ayyyy yooooo!!!!!!!!!! steam next fest is up!!!!!!!!!
do they do these 2x a year? i dont remember but i thought it was a summer thing.
here’s what i tried:
Mama’s Sleeping Angels
weasily my favorite demo i played. i’ve watched the trailer a bunch of times the past few weeks, and i finally got my hands on it.
i guess you could describe it as a multiplayer item-hunting game that takes place in dreams, simultaneously painful and joyful. in the developer’s words, the game is extremely personal, and i think that actually serves the gameplay. there are so many details that feel like childhood memories, inside jokes, deep phobias, that i’m not privy to. it’s just a game where you need to collect items, but the amount of mental translation to make sense of the dream makes the game feel so dense. i collected a globe that cursed me with an immortal stalker in the form of a guy in a white T shirt and mosaic-ed out face. a ceramic cat tchotchke that made me keep pissing myself. idk man. it makes me so uncomfortable and it is such a beautiful work of art.
i happened to get another player in my 2nd session and we had a good run. we couldn’t chat, and i got the impression they were bewildered with our goals too, so we stood around trading kisses for a minute. then i got killed by a sentient car and she had to finish the level without me! (ghosts can’t pick up curses. of course. you moron)
Withering Realms
hell yea!! wither me daddy!!!!!!!! i watched Jerma play Withering Rooms but never got around to it myself. i like the setting for this one a lot tho!
once you make it out of the first area, it becomes this sort of semi-randomized world with different encounters and gear drops (i think.) every item i found had an interesting hook to it, like the bayonet rifle (poke, bleed, and boolet) and the severed witch hand (slap, spam ghost hands) and the concept of applying a modifier card to each weapon? hoo boy. i beat the final boss by adding an MP cost reducer to my ghost hand spam, and adding more poise damage to my lead pipe. theory crafting baybeee
Hark the Ghoul
another King’s Field/Shadow Tower-like??? after being kinda disappointed with games like these, i think Hark the Ghoul is on the right track.
my problem with Lunacid is that it looks at King’s Field and says, “ok got it, a bunch of dark fantasy bullshit. i can do that.” but with Hark the Ghoul, i got the impression it takes its own setting seriously, and that helps a lot. we got some bugs! and other kinds of guys!!
i’m already sold on this one, so i stopped when i got to the first checkpoint
in character creation, the spell i picked was a short dash moved that said it “led to the demise of many of its clumsy users.” oh word? couldn’t be me. i’ve played dishonored and i can use a short dash spell
anyways here’s me falling to my death using the short dash spell
Cargo Hunters
i opened the inventory, alt-f4’d, and uninstalled immediately
woke up the next day, decided that was silly of me! reinstalled, did not have fun shooting guys. uninstalled
Rig Riot
tricky to get used to at first.really fun once i got into it, tho the difficulty curve was rough!
i always had a hard time getting into AC because i want to build mechs, but getting parts was so slow. in Rig Riot you get weapons pretty fast, but you have to beat the level to keep them for the next run. problem solved!!!!
the shoulder mounted sniper cannon…… my berloved
Nox Mortalis
i’m not sure? it kinda feels like a cod zombies map or a roblox game… where youre meant to figure out the “solution” to gaining power in this small open space. if it’s a short game i feel like “routing” would be the main draw. i think i might buy it when it comes out just to see where it goes.
the vibes are really good tho. the music really lifts it up to this “abandoned everquest spinoff” feeling
Boost Vector EX
faste… i always liked the idea of a racing game that primarily uses mouselook as steering. i had a pretty decent time learning the controls for this in tutorial, but then got destroyed in a race against cpu.
it’s a good game, but it’s more about timing to hit boost pads and item picking up power for your boost. also the screen effects are insanely cool to look at, but it’s too disorienting for me to play! i hope it takes off bc it has buckets of sauce, but it’s not for me
Map Map
so it’s a level based hmmmm Spatial Puzzle game. you have to mark spots on your map using the shape of the island and counting your steps. pretty fun! not sure if i’d play more, but i’m just starving for games ABOUT maps.
i got a perfect grade for the one in this clip
Audio Mech
it’s REALLY cool how this just works. i played some songs i had on my desktop and the game just responds to it without a hitch.
the only thing is… the gameplay itself isn’t very fun. it doesn’t really seem to matter what the music playing is. rather than a music game, it’s just a wave-based arcade game that happens to thump in the rhythm to whatever you have playing. not my kinda game. oh well!
Voidling Bound
bro… is this SKYLANDERS? this isn’t what i expected when it said monster taming game. the thing looks pretty and the sounds are good, but it’s just a lil bit boring 🙁 i’d understand if it were multiplayer so u can show off how u customized the DNA of your lil guy.. but it’s single player? idk, it’s fine if it’s geared towards kids tho
Witchspire
man. 5 minutes into demo and i’m already chopping trees.
-_- i wanted to ride a flying broomstick.
no thx
Aardenfall
i like this one! it has all the elements it needs to be a great open world adventure rpg. i accidentally did a sequence break by riding a bubble up to a cliff and running past the passage the giant fish was blocking. suddenly it fades to black and a commercial plays hahahaa
it’s clearly riffing on elder scrolls, and now after playing the demo i can tell all the groundwork is solid! the spread of skills looks a lot like an elder scrolls game, but once you get into it, it does have its own identity. the fighting is actually fun. u can brew potions, the drink them or THROW them!! the creature enemies have projectile attacks that…. gasp… take brain power to avoid. seems like spells are locked to staffs!
there was just enough lore in the demo to get me curious, and it seems like it might even be just a bit linear which i think is nice. i’m looking forward to trying it when it comes out
well those were the most interesting ones i played! i present an awkward, poorly thought-out handshake to Kriegsspiel for having these massive flat battlemaps for some Prussian engagement
and a loving, knowing, twinkling-eye smile to Cyclopean II. even tho the mouse wasn’t really working and i couldn’t play, i still think it will be coole bc i liked Islands of the Caliph a lot.
cheers, ψ / colin
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