Hi! I'm doing a series of STREAMS on TWITCH where I play as MANY STEAM NEXT FEST DEMOS AS POSSIBLE to find the ones that are the most interesting, fun or just kinda weird! You can watch that on my twitch channel if you want (Link here, i'll be playing more today)[https://www.twitch.tv/junipertheory], but if you don't have time to explore yourself, I'm also doing a short review of EVERY DEMO I PLAYED on cohost each day!
I'll be talking about what the demo is, if it's interesting, and what sort of person might want to check it out, so read through and see if any appeal to you specifically! Note that I don't know much context for a lot of these; some i've heard of, but most are just random demos that seemed interesting.
Yesterday's games were Rabbit and Steel, Another Crab's Treasure, Sentry, Turnip Boy Robs A Bank, Mosa Lina, Exhausted Man, Cursorblade, Wizordum, Cobalt Core, Yolk Hero: A Long Tomago, Duelists of Eden, Asura the Striker, and Snap the Sentinel.
So without further ado, lets get started with the NO CONTEST BEST GAME I PLAYED:
Rabbit and Steel
This game had a lofty, strange goal: to take the fun of doing MMO raiding and condense it into bite sized pieces, instead of a 200 hour game it becomes a simple game you can pick up with your friends while losing none of the depth or style. I didn't think it could deliver... and yet, It does. Oh my GOD is this ever fun with a few friends. It really does capture the frantic-yet-planned feeling of a good MMO raid without requiring everyone to spend time grinding beforehand, and it's cute as fuck to boot.
This isn't gonna be everyone's cup of tea, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who can't stand bullet dodging and it's way less interesting as a solo experience. However, if you think this might at all appeal to you, I cannot recommend you try this enough. It rules. Get a group of friends together and learn the ways of bun! (Hell, DM me and i'll play WITH you this game RULES)
Another Crab's Treasure
Another game I'd recommend everyone consider, this is the second game by Aggro Crab, the team behind Going Under. It's a shockingly expansive souls-like where you play as a tiny crab at the bottom of the ocean. Instead of a shield you find different objects to use as a shell, instead of ichor you find healing kelp, and instead of souls you have... microplastics, because the game has the same "very dark but still comedic" sense of humor as going under. Anyone who likes a difficult soulslike (or just an interesting, colorful world to explore) should check this one out, although I wouldn't recommend mouse and keyboard. Get out the controller for this one.
SENTRY
The pitch here is on this is an FPS tower defense game, a genre we've seen before, but with a heavier focus on the FPS part, actually requiring you to do some fast paced hardcore gunning down of enemies instead of solely relying on your turrets. It's better then I expected; gunplay feels weighty and good, but the game suffers a lot more from being a demo then the rest of the list. Figuring out how the creatures would path was way harder then it should be for a tower defense game like this, and the demo has a lack of content that I really felt. Check it out if you like tower defense games and want a heavier FPS styling to them, but i'm gonna wait to see what the full game offers before betting on this one.
Turnip Boy Robs A Bank
I originally thought this was going to be a roguelike, which worried me because the humor/quests of the original Turnip Boy were my favorite part of the game. I was delighted then to find something much, much more interesting; the game is still an adventure-quest based thing, but where each run into the bank only allowing for 3 minutes of exploring before you're kicked out of the bank. Dialog, discussions, and boss fights all don't take up time, but exploring does, so you're forced to balance your time wisely while trying to get rish. The sense of humor is gonna grate on some people (buttcoin? really?) but the sight of turnip boy literally turning veggies upside down to shake cash out of them is still fucking hilarious to me every time. Loved this one. Anyone who likes the "try and try again" nature of roguelikes but wishes they could actually try to explore a world and learn things should check this out, or if you're dying for another fix after playing Minit all those years ago.
Mosa Lina
Mosa lina is a puzzle platformer where... honestly the game description describes itself better then I could. "This game is a response to the current trend of Immersive Sim design, where every ability is perfectly suited to solve a specific problem in the game. In order to counter this "Lock and Key" philosophy, Mosa Lina is aggressively random. There are no safeguards here. You might get the same item ten times in a row. You might beat the game without seeing it at all. Every playthrough contains only a fraction of the total levels. They're also selected randomly. Nobody knows what'll happen."
It's fascinating to play a game so totally dedicated to not caring about things like approachability or playability. However, this does make a game that isn't... very playable. For some people, this will be a godsend that's their GOTY; for most, it'll be an unplayable but interesting toy. Try the demo out and you'll figure out very quickly which camp you're in.
Exhausted Man
This game rests in the exact niche between Octodad/Surgeon Simulator's "haha look at how Hard it is to do Basic Task when you have to control stuff so badly" gimmick and katamari damacy's "purposefully weird in style but charming nonetheless + a good dose of We Refuse To Localize This In A Way That Will Make It Seem Normal To You American Weirdos". Much more of a full, complex game then you'd expect, with lots of little systems and strange additions that allow you to accidentally make things way more difficult for yourself. If you can stand a bit of bad translation and a lot of silliness, this Chinese indie game is a GREAT demo to check out (especially if you're a streamer, lol)
Cursorblade
A lot of the above games have been hard to fully describe what they are; not this one. It's a bullet hell where your character is your mouse cursor. That's it. Swip over guys to damage them, avoid bullets with your mouse to not get hurt, get upgraded in a standard survivors-like rougelike fashion. It all works real well, although there's not much to the game in general; good for some mindless fun, but not much more.
Wizordum
I was really hoping this game would be more then just a really old school boomer shooter with a fantasy theming and some cute pixel art.
It is not.
For some people, that's more then enough, but for me I need more then just "it's like doom but with fireballs" to get me to really get into a game. Stopped playing this one after i got stuck behind a chest, but you might like it more if you really like doom and wish it had a fantasy reskin, I guess.
Cobalt Core
If there's one genre I have played way, way too much of, it's deckbuilder roguelikes. So when I say "this one seems kinda special", that's high fuckin praise, haha. The story promises to use the roguelike structure to it's advantage by actually having it be about time loops, the pixel art is adorable (and i love these cute little furries), and the base system of having to dodge out of the way of missile attacks added a fantastic twist to the standard deckbuilder gameplay. I did one run of this and was already so, so hyped for more. Best of all it's by the devs of Sunshine Heavy Industries, which I haven't played but have only heard good things about, so they've got a solid track record of kickass space games. If you like deckbuilder roguelikes, EXTREMELY check this one out.
Duelists of Eden
God i'm so torn on this one. I played tons of the original One Step From Eden and loved it a lot, and this game manages to turn it into a compelling pvp fighting game. It's fast paced but not too fast paced to understand, and every moment I spent with it was a blast of multiplayer action.
Unfortunately it's also maybe the whitest fighting game i've ever played? There's 80 different palette swaps in this game for the characters and of those exactly one of them looks even vaguely like a PoC. I don't know how a game puts in multiple references to konosuba before adding more then one palette with a skin tone beyond "barely tanned". Or well, I know exactly how it happens, and it just pisses me off. Idk. I'm gonna keep following this and hoping things get better, but i'll focus my time on Rabbit and Steel, honestly.
Yolk Heroes: A Long Tamago
The fun part of playing demos sight unseen is that sometimes you have no idea what you're gonna play when you boot it up, and that's how I didn't know this game was A Tamagotchi.
Anyways, it's a tamagotchi. It does some cool stuff with RPG mechanics and has a fun story element, but It's A Tamagotchi. Things happen at a glacial pace, but that's part of the point, it's designed to be checked a few times a day not constantly. You'll like this if having a retro digital pet game interests you.
閃攻機人アスラ - ASURA THE STRIKER
On the subject of "It's just X", did someone order Space Harrier? Cause this game is just space harrier. That's all it is. The assets/lighting are a bit off in that "cheaper unity project" way, and the gameplay feels a bit off at times, but the soundtrack is fuckin BANGIN. It's so good it makes me wonder if it was originally for a different project or something, how'd a game like this get a soundtrack this fantastic?? I don't know, but i'm here for it. Either way, this is mostly worth checking out if you're the sort of person who goes "Oh Shit Yeah I Love Space Harrier" and if you're that sort of retro gamer trash trans girl ummm call me 😳
Snap the Sentinel
As a fan of both kirby and sonic the hedgehog, I'm a firm believer that sometimes quantity IS quality. Sometimes putting more and more weird, awesome shit into your game DOES make up for the jankiness, and boy does this gzdoom game feel like it's made by people who get that. There's so many gun powerups just in the demo, and tons of weird stuff to shoot. You interact with everything by kicking it for some reason. The art is fantastic, a mix of pixel art and cute low-poly models. The music is bangin. It's weird, it's buggy as hell, it doesn't quite work, and I absolutely love it, it feels like something i should have seen at SAGE not on steam next fest. I can't really recommend this to anyone who isn't down to play a strange GZDOOM wad, but if you can stomach that, it's got a lot of weird fun shit in it