Steam Next Fest - October 2023 Edition is live now

I recommend giving Sentry a try. Promising TD/FPS hybrid

Steam users talking about Steam: !Steam nowadays.

In all seriousness though, the level of double standards by Valve on adult content on Steam is stupid and sorta sad. Cause you'll have crappy porn games left and right, but then an 18+ patch for a game will get blocked even though the previous games in the series have them on Steam already. *cough* NEKOPARA Vol. 4. *cough*

Thought I'd play a bunch of demos tonight. Only managed The Talos Principle 2. A bit on the heavy side, but still manageable on my 5 year old machine. Unlike a certain robocop game.

Sorceress is a neat first person action-platformer kind of thing with fun magic powers and environmental interactions, basic but well executed lever pully/key findy puzzles, and a Very Good Kick. You could probably play it as a Thieflike but there's no real call for that, movement is fast and fluid enough to go in bubble-guns (and bows and spears and swords and regular axes and magical ice axes) blazing.

A little something for everyone it seems.

But unfortunately not for me! There's nothing that's catching my eye at all, and there's not even a genre filter for one of my lifelong favourites, maze-chase, which just goes to show how small that genre's gotten over the years.

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?


Last edited by Pengling on 10 October 2023 at 3:02 am UTC

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

Yes you are...... You need to be looking in Minnesota...... Seems they have just what your looking for.........


Last edited by StoneColdSpider on 10 October 2023 at 3:06 am UTC

Yes you are...... You need to be looking in Minnesota...... Seems they have just what your looking for.........

That's actually genuinely cool on every level.

Tried out and enjoying Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor - It's very similar to a Vampire Survivors style game, but you're in an isometrically-oriented cave-system that you need to mine out. Mined resources contribute towards your weapon and equipment upgrades.

I also played a bit of Sentry - and I'm liking that too - Combination of FPS and Tower Defence. Set aboard a space-ship and preventing a horde of aliens from reaching vulnerable areas of the ship.

Looking forward to (eventually) trying out Enshrouded and IDUN. They also look cool.


Last edited by g000h on 10 October 2023 at 4:45 am UTC

The Thaumaturge is one of the games I have wishlisted, but with these story-heavy games, I usually stay away from demos. And while it might seem tempting to use the opportunity as a chance to check Linux/Wine/Proton) compatibility, I already had demos run great and the release not at all, and the other way round, too.

But let's see what else they have ... probably plenty that I never heard about before!

Tried out and enjoying Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor - It's very similar to a Vampire Survivors style game, but you're in an isometrically-oriented cave-system that you need to mine out. Mined resources contribute towards your weapon and equipment upgrades.

I found the demo bit before the fest, so I got a head start. Deep Rock Galactic as a survivors clone does bring something fresh to the genre.

Let's see how much time I have for this fest. I started playing leftovers from last one, so it might take a while to catch up.

I tried the Earthless demo, which is fairly similar to Slay the Spire except that combat takes place on a 2D grid. Oh, and you're piloting a spaceship fleeing Earth running into aliens, salvage opportunities, etc.. You can remove cards from your deck every so many jumps, and occasionally find upgrades that can be applied to them (in my case, I found an upgrade that added +1 to the range of an attack it was applied to). It's a little bare-bones at the moment (it mentions releasing in Early Access next year), and the tutorial doesn't explain everything (though if you're familiar with StS it should be pretty easy to figure out), but it's interesting enough for me to keep following.

One frustrating thing I find about Steam Next Fest is that it's not obvious that the vast majority of the demos self-destruct after a certain number of days and, even worse, you're not told when a demo will disappear. I personally think Next Fest demos should stay up until at least the game is launched (and maybe even beyond that, possibly with a revision based on the launched full game).

There are far too many demos to try in just one week, so I end up having to quickly trawl through gaming sites (inc. GoL of course) for recommendations, install them all and then work through them. Snag is that even installed demos won't run if they've been pulled from Steam, which is another reason I find the whole experience unsatisfying.


Last edited by rkl on 12 October 2023 at 7:07 am UTC

One frustrating thing I find about Steam Next Fest is that it's not obvious that the vast majority of the demos self-destruct after a certain number of days and, even worse, you're not told when a demo will disappear. I personally think Next Fest demos should stay up until at least the game is launched (and maybe even beyond that, possibly with a revision based on the launched full game).

There are far too many demos to try in just one week, so I end up having to quickly trawl through gaming sites (inc. GoL of course) for recommendations, install them all and then work through them. Snag is that even installed demos won't run if they've been pulled from Steam, which is another reason I find the whole experience unsatisfying.

Steam Next Fest is replacement for physical festivals where you get to play the demo only by visiting the booth. So I guess on the positive side we get demos that stay quite a while after the fest. Though still it's annoying as you might have to dig quite deep to know if demo is actually time limited or not.

I went through chunk of recommended demos and few that I spotted myself.

Give these a go

An Arcade Full of Cats

Simple hidden object game with some light puzzles. This time with arcade classics as backdrop.

Ghostrunner 2 First person runner inspired futuristic ninja game. I guess that's Ghostrunner in nutshell. Second one doesn't ease the difficulty (luckily autosaving is quite frequent and loading save is almost instant). As my skills weren't enough to finish the first game, I don't know if the motorcycle segment is new, but it wasn't easier than the regular ninja stuff. Worth trying out if you think games these days are too easy, but stay away if you want something relaxing.

Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley
If Ghostrunner is hard as nails, Snufkin is quite the opposite. It's mix of walking around and meeting interesting characters, light puzzles and stealth. Kids might enjoy it more, but it's not a bad game, so if you're Moomin fan, you might get something out of it. I guess only gripe is that it takes quite a while before there's any mental challenge, large part of the demo is practically a tutorial.

The Talos Principle 2
The first person puzzler is back. I played the tech demo of the original a while back and it seems to be more of the same, but with more plot and variety. I have love and hate relationship with puzzle games and I was bit more often irritated than happy. Few of of the puzzles seemed to require using something that felt bit more like a glitch.

Still lot of people liked the first one and second one seems to be solid.

Maybe not the best in the festival

IDUN

IDUN is bit of tower defense RTS hybrid. It's not horrible, I think I have only few bigger problems with it. Voice acting sounds like actors are bit bored. Also dialogue is not the best out there.

Otherwise there are some potential there. Once you get past tutorial hand holding, there's some learning curve to the game. Enemy waves are huge. Not sure if the difficulty spike is as drastic in the final game, sometimes demos skip ahead a bit in the content, otherwise demo is one big tutorial.

PS: seems to be inspired by Dune, there's no desert though

Hell Throne
Essentially voxel dungeon crawler with rogue lite elements. Controls seem little bit floaty and that affects combat somewhat too. Might something that's possible to get used to, though tight controls and good sound design is quite a must for these kind of games. Now takes a while to adjust to combat and it takes a moment to care about what's going on.

Also while the heavier sound track sounds nice, it feels bit like it's in a wrong game. Graphics are bit too simplistic to sell the hell theme properly.

Though if you stick with it for a while, there's demonic pacts that give penalties and bonuses at the same time and skills are somewhat interesting.

Had time for only FOUNDRY today, though in true Factorio fashion. time flies quite fast (looks like I played it eight hours or so). As it's in first person perspective, better comparison would be Satisfactory, but sadly I haven't played that yet. What seems to be setting FOUNDRY apart is Minecraft like terrain that can be modified as you like. It's missing some quality of life improvements, but it's more less in playable shape. I did fall through the terrain only once and dropped back to the world. Compared to Factorio, 3D has it's problems, though helps with immersion a lot.

Also respawn might be there for a reason. After a while, mining leaves a big hole in the ground and getting out of that will be hard. If you have researched ladders, stairs or jetpack, problem is not that big, but before any of those...

Like Factorio, there's not that much hand holding, but with some knowledge acquired from Factorio likes, you'll be having fun building tileable designs and enlarging the factory to meet the increasing demands of the factory. Worth a try.

Sadly, as the event is getting close to the end, I don't have too much time to explore the huge amount of games.

Did find time to play Robocop: Rogue City and I was positively surprised. It has been quite a while since I last saw Robocop, but it seemed that the game takes the source material somewhat seriously. There's violence (though most games do) and there's satirical tone. For example there's radio broadcast about sleeping pills that you give to your kids to keep them from asking questions.

I roleplayed police a bit and shoot the perpetrators in the leg. I'm not sure that they survive anyway though as leg most of the time is blown to bits. Rocobop is quite durable, though not invulnerable. And even in the demo, criminals get better prepared. Which you can compensate by investing your skill points in combat.

Game follows the trend of throwing lot of side quests at you, but at least they are quite well done. You can help people out and get yourself involved lot of different things. From demo it's hard to tell how repetitive the side quests will get, but will have to wait for the release and see the reviews.

Also already in the demo, there's at least one event that might have consequences based on your actions. You can also build good reputation, which should have impact on things.

There were few bugs. Gun might keep shooting and once I couldn't turn. Those issues weren't there most of the time though.

Demo has been available almost two weeks, so it probably not going to vanish right away.