Excuse me, sorry, pardon me, can I just, thank you, ah, sorry, thanks... Phew, made it. Steam Next Fest is pretty crowded, eh? As if the unholy swarm of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest was not enough, this week the fearful megalords at Valve decided to drop their regular cavalcade of coming-soons onto their megastore. The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about Next Fest, of course, is the overwhelming number of demos that come out during the event. A small herd of video games are standing on my toes as we speak. But that's okay, we are expert curators. Here's a handy list of our nine favourite demos of the lot.

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Excuse me, sorry, pardon me, can I just, thank you, ah, sorry, thanks... Phew, made it. Steam Next Fest is pretty crowded, eh? As if the unholy swarm of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest was not enough, this week the fearful megalords at Valve decided to drop their regular cavalcade of coming-soons onto their megastore. The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about Next Fest, of course, is the overwhelming number of demos that come out during the event. A small herd of video games are standing on my toes as we speak. But that's okay, we are expert curators. Here's a handy list of our nine favourite demos of the lot.

Read more

So what's the twist? Soulslikes, or at least heavily-inspired action games, are everywhere, with FromSoftware's influence creeping ever further. Thankfully, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn developer A44 Games has some clever ideas of its own.

As the name suggests, Flintlock's set in a world powered by gunpowder and pitches its protagonist Nor into a battle against magical, meddling Gods. Split from her party, Nor meets an enchanting fox god named Enki and, in typical fashion, they're forced to team up. Gunpowder and magic make for a novel combination, but it's the Reputation system that's the real killer concept here.

One of the core tenets of the Souls games is death and the player's loss of valuable currency that death brings. It's this that Flintlock plays with in its Reputation system, which I got to test out in a preview build. In simple terms: killing enemies stylishly builds a combo multiplier and bankable experience, while getting hit loses it.

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How do you like your coffee? For those who answer: "served by a barista with ten arms wearing a mask adorned with intense scarlet lipstick", you are in luck. The multi-limbed coffee shop owner of Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is, indeed, a reassuring sight, since they are the ones who sell the player fashionable jackets and trousers to wear while you axe enemy heads to bloody fragments. In this soon-to-sally-forth soulslike from the makers of Ashen, the creature design is a highlight. Whether it's a good souls 'em up remains to be seen. I've only played a couple of hours in the Steam Next Fest demo. But I want to make clear that, among the reservations I've collected on my murder jaunt, nothing will diminish the espresso-pumping hand-haver of the game's first café.

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A short way into an extended hands-off presentation of Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, and my main thought was: this feels a lot like a mix between God of War and Souls games, at which point creative director Simon Dasan described it as… more or less exactly that. "A massive thing for us was to try and take that real Soulslike field of action, and then make it more accessible, kind of bring it all together to the masses," he explained, to the sound of main character Nor slashing theatrically through an enemy grunt.

Flintlock, the next game from the New Zealand studio behind Ashen, is breezy and fluid, emphasising movement and offence where typical Souslikes might nudge you towards a more staid defensive dance. But the switch to proactivity is countered by the usual trappings of the genre: a semi-linear world, small numbers of enemies, and combat that, while flashier and faster, still seems to reward precision above all.

Arriving in a crumbling castle courtyard around a third of the way into the game, you find the area subjugated by a god. Battling through some initially typical Soulslike enemies - think zombified dudes in armour - Dasan and co demonstrated a few variations on how exactly that combat works.

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