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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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.

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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

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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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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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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