Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we've spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn't that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder - why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? - but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there's a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.

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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.

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Disco Samurai is a game that’s so difficult I’d have given up playing sooner if it didn’t contain so many of my absolute favourite action game things. Tense, decisive duels. Violence that’s both brutal and a little silly. Scalpel-sharp parry n' strike back-and-forths. Short stages that dole out chunky progression hits of dopamine, as quickly as they wrest those hits away from you with another humbling beatdown. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to do one thing - rhythm combat - and does it brilliantly. It's got teeth, but it's also got groove.

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Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we've spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn't that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder - why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? - but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there's a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.

Read more

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

Disco Samurai is a game that’s so difficult I’d have given up playing sooner if it didn’t contain so many of my absolute favourite action game things. Tense, decisive duels. Violence that’s both brutal and a little silly. Scalpel-sharp parry n' strike back-and-forths. Short stages that dole out chunky progression hits of dopamine, as quickly as they wrest those hits away from you with another humbling beatdown. Perhaps most importantly, it aims to do one thing - rhythm combat - and does it brilliantly. It's got teeth, but it's also got groove.

Read more

Stare into an abyss for long enough and, as Nietzsche wrote, a mostly naked man will wobble out of the abyss and try to murder you with a mattock. Inasmuch as can be told in the absence of dialogue or a text preamble, the naked man wants to murder you because you, and not he, are in possession of a hat. The hat makes you look like an eraser pencil from Forbidden Planet. It's the kind of headgear worn by the kind of criminal Batman's too grown-up to fight anymore. But it has, nonetheless, roused in this under-dressed stranger a sense of Dionysian frenzy. He will do anything for that hat - hewing your arms off, ripping your intestines out, tearing the skin from your ribcage. And you, in turn, will do anything to rob him of that mattock, because by the gods, it looks a lot more dangerous than the candlestick you're trying to fend him off with.

There are many such lost souls in the bleak, midnight world of the Half Sword demo - all lurking near candle-lit piles of randomly spawned hammers, stools, barrels, axes and lengths of wood, all subject to unforgivably authentic physics and cursor-based attacks that conspire to transform every scuffle into a Monty Python blooper reel.

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In my eternal quest to describe games concisely enough that you don’t feel robbed of time you could have just watched a trailer with, I am compelled to use many of the same words and word combinations ad nauseam. So, when a game like horror tower defence Bella Wants Blood comes along and uses some odd nouns, I get all excited. Here, that’s because I get to recklessly spaff out terms like ‘Blood Gutters’, ‘The Rattler’, and your friend and mine, ‘The Stabber’. Barely an atom quivers in Bella Wants Blood that hasn’t been stylised or made odd and alluring in some way.

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I’ve been scouring Steam Next Fest demos specifically for something laid back, and Spilled! – despite sounding like the title of a musical about upturned milk – has delivered nicely. It’s a light and breezy ocean cleanup game that has you sailing a cute lil’ boat around polluted seas, cleansing oil patches and scooping up plastic bottles. Even if it doesn’t have the every-last-speck detailing of PowerWash Simulator or Viscera Cleanup Detail, it satisfies in very similar ways, and I would very much like to get back out on the water whenever the full game is complete.

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Back in the day I used to be one of those Counter Strike players who'd hop into a custom aim-training 'environment'. I'd spend a good ten minutes or so darting my eyes between blobs or skittish enemy models then whipping my wrist to blast them with an AK.

Glyphica reminds me of those heady days. It's a roguelite horde survival game where you've got to protect your central pewpew from an onslaught of words. I think it's the perfect warm up for someone who's about to do a big essay or maybe defend Dark Souls 2 in an errant comments section. It's fun!

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Hollywood Animal is a management sim about turning a bankrupt movie studio into a money printing machine, set in Hollywood’s golden age. While a Frostpunk 2 or Manor Lords might have you grapple with the elements, here it’s all about balancing a fickle audience and Tinseltown’s seedy underbelly. Maybe making some worthwhile art, too? Sorry, did I say ‘worthwhile art’? I meant to say “lots of money.” Let’s get clicking!

First up, I need to name my studio (I settle on Horace's Revenge) as well as my crack new team of business bastards. There’s my chief legal officer, Jebediah End. My CCO, Anne Egg, and CFO, Rummy McLastdrink. He doesn’t have a sauce problem, because obviously I wouldn’t put him in charge of money if he did. In the wreckage of the studio, we find an unedited film reel hidden in the waffles n’ cocaine cupboard. It’s a noir thriller named ‘Messenger Of Death’. Whatever influential critic is currently directing this era’s discourse has chosen to categorise each film as genre percentages (‘60% detective/40% thriller’), and setting (‘modern American city’.) Let’s just hope those pigs in the stands recognise a solid gold picture when they see one!

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This week we finally got our raging bear gauntlets on Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree, an even dingier and danker edition of 2022's best and dankest open worlder, but perhaps you'd rather play a Soulslike with a Florentine flounce and the warmth of a Mediterranean sunset on its brow. A brighter, stagier variety of action-role-playing, which deepens the connection between Italian folklore and Soulsliking established by last year's Lies Of P. Well then: cast aside those ursine mitts, slip on a pair of immaculate white theatre gloves and get your thumbs into Enotria: The Last Song, which has a demo on Steam.

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In Sorry We're Closed, an axe-murdering entrepreneur called Jenny is described in newspaper clippings as both a serial embezzler and as the city's "wealthiest bachelorette". Aside from being a dry reflection of tabloid reporting on women who commit crimes (bad woman! sexy, bad woman!) this is also the kind of incidental character-building you can expect in this perky, retro-styled survival horror. It plays like Silent Hill charged with the hot pink body horror of Porpentine interactive fiction. And judging by my hour of unsettled strolling through the decrepit tube station of the game's demo, it's a powerful combo.

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Silkbulb Test is a game in which, going by its demo, you are strapped to a chair and made to answer questions projected onto a screen. You answer the questions by looking ponderously down and pressing the big red and yellow buttons on the desk in front of you. The questions begin with relatively innocuous, CAPTCHA-style inquiries, such as "is this a door?" accompanied by a picture of a face. A few minutes later, there's stuff like "Are you alone?" and "Is it safe to be alone?" and "You are alone" and yep, time to smash Pause or better, throw the Steam Deck behind the sofa and go stare out the window for a while.

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Roguelike FPS Wild Bastards is the space western follow up to 2019’s Void Bastards. It takes some of that game’s ideas, mainly those related to shooty and looty, and reforms them into a largely different can o’ campfire beans. This time, it’s less focused on exploration, more on individual, tense shoot-outs. You collect a cast of weirdos, each with different guns and abilities, and form the deadliest dang posse this side of the last tactical overworld map you descision'd your way through. I like what I've played so far, although I think a lot is going to hinge on how much evolution the mid-game offers. As always, here’s a Steam demo, if you want to be all contrary and 'form your own opinions'. Pah.

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I was a diehard WipeOut player as a kid. Seriously, me and the boys used to roam the streets of Bradford looking for F-Zero players to bully, at least till the RollCagers rocked up and stole our lunch money. Mind you, I think I was probably less interested in WipeoUt's racing than its trackside landscapes, which remain exquisite decades on - all those sweeping album-cover facades with their animate fixtures that thickened and solidified into full-blown peripheral cities as the series progressed.

I am similarly hooked by the worlds of Ghosts Ehf's Phantom Spark, which are a million lightyears from WiPeout in terms of their influences and atmosphere, much as the underlying hover-jockeying is a million lightyears away from WipeouT in terms of its gentleness and lack of combative elements. But these spaces are just as mesmerising to fly through and think about when not focussed on finding the perfect line through the next corner, or avoiding a patch of grass. Small wonder, given that the game's art director is Joost Eggermont, whose streaking astral contraptions and "small interactive moments" I've long admired, but never managed to write about until now.

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Between this, my supporter post later, and the fact I decided to watch Office Space again this week, I’d like to make it clear to any colleagues or management reading that I value and love them all dearly, and am 110% committed to the eternal grind machine of covering videogames online. Workday malaise is universal, however, whether or not you’re lucky enough to enjoy your job as much as I do. Enter Office Fight, a stylish physics action game where you, a ghost, posess office equipment to cause as much physics-based chaos as possible. The PR did some Office Space jokes in the email, so I pretty much had to cover it. At least once I realised what they were doing, after initially just thinking they were being a massive donkey.

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KILL KNIGHT, the silly-named twin stick action game you may have caught at similarly silly-named event The Triple-I Initiative in April, is joining this year's Steam next fest with a demo ahead of its expected release date later this year. I’ve played it, and I feel must apologise, Mr. Knight. I still think it's a silly name, but with frantic flowing action this immediately gratifying, you can call yourself whatever your killy little heart so desires. For this knight is not like other knights: this is a knight who kills. Wait, they all do that? Oh. Well, this one has four guns. Suck it, literally every other knight.

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The demo for puzzle game Schim, in which you play as a boy and his frog that only exists in the shadows, is out now on Steam. I’ve given it a whirl, and its pretty froggin’ delightful. The game has you progress through different scenes set in a chill, colorful townscape. You can switch at any time between boy and frog. The boy can go anywhere, but is frequently blocked by environmental puzzles. The frog has the means to solve such puzzles, by hopping between shadows naturally cast by the environment. They act like little inky puddles, and simply jumping from one to the other is a rare joy.

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Readers, I appear to have locked myself in self-referential language matrix trying to describe the feeling of playing top-down action shooter Kickback. You can only move through the recoil from shooting, you see, which means facing the opposite way to where you want to go. It’s both very counterintuitive and very fun. To call something both counterintuitive and fun seems, well, counterintuitive. But also: fun. Which, as a concept is very fun to think about. But, also, quite counterintuitive. Writing such a incredibly redundant paragraph is quite fun, even though I’m just repeating myself. Counterintuitive, right? I’m going to try to escape this paragraph now. If I manage it, I’ll see you in the one below.

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