Sumerian Six gets two things immediately right as far as I’m concerned. One, it lets you punch a bunch of Nazis in a pulpy 1930s setting, and two, it’s the kind of old-school, sight-cone-dodging stealth-tactics game I’m a sucker for. These things don’t come around too often, being a niche within a niche and all, and the genre suffered a major blow last year when Mimimi Games - the studio behind the likes of Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics - announced it was shutting its doors. So you can probably imagine the little happy dance I did when Devolver Digital unveiled Sumerian Six and its paranormally imbued alternate-history WW2 action during Summer Game Fest - even if that excitement was somewhat abated by the knowledge many of the team working on the game will likely no longer have jobs when it’s done.

Sumerian Six, though, gets off to a rip-roaring start as developer Artificer sets the scene with pulp-comic panache. Following The Great War, a military scientist named Alistair Sterling assembles a crack team of "scientist commandos" known as the Enigma Squad to investigate Geistoff, a mysterious substance with seemingly limitless power. After their experiments go devastatingly wrong, the group is disbanded – but former member Hans Kammler betrays them, selling their research to a Third Reich eager to harness Geistoff's power. We join the action in 1944, with WW2 well underway; Sterling's daughter Isabella has gone radio silent while working undercover to infiltrate Kammler's group, and her brother Sid is mounting a rescue mission to find out where she’s gone. Let's go!

If you’re a long-time stealth-tactics fan, playing Sumerian Six should feel just like coming home, given how closely it adheres to the sight-cone dodging, cover seeking, squad juggling template established by the likes of Commandos back in the late 90s. And it’s clearly, wisely, borrowing some of the refinements and ideas from Mimimi’s more modernised take on the genre, too.

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Cosy and punk don't really go together. Cosy is restrained, all nice and warm and snug. Whereas punk is noisy and destructive - angry tunes with aggressive attitudes and anti-establishment ideals. A cosy video game wants to tuck you up nice and tight with a warm drink and tell you everything's going to be okay, but punk games tear that blanket off, pour your drink down the drain, and drag you to a window to look at the darker parts of the world, or what the world might become. Punk wants to make you feel uncomfortable. So when developer Patattie Games calls Wax Heads 'cosy-punk', you might raise an eyebrow.

Take one look at it, though, and you'll see its 'punk' side isn't leaning into the moodier, political meaning of the word. With its comic-book art style and vinyl record shop setting, Wax Heads only takes the stylings and sounds of 'punk', but it definitely fulfils its 'cosy' promise with its retail-sim-themed puzzles.

After a brief introduction chronicles how the mega-popular Becoming Violet band started and broke up in the 1980s, you start Wax Head's Steam Next Fest demo as a new, nameless employee decades later at Repeater Records, a struggling record shop. It's owned by Morgan, the old leading lady of Becoming Violet, and she explains your job as the new hire is to listen to the customers' (often confusing) descriptions of what record they want to buy, before then searching the shop for it. Pick a good suggestion and you get more points, but offer a really bad one and you can lose points. It's not clear what the points are for in the demo, but it seems likely that they might affect the fate of the record shop in the full release.

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You've got to love Steam Next Fest. The video team has already put together a list of its must-play Steam Next Fest demos, but there's just so many new and exciting demos to try that we couldn't fit them all into one listicle! Well, OK, I guess we could have done, but that would have been one very long list video indeed...

On the video player above (or over on our YouTube channel if you'd prefer), you'll be able to watch today's livestream, where I took a look at the upcoming Steam Next Fest demo for Conscript. Published by Team17, Conscript is a survival horror experience set in the trenches of the Battle of Verdun. While this isn't the first time we've seen a horror game set during the First World War, Conscript still feels rather unique, even though its developer Jordan Mochi admits that he has drawn a lot of inspiration from classic horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

While I love a good retro-inspired horror game as much as the next person, one of the first things I noticed when I played the demo was how slow and clunky the combat was. This is certainly in keeping with games like the first Resident Evil but modern gamers may be put off by what appears to be a very sluggish and unforgiving control scheme. In Conscript you can only shoot, reload and melee attack whilst standing still and I found this very frustrating during the opening 30 minutes of the demo when I had to single handedly hold off a German trench invasion with only a rifle and a shovel. This mainly involved kiting enemies around the trenches until I could get in the right position to shoot at them or bonk them on the head, something that ended up feeling a bit like being chased around a Pac-Man maze by a bunch of Stahlhelm-wearing ghosts.

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Dystopika is a city-building toy, but it's also a place. It's a place loading before you drop your first superscraper in or pan the camera to frame the luminous smog of the eternal sunset. Just start the game up and there's a sense of urban life twinkling in the darkness, while the soundtrack moans and warps and chatters to itself. Dystopika is already here. It can feel complete before you've started.

A note at the start of the current Steam demo reveals that this design toy is the work of a single creator, Matt Marshall, and it's been inspired by a year of travelling in Asia and walking huge cities at night. The cities you can make in the game have a definite sci-fi, cyberpunk edge to them, but they wouldn't be too out of place in the work of photographer and game designer Liam Wong, a poet of the late night urban experience.

Everything is wonderfully straightforward. I suggest setting things to random, and then every click adds a skyscraper to the city you're building. You can go in deep and choose between a range of different districts, if you want, but a huge part of the appeal of cyberpunk has always struck me as being a sort of hypermodernism, with buildings of different eras, uses, and cultures smooshed together in the night. "Smooshed together" is an architectural term, incidentally.

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I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

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I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

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Look, I certainly wouldn't call myself a trucking nerd - I'm not even sure I could tell the difference between a carburettor and a carbonara - but I do like to truck. American Truck Simulator has long been my equivalent of one of those mindfulness apps that whisper gently evocative nonsense at you in the dead of night; a world of seductively monotonous rhythms and repetitions set against a soothing soundtrack of engine drones and indicator clicks. And for the eyes, the majesty of nature: lakes, mountains, forests (or at least a decent enough facsimile thereof), sprawling from hard shoulder to sky. So imagine my delight when I stumbled across Star Trucker – all that calm and the most expansive natural vista of all: space!

Ordinarily, these X meets Y comparisons feel a little trite, but in Star Trucker's case – going on the evidence of its Steam Next Fest demo, at least - you're going to struggle to find a more apt description than 'American Truck Simulator in space'. This is big rig cargo hauling on an interstellar scale, a stately back-and-forth between pick-up and drop-off set against an ever-shifting canvas of shimmering nebulae and screen-filling worlds.

For all its fanciful sci-fi flavour, though, Star Trucker plays the whole thing surprisingly straight, grounding its slightly ridiculous high-concept premise in the minutia of the mundane. Which isn't to say it doesn't have bags of personality – this is the far-flung future by way of Route 66, with an ever-present country and western twang on your radio, an incessant southern drawl on your CB, and just enough quaint Americana to give the endless void a distantly familiar sense of place - but its eye is firmly on the road, not on the stars.

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I've wondered for a while how best to explain my time with Flock's demo. The whole experience was a testament to the joy of flight - much as developers Richard Hogg and co intended - and I relished being able to glide effortlessly over the world. It felt free and easy. Yes, the flying in Flock was certainly a joy.

But that is not why I found myself so enamoured by the whole thing. Rather, it was because in a time when the world feels so full of noise and chaos, Flock gave me a sense of calm, away from the pressures and anxieties that come with everyday life.

Allow me to explain further. In Flock, you are essentially a shepherd, but rather than just your traditional land-based sheep, you are collecting a mixed bunch of eclectic creatures for your Aunt Jane. She is a professor of zoology, you see, so by gathering up these creatures you are helping her with her research. That is not to say there aren't also sheep in the game. There are, and these little fellows can help you by eating their way through grassy meadow patches, unearthing peculiarities hidden beneath. Then, once they have eaten a certain amount, they will grow a nice woolly fleece which you can shave off to use for mittens and the like.

Read more

I've always found the concept of immortality to be horrific. How, as the years churn by, new memories and experiences drown the ones which lie at the foundations of your personality, eroding them until a new person inhabits your skin. You are not yourself anymore. Vampire mythology adds a physical stake to this curse - to be a vampire is to be a monster in body and appetite, but whether you become one in spirit is up to you. Do you try to preserve your humanity or indulge in the hedonism your new form makes so easy? Or become a creature trapped between the two? It’s these questions Cabernet, an upcoming narrative RPG, seeks to explore through its protagonist Liza - recently deceased.

While Cabernet may begin with Liza's funeral, she doesn’t truly comprehend her new vampiric nature until witnessing a fellow creature of the night transform into a bat. From here on, the outlook she takes on her undead existence is in your hands, with many of the dialogue choices and actions Liza can take raising either her humanity or nihilism metre. The differentiation between the two is clear: speaking honestly and treating people kindly increases her humanity as you try to preserve the person Liza once was, while revelling in her new powers and treating humans as mere playthings sees Liza embracing the darkest aspects of being a vampire and, in return, raises her nihilism.

The impact of Liza's choice - on both her and those around her - is clear even in the short demo. One vampire asks Liza whether her new status as a vampire has changed her view on the value of human life: is it more important, equal, or less than her own undead? Returning to this vampire later on, she explained the new understanding my answer gave her, no matter whether I had decided to be cruel or kind. I'm yet to discover if this decision has lasting implications, but one I do expect to have them comes when Liza hypnotises a human. Once again, she's given a choice: encourage the man to drink less, start stealing or, what Cabernet makes clear is the worst option, drink more.

Read more

"Baba…help me Baba…I need you Baba…." So says protagonist Zau at the start of Tales of Kenzera, his voice shaking. That's the voice of Abubakar Salim (Assassin's Creed: Origins), who founded Surgent Studios to create this game as he deals with the loss of his own father.

When he says those words, it doesn't feel like he's acting.

It's this raw, personal edge that lifts Tales of Kenzera above the usual influx of indie metroidvanias. The game's reveal at last year's The Game Awards was one of the more memorable moments of the show as Salim shared the poignant story of playing games with his father. It's this personal history with gaming that's inspired Tales of Kenzera and its paralleling father-son relationship. Playing the demo as part of Steam Next Fest is a striking experience.

Read more

I never love defining one game with another, and not least a game like Harold Halibut, which wears its influences openly - stop-motion, Wallace and Gromit-style Aardman animations, mixed with maybe a bit of Wes Anderson and in all seriousness, Postman Pat - but which also so clearly deserves to be seen as its own thing.

In this case though it's hard to ignore: the setup for Harold Halibut is very similar to First Contact, arguably the most interesting mission in Starfield (and one itself heavily influenced by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called The Neutral Zone), where - spoilers! - you discover a seemingly alien ship lurking in a planet's orbit, emitting weird garbled noises over the radio. You soon discover this is actually a ship from Earth - only one that's taken several hundred years to actually get here, leaving it populated by a load of slightly entitled generational descendents of the original explorers, who's only world is the ship's interior, and only understanding of humanity that which they can read about in the selected history books and classes they have on board.

As for Harold Halibut, Harold is a lab assistant-cum-janitor on a similarly stranded spaceship that has instead become an underwater enclave, after arriving at a presumed Goldilocks planet that actually turned out to have no inhabitable land. Having set off in the late '70s and since been totally submerged beneath this new planet's oceans, though, the ship has become a kind of strange, alternate-universe time capsule, filled with fuzzy CRT monitors, intercoms with wobbly sound, and very specific kinds of little England jobsworths. (Much of Harold Halibut, a narrative adventure game about completing largely mundane tasks as a wider, more existential mystery unfolds, feels like a trip to the local Post Office, where you're informed you can't send that letter because you've placed your stamp slightly too close to the label. And that's the wrong kind of envelope.)

Read more

I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

Read more

Look, I certainly wouldn't call myself a trucking nerd - I'm not even sure I could tell the difference between a carburettor and a carbonara - but I do like to truck. American Truck Simulator has long been my equivalent of one of those mindfulness apps that whisper gently evocative nonsense at you in the dead of night; a world of seductively monotonous rhythms and repetitions set against a soothing soundtrack of engine drones and indicator clicks. And for the eyes, the majesty of nature: lakes, mountains, forests (or at least a decent enough facsimile thereof), sprawling from hard shoulder to sky. So imagine my delight when I stumbled across Star Trucker – all that calm and the most expansive natural vista of all: space!

Ordinarily, these X meets Y comparisons feel a little trite, but in Star Trucker's case – going on the evidence of its Steam Next Fest demo, at least - you're going to struggle to find a more apt description than 'American Truck Simulator in space'. This is big rig cargo hauling on an interstellar scale, a stately back-and-forth between pick-up and drop-off set against an ever-shifting canvas of shimmering nebulae and screen-filling worlds.

For all its fanciful sci-fi flavour, though, Star Trucker plays the whole thing surprisingly straight, grounding its slightly ridiculous high-concept premise in the minutia of the mundane. Which isn't to say it doesn't have bags of personality – this is the far-flung future by way of Route 66, with an ever-present country and western twang on your radio, an incessant southern drawl on your CB, and just enough quaint Americana to give the endless void a distantly familiar sense of place - but its eye is firmly on the road, not on the stars.

Read more

I've wondered for a while how best to explain my time with Flock's demo. The whole experience was a testament to the joy of flight - much as developers Richard Hogg and co intended - and I relished being able to glide effortlessly over the world. It felt free and easy. Yes, the flying in Flock was certainly a joy.

But that is not why I found myself so enamoured by the whole thing. Rather, it was because in a time when the world feels so full of noise and chaos, Flock gave me a sense of calm, away from the pressures and anxieties that come with everyday life.

Allow me to explain further. In Flock, you are essentially a shepherd, but rather than just your traditional land-based sheep, you are collecting a mixed bunch of eclectic creatures for your Aunt Jane. She is a professor of zoology, you see, so by gathering up these creatures you are helping her with her research. That is not to say there aren't also sheep in the game. There are, and these little fellows can help you by eating their way through grassy meadow patches, unearthing peculiarities hidden beneath. Then, once they have eaten a certain amount, they will grow a nice woolly fleece which you can shave off to use for mittens and the like.

Read more

I've always found the concept of immortality to be horrific. How, as the years churn by, new memories and experiences drown the ones which lie at the foundations of your personality, eroding them until a new person inhabits your skin. You are not yourself anymore. Vampire mythology adds a physical stake to this curse - to be a vampire is to be a monster in body and appetite, but whether you become one in spirit is up to you. Do you try to preserve your humanity or indulge in the hedonism your new form makes so easy? Or become a creature trapped between the two? It’s these questions Cabernet, an upcoming narrative RPG, seeks to explore through its protagonist Liza - recently deceased.

While Cabernet may begin with Liza's funeral, she doesn’t truly comprehend her new vampiric nature until witnessing a fellow creature of the night transform into a bat. From here on, the outlook she takes on her undead existence is in your hands, with many of the dialogue choices and actions Liza can take raising either her humanity or nihilism metre. The differentiation between the two is clear: speaking honestly and treating people kindly increases her humanity as you try to preserve the person Liza once was, while revelling in her new powers and treating humans as mere playthings sees Liza embracing the darkest aspects of being a vampire and, in return, raises her nihilism.

The impact of Liza's choice - on both her and those around her - is clear even in the short demo. One vampire asks Liza whether her new status as a vampire has changed her view on the value of human life: is it more important, equal, or less than her own undead? Returning to this vampire later on, she explained the new understanding my answer gave her, no matter whether I had decided to be cruel or kind. I'm yet to discover if this decision has lasting implications, but one I do expect to have them comes when Liza hypnotises a human. Once again, she's given a choice: encourage the man to drink less, start stealing or, what Cabernet makes clear is the worst option, drink more.

Read more

"Baba…help me Baba…I need you Baba…." So says protagonist Zau at the start of Tales of Kenzera, his voice shaking. That's the voice of Abubakar Salim (Assassin's Creed: Origins), who founded Surgent Studios to create this game as he deals with the loss of his own father.

When he says those words, it doesn't feel like he's acting.

It's this raw, personal edge that lifts Tales of Kenzera above the usual influx of indie metroidvanias. The game's reveal at last year's The Game Awards was one of the more memorable moments of the show as Salim shared the poignant story of playing games with his father. It's this personal history with gaming that's inspired Tales of Kenzera and its paralleling father-son relationship. Playing the demo as part of Steam Next Fest is a striking experience.

Read more

Puzzles are a tricky thing to perfect in video games. They're present in so many different genres - typically giving us some small goal to work towards between blasting enemies and searching for resources - but are also rarely as engaging as they could be, when not a game's main focus. For more creative solutions (and creative problems) we have to turn to the dedicated puzzle genre, of course. These days, indie games rule the space, but with so many out there in the wild west of digital storefronts what makes a puzzler stand out? Paper Trail answers this with one basic idea: folding paper.

Folding the piece of paper your character is standing on reveals the picture on the underside of that page, which can have keys, doors, and pathways to your destination. Or, the underside can fill in part of a pattern required to magically unlock other areas. You can fold pages from the top, bottom, sides, or four corners. Playing Paper Trail is as straight-forward as that, but simple controls do not equal a simple game.

I'd hazard a guess we've all had to push a heavy object onto a switch to get through a door at some point in our gaming histories, so it's no surprise Paper Trail includes this almost customary puzzle in its demo. However, I've never had to fold my way to the solution before. With this one addition, a mainstay puzzle suddenly requires a whole new way of thinking. What corner do I fold first? In what order? Where should the statue be when I start to fold? Where should I be standing? It doesn't have a wildly complicated solution, but it does feel satisfying when the lightbulb moment happens. This one new layer of thinking is easy enough to comprehend, but tough enough to impress.

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