It’s that glorious quaternal time of year once more, as Steam is taken over by demos for eighty-squillion games, impossible to find by genre because no one knows what genres are any more. No, every person ever, “point and click” does not mean, “game with a cursor in it.” I hate you. I hate you. But to avoid such feelings in your own soul, I’ve gone through the madness and plucked out eight demos I think are well worth your time. Most of them are really weird. Which is brilliant.
Please drop any buried demos you’ve found into the comments, so others can benefit from your discoveries too. And remember to wishlist everything you like the look of–it helps out the developers with their visibility on Steam, and it means you’ll be reminded when the game is released. Win-win.
Kiddo
I’m in love with the art, here. Using Tom Snyder’s “Squigglevision” style of wibbly animation, this “dystopian present” as the game describes itself looks incredible. It’s a tale of a deeply broken man, stuck in his apartment in increasingly disgusting conditions, until seemingly the disappearance of his pet dog triggers him to escape his couch and try to improve things. Being a point-and-click adventure, this requires making cheese on toast for an angry mouse in order to get the login code for his PC, that sort of thing, but it all makes a perfect and disgusting sense in his morbid conditions.
Despite how deeply depressing that all sounds, Kiddo is… well, it’s pretty depressing. But in a fun way! The puzzles are great, the animations are fantastic, and its use of colour contrasts are stand-out. The demo offers a generous chunk of challenge, with an ultimate goal here of cleaning the toilet. Big aspirations indeed. I absolutely cannot wait for more of this–it’s really stunning.
- Demo
- Official Site
- Release: TBA
Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer
I’d completely forgotten a new Kathy Rain was coming! From the excellent Clifftop Games, this is a sequel to the 2016 original (or indeed the 2021 Director’s Cut, which is the canon version), and the first new game from the team since 2019’s wonderful Whispers of a Machine. The demo shows exactly what I was expecting: beautiful pixel art, traditional point-and-click puzzling, and a murder mystery to solve. Kathy is now a PI, but deep in debt, bills unpaid–you know how it goes. But there’s a serial killer in town, and he’s just taken his fifth victim in three months, a famous local author called Debbie Sinclair. If she can can crack the case, there’s money to be made.
The demo is improved since the version released in November, with overly-hard puzzles made more friendly for such an early chunk of a game. There’s sporadic voice acting, which sounds great, but the final game will be fully voiced. But when is that final game coming?! There’s still no information, other than that it won’t be “years”. Come on people, I neeeeeeeed this.
- Demo
- Release: TBA
Into The Void
There have been a bunch of super-fast run-n-gun shooters of late, and all of them essentially include kicking. Into The Void is no different in that respect, but also with a brilliant black-and-white aesthetic that simplifies the conceit to its bare minimum. You hurtle through levels at ridiculous speeds, kicking down doors, and shooting the chalk outline enemies you encounter. Levels are broken up with checkpoints, death takes you back to the last of those, and your efforts are being timed.
Oh, and you’re a dead guy, reawakened with no memories, and only the instruction to DESTROY THE CORE. Love it.
- Demo
- Official Site
- Release: TBA
Paper Animal Adventure
No, indeed, that’s a terrible name for a game. But it’s descriptive, at least! Imagine if you took Paper Mario, but put the papery characters in an isometric 3D world, and also the battles played out in the same areas. Er, did I help? Oh. So this is a tile-based RPG dungeon crawler-me-do, in which you move cutesy little woodland creatures around “dungeons” (lovely, bucolic, sunlit dungeons) to battle enemies, gather loot, and find exits. Movement is perpendicular, and battles make an excellent combination of this standard movement alongside attacks on countdowns. So if you want to hit that mushroom, you need to avoid the highlighted tiles he’s about to attack, but also get right up close and personal and use your biff when the meter has refilled.
I’m rubbish at explaining mechanics, OK? Leave me alone. But it’s cute, it’s breezy, and it’s surprisingly hard. I love how it merges its turn-based battles into the core game, rather than teleporting you away to a specific zone. And there’s betwixt levels cooking and prep, multiple characters to play as, and apparently all this is very restricted in what already feels like a busy demo.
- Demo
- Official Site
- Release: TBA
Bad Cheese
As various pieces of art finally leave their grotesquely long copyrights and enter the public domain, until now people seem pretty determined to only use this freedom to make terrible horror movies. But what’s this? Bad Cheese is a game that absolutely couldn’t have happened before Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willy incarnation became a free-for-all, but also probably shouldn’t have happened given just how utterly creeped out I feel after playing its demo. You know, in the good way.
This is a first-person game in which you play a morbidly obese version of Mickey Mouse, slowly shuffling around a grimly lit old house, trying to find pills to feed his monstrous father-figure–a sort of dog-like horror of indeterminate shape and proportions. It’s all utterly grotesque, from the cacophony of squelching and burbling noises to the horrific images, as you move this wheezing mouse through the shadowy, unwelcoming house. Everything about it made me feel awful, and it was all so tremendously well done. The animations seem to truly appreciate the subject of its pastiche, and this short section of the game left me feeling like I needed to know what would come next despite absolutely not wanting to.
- Demo
- Release: TBA
The Perfect Pencil
Imagine if you took Hollow Knight, but replaced the insects with…grown men in prams with dripping taps on their heads that cut grooves in their foreheads, and pillow-wielding menaces in their PJs. This is the inexplicable nature of The Perfect Pencil, a deeply peculiar metroidlike which seems to think it’s set in some sort of meaningful afterlife, but is just pure, indecipherable madness. I quite like it.
The beginning of the demo is painfully slow, but it’s worth persisting as this very quickly becomes a fun–if deeply weird–platformer. The demo is a hefty chunk of game, with upgrades to buy from bizarre toothbrush-holding blackbelts, mini-bosses to battle, and more oddness than you’ll know what to do with. It desperately needs more checkpoints, but other than that, this is a collection of exquisite animations, really solid platform combat, and more strangeness than you could possibly expect.
- Demo
- Release: Q3 2025
Diacritic
Sometimes it’s just safer to paste the store description:
“Decode a layered narrative as you complete the work assignment of a Diacritic: to fit shapes into orthogonally projected outlines and provide answers to inscrutable questions.”
Which is to say, this is a wildly interesting puzzle game in which you rotate and resize line drawings of geometric shapes until they align with dotted patterns on the background, all while listening to the muted and distorted sounds of the sea, seabirds, and an unknown rumbling. In between levels you read short snatches of an ongoing story, seemingly from a stranded man on an island in the 1950s, deciphered from exploring files on a computer in the 1970s! Also on your computer are messages from colleagues, superiors, and various other storybuilding elements, the whole thing enormously strange and completely compelling.
- Demo
- Release: 2025
Nothing Beyond This Point
I kind of had to put this last, right? Do not be put off by the graphics here, at all, because this is a work of art. A twin-stick shooter, where your health is also your ability to attack, set in the bizarre un-space of a void.
You begin with four “rods”, each of which is a bar of health, but also the points you need to be able to perform various attacks. If you have zero rods and get hit again, you’ll die. But you’ll also not be able to attack at all, as the basic melee wallop requires a minimum of one. Then there are ranged attacks, missiles fired for a rod each, dashes that’ll cost you three rods for at a time, and nice big charged-up AOE circles for a price. This is a brilliant idea! The more you use your special moves, the more vulnerable you become. Of course, you can replenish rods, but this requires standing still and holding X, and that’s often tricky in a frantic twin-stick shooter. It becomes all about finding those moments between enemy attack patterns when you can charge up a couple of rods, focusing on the free melee attacks, and then letting loose with the more powerful stuff once more.
The demo is a good size, and generously lets you carry on playing in the final area once it’s over. It may not be the prettiest game (although I actually rather like its aesthetic), but damn, it’s a smart and interesting one.
- Demo
- Release: TBA
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Thank you John, I was curious if you managed to compete with larger sites to cover the Next Fest!
This is a nice selection, previously unknown to me, you deserve a rest surely!
Whoever reads this, I would also recommend Bramble Royale, from the Meteorfall/ Krumits Tale devs!
The Adventure and even Adventure/Point-and-Click categories are indeed quite useless. Puzzle/Story-Driven was a bit more relevant; I found A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe, Arka Kraya, Beast Island, Boxville 2, Brassheart (surprise surprise), Cloud Cats’ Land, No Rest for Lex, and The Case of the Worst Day Ever. None of the games which I really look forward too though.