Sorry, sorry, sorry, I can only, thank you, oh, sorry, thank you… Phew, I did it. Steam Next Fest is pretty crowded, huh? As if the ungodly barrage of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest weren’t enough, this week the dreaded megalords at Valve decided to unleash their regular cavalcade of early releases into their megastore. Of course, the beautiful (and scary) thing about Next Fest is the sheer amount of demos that come out during the event. A small herd of video games is at my feet as we speak. But that’s okay, we’re expert curators. Here’s a handy list of our nine favorite demos.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Watch on YouTube
In this limited tactical game from Suspicious Developments, a magical SWAT team breaks out and shoots the bad guys. At the end of the fight in this funny tactical move, you’ll be rewarded with a score for speed, efficiency and the number of “defenestrations”, which should tell you everything you need to know. The healer on your team is a necromancer, so in order to properly heal her squadmates, she may need to kill them first. “It’s going to take some serious incantation to stop me from diving into the full game when it comes out,” said Nic while trying out a demo for the groundbreaking Into The Breach. He won’t have to wait too long – it’s out on August 22nd.
Download the Defenestration Demo on Steam.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
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The soul that summons all other pistol-like souls at dawn (I stole this joke from one of our commenters who may claim satisfaction). Flintlock will see you exploring a world where twisted gods have been unleashed and must be taken down. From the opening chapters, you can triple jump and curse the boy with a magical fennec fox sidekick. The demo is pretty buggy (not reassuring for a game due out next month), but when it works, it’s stylish, quirky, clever and inventive. The creature design is a special treat.
Dust your musket via the Steam page.
Disco Samurai
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Sekiro rhythm action where you tap your way through neon lit dioramas to the beat of techno. It’s hard, Nic says. But it also doesn’t directly punish you for missing a beat like something like Thumper. You just don’t attack here. It’s trickier when you parry, dodge, stun, and weaponize your way to bloody victory from a 4/4. You can also kick vases for extra damage, smashing priceless heirlooms into dirty faces. To paraphrase a seminal work by 1990s Italian Eurodance group Corona: This is the rhythm of fight, fight, oh yeah.
Dance and Dice in the Steam demo.
Spilled!
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Well, oil be it. Spilled (I’m not writing that scream, it’s quiet time) is one of those cozy games about relaxing and satisfying cleaning. You sail in a pleasant boat and filter black pools of garbage from the water. You’ll also be hauling plastic scraps back to your recycling headquarters and flushing the noxious sludge from the rocks above the waterline with a large hose. Yes, you can upgrade your boat to make your job easier, but “the pleasure is more in the cleaning itself than the rewards,” says James, who enjoyed his boat vacation.
De-gunk demo on Steam.
Sorry, we are closed
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I heard you like the Silent Hill games. I heard you like Paradise Killer. I hear you like the hottest pinks on the face of the earth. I’ve heard that you like to switch to a first-person perspective when you shoot. I heard you like the Persona games. I heard you don’t have enough bullets. I hear you like the London Underground, but you’re screwed. I hear you like to run from room to room while being chased by a mutilated creature of unknown origin, which let’s face it, is probably a psychological manifestation of your sadness or guilt or shame or repressed sexual desire, and also moans and swings around a piece of sharp rusty metal kill you maybe metaphorically, but also quite literally. I hear you like it all.
Shout the Dream on Steam.
Tiny Glade
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In Tiny Glade, you start with a grassy piece of landscape and end with a cozy castle. Its simple diorama construction lies somewhere between the zen rearrangement of Quiet As A Stone and the pleasant seaside brick Townscaper. Many of the hardest decisions are made for you as you haul stone walls and wooden fences around with sigh-inducing ease, the game inserting piles of wood, pitchforks and even bird nests into the nooks and crannies of your bucolic fortress. “Managed to quiet my brain for a few precious hours,” Kiera said as she made the witch’s house of her dreams.
Get enchanted in the Steam demo.
Enotria: The Last Song
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Two souls on the list? Don’t be absurd. We don’t need TWO souls alike. Oh, this is Italian? And they all wear a ghostly mask that determines their purpose in life? Well, I mean why not. Si, please. The fight looks massive, with lots of slow charged attacks, I bet they will have to be extremely well timed. And apparently there is no lock button. That alone will cause the souls of the sick to pour out the window. I’ll let Edwin walk you through the finer details. I think he is part Italian. There is always talk of Rococo this and Baroque that. I can’t get this guy to stop.
Demo on Steam.
Faceminer
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What is the face price? 43 dollars. That’s our Ed’s guess based on the time he’s spent playing Faceminer, a dystopian idle game about greedily hoarding human portraits. You sit on an old PC with a gray interface from years gone by and search datasets and directories clicking on as many faces as you can. You are getting emails about it. Management seems to require more faces. Install more RAM and autoclick software to increase your facerate. Buy some solar panels to ease your hunger for looking like every person they’ve ever photographed. where does it end When will you be satisfied? I don’t know. This is a demo only. It’s all just demos, mate.
This one is also on Steam.
Lost and Found Co
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You are a duck. Sorry, you were duck. Until some elegant goddess turned you into a human because she needs an intern for her “magic startup dedicated to finding lost things.” Let the hidden object hunt begin as you click and maybe make your way through scenes of packed tea rooms, crowded cabaret clubs and flowery country scenes. Graham is the resident Hidden Objectifier at RPS. “I appreciate that there’s also a story that pulls you through each scene,” he said when he first noticed it on the Wholesome Direct, eyes full of wild and slightly worried concentration. He’s probably looking for a lost cat.
Find the demo hiding on Steam.
Disclosure: Suspicious Developments, the creators of Tactical Breach Wizards, is led by Tom Francis, who used to write for RPS and knows all our darkest desires.