzzle game we'd have gotten a decade ago and I mean this lovingly. It's a first-person puzzle game clearly inspired by Portal where you're given an impossible device that you use to solve a variety of abstract puzzles. It's a bit difficult to describe, but you have the ability to place the contents of a Polaroid into the world around you. It requires you to rethink perspectives and scale in a way I haven't really needed to do since Echochrome, and much like the original Portal the toy you've been given control of is incredibly fun to play with.

Broken Roads

I haven't played a whole lot of CRPGs so I truly don't know whether this would be something I'd actually play but this has a very promising start. In a post-apocalyptic Australia you play as a scouting team's new hire to provide support for them as they travel the wasteland. There's turn based combat that should be familiar to people who've played similar games but what I found truly interesting was its morality system. Instead of a binary "good/evil", each decision is instead placed on a four-way grid of Utilitarian, Humanitarian, Nihilist, and Machiavellian. Much like Mass Effect you'll have dialogue choices that are (un)available to you based on your personality (as dictated by earlier decisions), but due to the shift in how actions are treated it allows for consistent decision-making that feels more nuanced than "always trying to do the 'right' thing".

The Invincible

Based on a Stanislaw Lem book (that I haven't read) this feels a bit like an astronaut's Firewatch. You're on an alien planet while in constant radio contact with your supervisor as you investigate what happened to your fellow astronauts. I've got no idea what that novel's about or how accurate this is to said novel, but the brief segment I played as part of this demo had me hooked.