As usual it’s taken me nearly the whole week to pick out the seven demos from the 8000+ I’m really keen for you to play too, but it’s been worth it. I’ve dug through and found some real treasures. The games below are all stunning in completely different ways, and their demos are featured in Steam’s Next Fest until Monday. Also, a whole bunch of them are coming out in the next couple of months! Remember to wishlist anything you like the look of – it’s a huge help for the developers, and for you.
Derelikt
Visuwyg
This is my stand-out game from this latest Next Fest. Derelikt (I wish I were a better person and didn’t just think “I guess you can Derelikt my balls” every time I see the name) is a retro-styled immersive sim, presented as if someone made System Shock for the PS1.
The huge demo begins as you arrive on a space station orbiting Saturn, sent to discover what’s gone wrong, and find a place that’s still occupied by other humans (what a nice surprise!) but also in terrible danger. After a hefty period of exploration, snooping, reading other people’s email, and getting to grips with the mystery, you’re sent into the fray with a gun and a goal. Combat is chunky, ammo isn’t plentiful, and you’re always looking for alternative routes and hidden stashes.
It also has great writing, the best 3D old-school pixel art, and excellent sound. The demo was so long at a certain point I forgot I wasn’t playing the full game, and then was devastated when it finally ended. Thankfully there’s less than a month until its 13th November release.
Kopernicus
Simon Lukasik
I’ve got a bit of a thing for incremental games – those sorts where you do a relatively banal task and then rapidly unlock a massive skill tree of new abilities to speed it up – but rarely recommend them because they’re so thin and transient. Kopernicus is anything but, a deeply interesting and chunky game that applies the incremental theme to a Enter the Gungeon-ish top-down action game, where burning enemies becomes an ever-more interesting prospect as you swell your suite of skills. It’s also stunning, a visceral grotesquery of three-colour art that is deliciously horrific.
This is another demo that is wildly generous, letting you play a huge chunk of the game, and even letting you carry on playing the sizable early stages once you’ve gotten as deep in as it allows. There are so many elements available, building up a base of buildings that open up new upgradeable weapons, tools, and advantages. Upgrades require all manner of collectibles, and some open up new game types (in the demo you have a fuel-gathering game, which itself evolves incrementally the more you play it). It’s so deep and complex and fascinating, and despite its deliberately crude (but brilliant) presentation, a far more involved and challenge game than your typical incremental fare.
The Bagman
Bad Tasty
There’s a lot to be intrigued by here. It’s a traditional-looking point-and-click adventure, where you play as Eloise, a young woman in therapy for some sort of childhood tragedy, but the demo immediately reveals a few twists. You can work with other characters by using a sort of crude, menu-based BASIC-like command structure (“USE metal bar THEN wait for 10 seconds”), then leave them to get on with their task while you do your own. And your task here is to escape a ghoulish animated corpse that’s determined to tear you to pieces.
I’m really intrigued to see how this works as part of a larger story, that includes stealthy elements and action sequences along with inventory puzzles. I’m also intrigued to learn what on Earth anyone involved is thinking by having Eloise look exactly the same as Kathy Rain, complete with blue-to-red hair style. That seems like a weird choice that should probably be addressed before release.
Infested DX
Komi Games
This is an old-school first-person adventure game, presented like your grandpappy used to code, to lovely effect. It’s part verb-picking point-and-clicker, part puzzle game, with (very forgiving) deaths to dodge and inventory items to employ. Set on a space station that’s packed with dangers, gloopy horrors and monstrosities, you solve your way through its VGA challenges while trying not to slice off your fingers in a laser grid.
I like this a lot, and it’s just announced that it’s coming out as soon as 27 October, which just happens to be my birthday!
Hellforged
Moonpyre
This is an incredibly slick bullet heaven meets bullet hell, in which the Vampire Survivors themes trek off in a very Diablo direction. The hub world between levels is a place rather than a menu, and gradually gets filled up with places to improve equipment, people to talk to, and ways to upgrade skills, in a way that’s far more interesting than clicking on icons. But crucially, the core game is just a whole heap of fun, requiring hefty use of your dodge as you simultaneously farm enemies while dodging whole screens full of attacks. Very excited to play this a lot more when there are more arenas in which to battle.
Eldritch Slayer
Mewsturbo
I played a whole bunch of FPS demos, and it’s odd frankly that this is the one that jumped out at me. Eldritch Slayer is such an incredible simple game in most ways, its chunky, cartoon pixel art portraying a dead-straight shooter that’s so lacking in twists that you can’t even look up or down. There’s no jump, no duck, just shooting at the cutest little Eldritch horrors you ever saw and trying not to die.
That not dying part is important here, as each level has no save points, no quick save, just the simple goal of reaching the end in one go. I think that’s what worked for me here, and while the five levels in the demo don’t put up a particular challenge, it’s nice just to go hell for leather without hiding behind saves. It’s all about firing a lot of bullets at a lot of enemies, grabbing health packs when you can, and just ploughing forward in your pursuit of keys, ammo and ladders. I’d love if it had some secrets to find, but other than that, I just really enjoyed its odd purity.
Ruin: 35th Anniversary – Definitive Edition
Official Electric
Some games come with epilepsy warnings, but Ruin feels more like the epileptic fit itself. This extraordinary creation, appearing very briefly int his short demo, is part surrealist adventure game (and I mean “surrealist”, misusing that word is one of my pet peeves), and part art piece. It’s the 35th anniversary edition of a game that never existed before, and that’s by far the least strange thing about this. I loved it.
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Thank you John, that is a cracking selection. Infested DX and Derelikt might be my favourites, just the right kind of old school. The Bagman looks also great but personally I’m not a fan of time-based puzzles; I’ll still keep an eye on it to see how it turns out.