|OT| Steam Next Fest - returning October 2024

Parsnip · Sep 24, 2022

I still haven't played most of the demos I grabbed from the previous one.

Some of those actually came out between then and now too.

Nabs · Oct 4, 2022

Games I want to try out

Looks like a Townscaper influenced city builder

Cassette Beasts has a demo

spiel · Oct 4, 2022

Perfect excuse to procrastinate on my backlog

Tried out these few demos so far:

This was fun, very satisfying

Not very good at bullet hell games but I adore the art and liked the deckbuilding bits from what I played of it

Wanted to like this because the banner art was pretty but it was a little too slow and didn't hook me immediately the way that 20 Minutes Till Dawn did

I don't mind another Portal-like. Will wait on reviews.

The last game gave me motion sickness so I'm giving up for now.

Li Kao · Oct 5, 2022

Ok, so far I tried two games.

Desktop Dungeons Rewind Demo
Is... Desktop Dungeons in 3d. I guess. Without the charm of the portraits in the old ones. And it's still too puzzle-y for me.
I installed the original again in case I want to suffer, I don't see the point of this new version.

Theseus Protocol Demo
Problem with demo is that you generally get the tutorial and maybe some more. Beware of what you wish for, because hilariously this card game demo has no tutorial at all, and a few unique mechanics. So I had to wait for my second attempt to understand there was a gun and how to use it, and while I think I have a good idea of it, I don't really understand positioning as far as the main character goes.
Pretty generic at first in that 'well that's a modern card game / rogue like, alright', it has its charm. I still reserve judgement depending on the degree of Rogue Likeness or Liteness and monetization, but it's correct.
Pinging Tizoc

Li Kao · Oct 5, 2022

Well, Wildfrost is another rogue-like card game. Maybe more polished, less obscure than Theseus Protocol. Feels really Monster Train-y, with the added lane mechanics.
Cool. Not in love but solid.
Tizoc signal is used a lot today

bobnowhere · Oct 5, 2022

Doesn't seem to be a lot of non-anime rpgs this time.

Li Kao · Oct 6, 2022

The Foretold Westmark Legacy

Was bad enough to make me stop playing for the day. One of these extremely rare moments when you ask yourself what you are doing playing a game.
It's on or will be on Kickstarter, so I suppose it's extremely early. It looks like a card game, could be a mix of card and adventure like the Arkham Horror LCG, and looks to have more than a little aped the Darkest Dungeon aesthetic.
But it's not always good looking, not a card game, it has choices I guess.
It's a game full of itself that just love to talk, badly explained, where the gameplay seems to be... some solitaire ?

It's certainly a take, but yesterday I felt an awkward silence in my head while playing more than anything.
Like bruh, that's it ? No, that's really it ?

spiel · Oct 6, 2022

Trying out more demos today!

Lonesome Village: cute art, but took too long to get started, especially with animations and dialogue interrupting every 10 seconds.
Paperback Adventures: looks like an interesting take on Slay the Spire, but the tutorial was kind of overwhelming
Flat Eye: the Diner Dash-style gameplay is addictive so far, and I'm curious how it'll further develop mechanically
The Abandoned Planet: a fairly stylish looking point-n-click, unfortunately my progress got stuck on pixel-hunting. I'll keep an eye on this.
The Palace on the Hill: this is an unexpectedly charming find. Gameplay is a mix of resource gathering and life sim. The painterly art style reminds me of Heaven's Vault.

I ended up wishlisting these two games

Virtual Ruminant · Oct 7, 2022

One of those baffling cases, where a previous demo that was released 1.5 years ago somehow ends up making a better impression than the current one. Recommend anybody interested in the game to play that older demo/teaser instead, called Cognition Method: Initiation. Remains wishlisted though.

Apes the look of P.T. quite well, but is the sort of bore-fest that gets you stuck looking for a key within five minutes of launching the game. Bad. Ignore-button smashed hard.

Successfully creates a creepy and unnerving atmosphere, but unfortunately waters it down by also incorporating an Outlast-style roaming monster bit, which at this point still looks quite low-rent. Still wishlisted.

Virtual Ruminant · Oct 7, 2022

Controller support is incomplete (can't navigate the inventory), so you'll have to grab the keyboard occasionally if you're a controller player, but otherwise this is already really good. Starts off like yet another P.T./Outlast/Haunted-House game and then ... becomes an SCP game. With all the SCP-styled flavor text goodness you'd expect. I get the feeling this is gonna be proper good. Wishlisted.

Sigh, what a disappointment. It looks pretty alright and the voice acting is good, but all the lines and most of the flavor text is so ... bland. Almost as if the writers weren't really into SciFi. And then the gameplay is annoyingly soulsy, but with super-corridor-ish level design that really seems like a throwback to the 00s. Performance was also pretty meh for me - it runs smoothly exactly until enemies pop up, then it freezes up for seconds at a time, hard enough to get you killed during the freeze. No wishlist for this one.

gabbo · Oct 8, 2022

Haven't been gaming as much, and haven't really come across any out of the blue gems this time around yet.
So far only ACE Team's games have seemed worth while for my tastes:

The Endless Cylinder

This was an Egs-cloosie I think, but whatever, I like ACE team and the game's premise is as surreal and weird as their art style. The little Trebhum's are cute, the world is menacing, and it runs really well. It's kind of a strategy adventure, but not in a traditional sense

Clash - Artifacts of Chaos

Not sure how to describe this: Fighting/action game set in... i think the Zeno Clash universe where you play a... living wooden/meat puppet of some kind who is kind of aware theyre in a game.

Basically ACE Team is back to doing crazy shit with great art again.

Virtual Ruminant · Oct 8, 2022

Superbrothers of Sword & Sworcery EP fame made a new game ... and buried it in the EGS timed-exclusive vault. But it's due to break free from that next year and you can check out the demo right now. Somewhat unfortunately the demo is just the intro/tutorial of the game, which is just some walking and basic flying, when the main game looks like a much larger open world thing with a lot more going on. Wishlisted not on the strength of the demo, but me expecting a Superbrothers game to be good.

Also omegalul at the incredibad job Epic does at promoting their timed exclusives, I genuinely had no idea this game even existed before I found this demo a couple days ago.

A cartoony/cutesy third person action-RPG that does the stereotypical Chinese thing of trying to have every mechanic and gimmick from every other successful game out there and doing none of them properly. Bit of a shame, since the presentation is quite good.

Judging by the demo this is an exploration/scrapbooking game ... very chill and relaxed vibe, although there is a ever-present melancholic undertone that doesn't really get explained in the demo, but probably is there for a reason. Wishlisted.

Li Kao · Oct 9, 2022

Meh, bad demo day. A little underwhelmed.

Warhammer 40,000 Warpforge
Is CCG 101 more or less. With some very small variations. Boring.

Homicidal All-Stars
Was solid in its attempt to mix XCOM with the death show trope. But it remains to be seen what the full game brings, if it's simply a series of match it will be very light. Was whatever.

Potionomics
Was somewhat of a deception. Not bad, I can still see myself buying it, but it's very static and verbose. Character arts are great but very still.

Dredge
Is okay. Nice mechanics, cool atmosphere, but again, what about the full game ? The grind harshness is up in the air, it is not that scary at all and the map is smöl. As a novelty it's very promising, but not sure it will be as interesting XX hours in.

Virtual Ruminant · Oct 12, 2022

Charming adventure platformer where you explore unknown world , espcape its dangers and solve puzzles as a space doggo.

Holy shit, how have I not heard of this game before?!? AND I missed it while browsing the Next Fest pages.

It's a Space Doggo platformer, this should be almost as big on the hype as Stray ...

... or is it and I've just been living under a rock lately?

gabbo · Feb 7, 2023

Man, the action section lists any game that isn't outright sports at this point. Going through action adventure was a slog
edit: Steam starting to chug, which is annoying, but damn if this isn't my favourite week(s) outside the two big sales.

manchego obfuscator · Feb 7, 2023

not playing as many demos as I used to but I tried a few thus far

Mika and the Witch's Mountain: Cute Kiki's Delivery Service-meets A Short Hike platformer set in what I think is a small open world, seems charming but I was turned off by jump being inexplicably mapped to the Y button, with no option to reassign controls. fortunately, it's still pretty early, I think

Planet of Lana: Very pretty and polished 2.5D cinematic platformer. Doesn't seem to be doing anything terribly novel for the genre, though the demo did hint at some interesting puzzle possibilities involving your companion creature, but I liked it a lot

The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Been looking forward to this one since it was first revealed at the Xbox not-E3 showcase last year - basically, it's a Lovecraft-inspired 2.5D Metroidvania with adventure game-style puzzles and some Souls influence in the combat. Unfortunately, while it has a ton of potential, the demo left me with mixed impressions = while the visuals are gorgeous, the game is very poorly optimized (including a delay of a few seconds when opening and closing the map), combat feels a bit awkward with a parry mechanic that's harder to pull off than it should be, and there's a very weird implementation of double-jumping (it not only consumes the game's equivalent of stamina, but you can only do so when there's an object for your spirit tentacle thing to grab onto). Additionally, the demo throws an overly large chunk of the map at you with what I felt to be insufficient indication of what you're supposed to do next. All that said, the demo does note that it gives you access to certain abilities earlier than you'd get them in the full game for demo purposes, so maybe it'll all cohere better with the proper Metroidvania flow of progression when the full game launches in a few months.

gabbo · Feb 8, 2023

Finally got to spend some time with some demos:

Enenra - What if you took the speed and finesse of a character action game, specifically Revengeance, and made a game with less plot that also feels like it plays itself? You know, kinda shallow in my short time with it. Boy was the action smooth and sleek, but boring. Like a chrome-covered Camero doing donuts in the Walmart parking lot.

Tanthious - An action rpg with werewolves? Sign me the fuck up. What's this? The character creator broke trying to change my hair style - rendering two characters on top of each other at the same time, and I couldnt see any changes? Okay, whatever, it's a demo. Click to play....And the game broke again. This time loading the opening level, My character was in game and pushing keyboard and mouse buttons was causing audible movements from said character, but all I saw the action/skill bar AND a loading screen with the title menu animation and nothing could get me out of this weird loop? Yeah, this needs work.

Phantom Brigade - A little Battletech, a little Red Dawn, a little 4X/tactical strategy - this is my jam

Slave Zero X - 2.5D hack and slash brawler somehow connected to Slave Zero - a fun Mecha game from almost 25 years ago - I was intrigued for sure, and the action is crunchy, but this ran like shit on my machine, and I handled the above three demos maxed out without breaking a sweat. Also forced itself to run in some ridiculously small window size (1280x720 I think?) with no way to change it that I could see. Needs serious some optimization love if it's going to get any further interest from me.

Amzin · Feb 8, 2023

Not sure how many more I'll get to but here's my list so far:

Afterimage. I am so, so tired of metroidvanias shoehorning in souls mechanics for no purpose. At first glance, this is actually a classic metroidvania - no dodge, no parry, SotN-esque kill-and-level, item drops, pretty narrow platforming windows with tons of "need an upgrade" stuff visible everywhere. But it just shoves in the respawn-on-save, heal by potion (refilled at save points), lose xp when you die stuff that truly adds nothing. People in the discussions were actually wondering where dodge/parry were, that's how ubiquitous these things have become in a genre where most games didn't have either.

The graphics are pretty, the combat (what there was in the demo) is pretty simple but again classic metroidvania stuff, and it looks like there's a ton to explore. But even some of the best received games in the genre get flak for misusing mechanics like this does, and this is not the best game in the genre. I might get it on deep sale or part of a bundle.

Rusted Moss. A metroidvania that seems to emphasize mastering the grappling hook mechanic. It felt really wonky to use at first but I sort of got the concept before too long. The style looked better in pictures than in motion to me, at least the areas I was in, it all felt very drab. The combat felt kind of meh as well (all ranged weapon stuff, just dodging and shooting). The super jump you get felt clunky to use too but you could do some interesting stuff with it right away. It has an accessibility difficulty that reminds me of Celeste, but the game was not overly difficult outside of the optional climbs (which look frustrating). Honestly, my biggest complaint is there are pits/spikes everywhere under platforming you have to do and they do damage to you, I took more damage from learning to grapple than I took from enemies in the entire demo. If you could turn off pit damage I would do that in a second, I don't feel like it adds anything. Another maybe.

Nocturnal. This is a 2D platformer that uses a "flame" mechanic - you light your weapon on fire at torches / sconces / braziers / other fire, and it both serves as a buff, a ward (against some malignant darkness), and your mana (for healing, skills, etc.). It's fairly pretty at times when the fire aura around you is cutting through darkness and there are crystals gleaming around. The combat, however, felt pretty bad to me - it's functional but incredibly limited, the hitbox on enemy attacks seemed to be way bigger than indicated, and it's nearly impossible to see attack tells in the midst of the aforementioned fire + darkness + gleaming + your own character. Some of the demo enemies were very tanky too, and the first boss is a multi-phase test of enduring that didn't feel fun. It has a lot of potential but I feel like a combat pass would do it some good, but it otherwise seems finished so I'm not sure that will happen.

Terminal Breach. A bullet heaven with a 3D bit tech aesthetic, and an interesting shop mechanic that honestly feels neat. It's basic vamp-survival stuff, pick a character, you get to unlock / pick starting weapons (and have 2 equiped to switch between although no idea why you would want to bother), pick upgrades on level up and at the buy-anytime shop. You can use keys to reroll shop or level up rewards OR unlock chests that spawn which is a nice touch. You can jump and dash over enemies to get out of trouble.

However, and this is a big however, it ran like absolute garbage on my 3080 and i9. Stuttering from about minute 5 of 15 minute runs, making it borderline unplayable (I was strong enough to finish a run through it all once), regardless of resolution / settings / etc., it's just something broken with the game. Second run I tried was worse AND at some point I got yeeted into the void and just sat out of bounds in darkness for 2 minutes and the stuttering was still there. It's an OK entry into the bullet heaven that seems kind of low depth but the technical issues make this probably not even worth trying the demo right now.

Picayune. Another bullet heaven, but also a bullet hell. The aesthetic is Megaman mixed with like 50s retro space plus unhinged claymation inspired enemies? I guess? It's certainly a look. Also, the xp pickups are the damage numbers you do which actually helps to alleviate the issue of falling behind and never getting xp if you can't kill things which is neat. The other gimmick is all the upgrades are described by just showing their code, more or less - they say they were inspired by games like Isaac where you get no info about pickups until you try them, and here if you can parse code logic you at least get a good idea. The problem is the balance feels way off, a lot of them are useless, especially the passives, and you really just want to focus on leveling one or two weapons forever which makes it kind of boring. I didn't hate it, but these games usually grab me and this one just didn't make me want to keep going.

Crafty Survivors. A bullet heaven (sort of) mixed with cartoony village visuals and an absolute grind of meta materials. I played 2 of the three characters and they are VERY distinct - the first, a chef, applies different statuses to enemies based on the skill used (cut, spiced, frosted, candied, etc.) and gets charges for their "ult" when they kill enemies with the right combination of modifiers. The second character is a statue carver, his attacks do little damage to enemies but your abilities create statues that do stuff after you hit them a certain number of times, plus hitting a statue does a shockwave of damage to enemies. I died like 5 times in quick succession on them but it's a fascinating new mechanic for sure. You collect wood, gold, silk, etc. in different stages and use those to upgrade the town, it seemed like very small upgrades and not a ton of diversity unless more stuff gets unlocked in the full game or later than I played, but I might pick it up just for the uniqueness of everything.

manchego obfuscator · Feb 9, 2023

played a few more demos last night:

Protodroid Delta: Mega Man-inspired 3D platformer with lock-on shooting. Didn't play this for long as the level design felt pretty bland and movement felt a bit awkward, but maybe later levels will be more interesting, IDK

Enenra - combines DMC/Bayonetta-style character action with Arkham-inspired freeflow, where you automatically target nearby enemies (well, as long as you're pushing the analog stick towards them, anyway). Fun, and the animations and general feel of combat are very impressive for a game from a single dev, but not sure how much more there is to it than that, and character action fans might feel it takes too much control away from the player.

Radio the Universe - this was infamously funded via Kickstarter over a decade ago in 2012, but based on the demo, this is the rare case where an extremely long dev cycle might actually be justified by the final product. Incredible atmosphere, with pixel art with just the right of detail, cutscenes that hint at a deeper story while leaving a lot to the imagination, and a perfectly ominous musical score, but it also plays extremely well too, with snappy and responsive controls and satisfying combat; also appreciated that there's an indicator that shows you where a jump will end up, which addresses some of the issues many top-down 2D games have with platforming from one elevation to another. My one real concern from my limited playtime is that the difficulty might be too high for my taste, since one hit kills you, but the game does autosave very frequently after every screen.

Virtual Ruminant · Feb 10, 2023

Did you know that Steam lets you click "Add to Library" on demos if you're browsing the page in a browser and then when you open Steam later, none of them have actually been added to the library? Ha-ha, very funny Steam ... anyway ...

Slopecrashers - Still in alpha, but already quite smooth and fun. Mario Kart, but it's snowboard-races with cartoon animals? Could be a big hit, if done right and promoted well.

DYNOPUNK - Pixelart, retrowave-styling, talking cartoon dinosaurs. Visual novel plus mini-games. Enjoyed it a lot, great vibes.

Eggcelerate! ... to the Tropics - Racing/rage-game, where you race a motocycle against the clock around courses. The twist: You're also carrying an egg in a shallow basket and it must not fall out. Very fun, and not easy! Apparently this is a series of games already, there's Eggcelerate! and Eggcelerate! ... to the Northpole, but I had never heard of those games before.

Zid Journey - Cute and wholesome point and click starring pixel-art dinosaurs. Has the charme and art-style of 1990s educational games, and the bits I played were pretty straightforward without daft point-and-click anti-mechanics.

The Star named EOS - A "The Room" style puzzle game, with some additional mechanics around taking pictures thrown in and a radically different art-style (all hand-drawn) compared to the usual "The Room" clone. Normally I don't do "The Room" style games because the puzzles seem just too arbitrary to me and don't really make much sense in the context of the stories, but this one is just so comfy and nice, I actually made it to the end of the demo.

5 demos, 5 times wishlisted, good start!

rickyson33 · Feb 11, 2023

played a couple demos from games that were already on my wishlist tonight

Cook Serve Forever - seems to be trying to go for a bit of a different gameplay style than the previous games that's more of a rhythm game style QTE thing, anyways the demo just isn't a good showcase of this at all it just plops you into a random level and is like 5 minutes long with no customization or anything

Inkbound - new roguelike game from Shiny Shoe(Monster Train devs) this time without cards. I played this for a half hour or so, took a little bit to figure out how exactly it controls since that isn't really explained at all(stuff like how exactly the action point system works how to tell how much damage you'll take from stuff etc) but fun once you get that down, I doubt i'll like it as much as I liked Monster Train since I like card stuff but should be another good game from them, also has co-op which I haven't tried so can't comment on that

I got 9 more demos downloaded we'll see how many I end up actually getting around to, I really want to at least try out Tape to Tape and Phantom Brigade those seem interesting

Virtual Ruminant · Feb 11, 2023

It's just more fun to scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and start working your way up from there ... but inevitably, there will be some pure garbage in there. I think I might be through the absolute bottom of the barrel now, here's the list of complete stinkers I encountered. Only play those for a laugh.

Bakken - Ski Jumping - #SkiJumpingIsBack says the description of this game and it couldn't be further from truth

Ball laB 2 - Somebody tried to convert a popular minimalist endless runner into a precision platformer and failed

BIG DRUG - No amount of drugs will make this one entertaining

Chippy's Escape from Seaberry Keep - I"m hoping this (and the series of games it's a part of) are elaborate shitposts, otherwise it would be just sad

Dictator's Creed - There's no doubt that this one is a shitpost

Sisters of Sweetwater - Comes with a disclaimer that basically says "this is shit and also unfinished, even as a a demo" and that is completely accurate

gabbo · Feb 11, 2023

Potion Tales - You run a little potion shop in the underground - making potions from your potion book and the stuff on your shelf. Simple controls,. simple premise - quite fun in practice. Do you give your customer what they want or do you give them what you want? Furry Golems becoming oakland raiders fans, fire spewing flower killers, the [potion] Life of Brian. For such a littler unity game - there is quite a bit of mischief to be had.

Slopecrashers - Virtual Ruminant hits the nail on the head - this is MarioKart with snowboards. The soundtrack reminds me of Sonic Allstars Racing Transformed just enough to not get sued

Repo Man - looks nice, crashes with a GPU error moments after I start the demo, every time. Would love to know if anyone else with an AMD card was able to play it successfully

Shadows of Doubt - An interesting take on being a PI - reminds me of Cloudpunk with its future dystopia and chunky art style. I was lost pretty quick, which may be more me than the game, but I digress. If it didn't have the blocky-Minecraft look I'd probably be more willing to give it more time but I don't really care for having to stare at that up close non-stop. YMMV

spiel · Feb 12, 2023

Coffee Bar Renovator - meh

Cook Serve Forever - this one hurts to say but I wasn't all that hooked by the new mechanics. The multi-tasking, key smashing chaos of the trilogy has turned into something of a rhythm game? Fantastic music though.

Dawnlawns - it asked me to create an account. nOPE.

Voidtrain - the presentation is amazing. It's like Raft but on a train in space (?). But I think progression is slow even for a demo and too much busywork in the UI.

Townseek - adorable. But I noticed a lot of fetch quests that don't feel meaningful. So I imagine the full game would wear out its welcome pretty quick if it doesn't have a good narrative questline.

Painter Simulator - meh.

Pekoe - I really like the tactile feel of making tea in this one! But the rest of the UI feels finicky. If the devs can improve that in the full game I would play this.

Virtual Ruminant · Feb 12, 2023

The most fun part of every Next Fest for me is finding those games that really leave a unique impression. And it's always a tightrope walk - will a game come down on the "weird, but wonderful" side or end up being full-on cringe?

The Weird and Wonderful:

NecroNomNomNom: Eldritch Horror Dating - It's a VN / Dating Sim about going on a dinner date with various creatures from or inspired by the Cthulhu universe, in a restaurant to match.

And even though the game does not even have a release date yet, the demo is nothing short of perfect: Stellar writing that is outrageously funny and yet stylistically completely on-theme, gorgeous high-definition pixel art, fantastic soundtrack. Already guaranteed to be an absolute cult VN classic of the future and among the top VN releases of whatever year it will come out.

Even people who normally could not care less for Cthulhu stuff and / or dating sims should have a look here.

Mia and the Dragon Princess - Wales Interactive are really dedicated these days to their production line of modern-day FMV games, and usually they end up on the cringe side of things, because the concepts just fly on a different altitude than the production budget.

But: This time, they struck gold.

It's a time-travel fantasy comedy about a south-east Asian pirate princess being transported into modern day London during her search for her lost partner-in-plunder. The backstory and fantasy parts are told in hand-drawn animated segments (which the game trailer, to its detriment, completely omits to show) and the present-day comedy is FMV.

That way, both sides of the story get to shine - the fantastic part gets the atmosphere and grandeur it requires, while the actors in the FMV scenes can concentrate on giving great performances on real sets instead of standing around in silly costumes in front of green screens.

Worth checking out, even if you had previously dismissed these games (as I had).

1000xRESIST - This demo had me guessing what the hell was going on for the better part of the 1.5 hours I needed to play it, but by the end of it I smashed that wishlist button hard.

The development team describe themselves as "a group of majority Asian-Canadian diaspora creators with a decade of experience in dance, theatre, music, film, visual arts, and new media arts, bringing our background in the experimental performing arts to interactive media", and that really is what you get here - sci-fi JRPG aesthetics, but action game controls and exploration, but visual novel style story telling, but fully voice-acted, a very-very-anime dystopic scenario, but a story that is clearly also inspired by the combined life experience of the developers growing up as immigrants or children of immigrants to North America.

Worth taking your time for.

The Cringe:

Furry Finder - This could be a perfectly fine light-hearted VN about giving a slightly awkward teenage dude a shot at true love, but I strongly suspect the game was not originally written in English and very hastily translated to release this demo on time - and it really ruins the experience. Also the background artwork is quite hit-and-miss. Needs more time in the oven at the very least.

Ghost of Fall - This wants to be a (more?) furry Undertale, but is riddled with bugs, the combat bits are way too hard right from the start and the art style is just all over the place.

Goofy-Dee - This one brings every annoying cascading puzzle/fetch-quest ever encountered in a point-and-click adventure to a first person exploration/puzzle game, with obnoxious bright cartoon visuals and sound effects to match (the game comes right out of the gate with a lot of fart sounds). This game tries so hard to be funny, it comes with a dedicated "Ha-Ha-Ha" button that triggers canned laughter in the game's pause menu. Doesn't get much more cringe than this.

rickyson33 · Feb 12, 2023

Tape to Tape - this is fantastic, it's an arcady Hockey game that's also a roguelike with a slay the spire esque map of picking between two different locations to go to and artifacts and powerups(teamwide effects and individual player effects respectively) to unlock during your run, nothing too crazy on the effects yet but it's really fun already and has a lot of potential to be more so

my one complaint was that it became really easy to maintain possession once you got the hang of it which made the game feel pretty easy but the demo even thought of that and unlocks a hard mode once you beat a run

random gameplay moment that was hilarious: the boss for the demos act(the demo is act 1 there will be more acts in the full game) is a team of refs and when I was playing against them the refs called off my first goal just because

this went from something i'd never heard of a few days ago to one of my more anticipated games releasing this year after playing the demo

Virtual Ruminant · Feb 12, 2023

Long Sunday of playing demos behind me, this session was without a theme, just 6.5 hours of me playing random picks from the stuff I downloaded

Garbage / Needs more work:

Alpha Terminus - What if that bit in Halo 2 where you shoot stuff while stuck on a large moving platform was the whole game and you were trapped in a turret

Defi Gravity - What if somebody tried to reinvent WipeOut with a free game engine and the asset store, with a probably copyright-infringing soundtrack

My Dream Setup - What if somebody made a room planner software in Unity, added a feature to play chillout music playlists directly in the software and tried to market it as a game

RingRaceR - Somewhat original concept, but not much of a game here yet

Assault on Proxima - Art style somewhere between Borderlands and Void Bastards, but clearly very early in development still, everything about the actual shooting feels awkward. There's also no single player campaign to speak of yet, you just get dumped in a corridor and shoot things

Pekoe - Comfy visual novel / immersive sim around making tea. The actual game part isn't quite there yet, I managed to soft-lock the tutorial. But hey, the custom pronoun editor is already fully-featured and working, so the rest will surely follow at some point

Super Space Club - "A lo-fi arcade space shooter to chill to" - it has the graphics, the music, the style, and the controls, but if the first five minutes of your demo are harder than the first five minutes of Super Stardust (mostly because the enemies are so damn tiny), something went terribly wrong with the chill part

Tray Racers! - Another online cartoon downhill racer, but unlike Slopecrashers, this just has no mojo at all. Could still be turned around, but I won't hold my breath

Verlet Ascend - Bunny needs to platform and shoot his way out of procedurally generated levels while being chased by the rising tide. Needs more polish and maybe a bit of a story carrot to keep things interesting

Okay, but not my thing:

Iosis - Inspired by 2D twin-stick shooters, but heavily emphasizes mouse-control, a deep upgrade system and the fact that you don't shoot anything - you ram into enemies until they die. Meanwhile the enemies aren't really after you, they are after a companion object of yours that you need to protect from getting hit. Solid, but I just don't like playing games like this with the mouse

Roxy Raccoon 2: Topys-Turvy - A collection of Roxy-Raccoon-themed mini-games (tilt-mazes, labyrinths, one-button endless-runner style arcade challenges). Solid, but not for me.

Weird and wonderful:

Amanda the Adventurer - I think this is the playable trailer for a first person horror game, but it doesn't really have any classic first person horror bits in it - instead, it's a very weird and short first person puzzle game. No idea if the actual game will be any good, but the demo is worth playing on its own merit.

Good:

Baldy Bounce - This is a chill, casual open world novelty platformer, like a less obnoxious and gag-obsessed goat simulator.

DE-EXIT - Eternal Matters - This one was strange for me - the art style and skeleton protagonist reminded me of a whole bunch of garbage-tier 3D platformers I've seen over the years, but this is a proper game made by a proper studio that plays properly and will almost certainly be good when it eventually comes out, but purely because of the visuals I was heavily biased against it. I'm hoping it'll end up being REALLY good, so that art style can be redeemed at least for me personally.

Cavern of Dreams - A 3D platformer purposely designed in the style and fidelity of N64/PS1 games. Slow starting due to a slight lack of tutorialization, but once you get going it's hard to put down.

Great:

Planet of Lana - Had this on my wishlist from the moment I saw the first trailer, but finally played the demo now. This puzzle platformer has got it all - the looks, the character designs and animations, the interaction with the sidekick character, the level design, the music - this one will be right up there with the very best of the genre, can't wait.

rickyson33 · Feb 13, 2023

Phantom Brigade - I don't know if this was a bug or what but I wanted to try this one out and I bounced off of it really fast in the tutorial stuff because there was no sound at all....actually really curious if this is just an issue I personally ran into or if it's actually meant to not have sound because it felt really jarring

Lakeburg Legacies - had this one on my wishlist but also bounced off this one really fast, in this case it just felt a bit too menu heavy for a demo which felt a tad overwhelming

Stone Ocean · Feb 13, 2023

A few of my standouts so far

Had to double check to make sure it wasn't a New Blood game, "Celeste with guns" definitely sounds like something Dave would advertise. With that said it does play as smoothly as Celeste with some Cave Story thrown in, kind of cruel platforming early on but I'm down nonetheless.

People are getting really good at emulating NES gameplay, this feels a lot like those amazing Sunsoft Batman NES games, pretty damn sweet.

Game was a bit more obtuse than I expected but still feels amazing. Not super fond of the XP gimmick, specially with the whole minimalistic approach that won't even tell how much damage your moves do but not a dealbreaker in the slightest.

Every game is made better by adding hookshots to it, and Megaman X is no exception.

Virtual Ruminant · Feb 26, 2023

I also managed to take two more demos off the ridiculously huge load I put on my plate:

Blue Wednesday - Similar to Night in the Woods in concept, but with a stronger emphasis on rhythm mini-games. I didn't feel this one, the demo is much, much too long for what's in it and the main character felt quite unrelatable. Music is good, but I think I'll pass on this one.

Rallygator - A cute little Trials-style physics-heavy side-scrolling racing game that is considerably more chill than the usual game of this genre - no timer / leaderboard for example - and instead puts in some puzzles between the start and finish line - as well as hidden collectibles. Wishlisted.

Virtual Ruminant · Mar 7, 2023

Elypse - Ori mechanics and Hollow Knight-ish aesthetics. Technically pristine, but the checkpoint placement sucks and I couldn't get past the first mini-boss. Not made for scrubs like me I guess.

Boti: Byteland Overclocked - There's a good 3d platformer buried in this demo with bad voice acting and worse performance. Will the developers manage to dig it up? Wishlisted to keep an eye on it.

TVs: The Revival - Strange plot and gameplay inspired by Inside, but plays and performs pretty badly. Doubt that this can be salvaged.

Candle Knight - Interesting power-up system and generally good concept, but clunky level design and clunkier controls.

Windswept - What if Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country had babies and those babies happened to be a duck and a turtle. A technically perfect imitation of classic 16-bit platformers, but the gameplay goes beyond imitation and manages to congenially remix some classic mechanics and controls to create an experience that transcends mere 90s references. Wishlisted.

Virtual Ruminant · Mar 8, 2023

I checked out the Windswept and Chants of Sennaar demos after reading about them in prudis post and can confirm they are both very good and everyone should check them out (they are still available).

This is why this thread is really great to have, I spent literal hours going through the list when Next Fest was live and still somehow managed to miss both of these gems.

I also played Colored Effects, which is a fairly straight-forward puzzle platformer with single-screen levels and a retro-ish pixel graphics look. Plays very smoothly, looks & sounds nice, puzzles are good, wishlisted.

Virtual Ruminant · Apr 2, 2023

lol, I finally finished all my downloaded demos. And a bunch of them also expired on me.

Most of them were various shades of bad, but there was one good one I wanted to mention:

The Ramsey - It's a retro-styled pixelart platformer with visual-novel-style story-telling and a main weapon mechanic that seems a little clunky at first, but then allows for some interesting mechanics later on which helps making the platforming in this one a little different from most platformers out there. Wishlisted.

Panda Pedinte · Jun 20, 2023

It's that time of the year again.

Sea of Stars

The first demo I've tried and I loved every minute of it. The Sea of Stars demo has a nice pace and gives an overall idea of what the game is about, the animation are full of life, as expected from the makers of The Messenger. Having the 3 characters running around the levels gives some Secret of Mana vibe and the music fits perfectly in the game.

Nour: Play with Your Food

As the store says it's an experimental game, you spawn different kind of foods according with the level and can have different interactions with them. Each item has a sound assigned to it so you can kind of create some melodies, but nothing complex. There are some interactions that change some minor elements in the level. While the demo was quite short, it was fun to burn and hammer the food.

|OT| Steam Next Fest - returning October 2024

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