Excuse me, sorry, excuse me, can I just, thank you, ah, sorry, thank you… Whew, it worked. Steam Next Fest is pretty busy, huh? As if the unholy swarm of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest weren’t enough, the anxious megalords at Valve decided to drop their regular cavalcade of coming-soons onto their megastore this week. Of course, the great (and terrifying) thing about Next Fest is the overwhelming number of demos released during the event. As we speak, a small herd of video games is standing on my toes. But that’s okay, we are expert curators. Here’s a handy list of our nine favorite demos from the lot.
Tactical Breach Wizards
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A magical SWAT team bursts through doors and shoots bad people in this limited tactics game from Suspicious Developments. At the end of a battle in this fun tactician turn-taker you’ll get a score for speed, efficiency and number of “defenestrations”, which should tell you everything you need to know. The healer on your team is a necromancer, so in order to properly heal her teammates, she may need to kill them first. “It would take some serious hex to keep me from diving into the full game when it comes out,” Nic said when trying out the demo for the window-breaking Into The Breach-esque. He doesn’t have to wait too long; it will be released on August 22.
Download the defenestrating demo on Steam.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
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A soul-like person who challenges all other soul-like people at dawn with pistols (I stole this joke from one of our commenters, who might demand satisfaction). Flintlock lets you explore a world where twisted gods have been unleashed and must be eliminated. You can triple jump from the early chapters and curse guys with a magical fennec fox sidekick. The demo is quite buggy (not reassuring for a game coming out next month), but when it works it’s stylish, curious, smart and inventive. The creature design is a special treat.
Powder your musket via the Steam page.
Disco samurai
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A rhythm action Sekiro where you make your way through neon-lit dioramas by tapping to the beat of the techno beat. It’s difficult stuff, says Nic. But it also doesn’t outright punish you if you miss a beat, like something like Thumper might. You just don’t attack here. Things get more complicated as you battle your way to bloody victory with parries, dodges, stuns and guns. You can also kick vases around for extra damage, destroying the priceless heirlooms in goon faces. To paraphrase the groundbreaking work of the Italian Eurodance group Corona from the 1990s: This is the rhythm of the fight, the fight, oh yes.
Dance and roll the dice in the demo on Steam.
Spilled!
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Well, oil be damned. Spill (I’m not writing that exclamation, it’s quiet time) is one of those fun games about relaxing and a satisfying clean-up. You float around in a pleasant boat and filter black puddles of gunk from the water. You also float plastic wreckage back to your recycling headquarters and wash noxious stuff off the rocks above the waterline with a big ugly hose. Yes, you can upgrade your boat to make the job easier, but “the fun is in the cleaning itself, not in the rewards,” says James, who enjoyed his boating holiday at sea.
De-gunk the demo on Steam.
sorry we are closed
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I heard you like Silent Hill games. I heard you like Paradise Killer. I heard you like the hottest pinks in the world. I heard that you like to switch to a first-person perspective for shooting. I heard you like Persona games. I heard you like not having enough bullets. I heard you love the London Underground, but ruined. I’ve heard that you like to run from room to room while being chased by a mutilated creature of unknown origin, let’s face it it’s probably a psychological manifestation of your sadness, guilt or shame or repressed sexual desires and also moans and sways around a piece of sharp rusty metal to kill you perhaps metaphorically but also literally. I heard you liked all that.
Scream through the dream on Steam.
Little Glade
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In Tiny Glade you start with a grassy field and end with a cozy castle. The simple diorama building lies somewhere between the Zen-like rearrangement of Quiet As A Stone and the pleasant coastal brickwork of Townscaper. Many of the toughest decisions are made for you as you drag around stone walls and wooden fences with sighing ease, while the game sticks piles of wood, pitchforks and even bird nests into the nooks and crannies of your rural fortress. “I managed to quiet my brain for a few precious hours,” Kiera said as she created the witch house of her dreams.
Enchant yourself in the demo on Steam.
Enotria: The last song
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Two soulslikes on the list? Don’t be absurd. We don’t need TWO soulslikes. Oh, this one is Italian? And does everyone wear a creepy mask that defines his or her purpose for their entire life? Well, why not, I guess. Si, per favorite. The combat looks solid, with lots of slow, charged attacks that I think will have to be extremely well timed. And there’s no block button, I’m told. That alone has the sick souls lining up to drool through the window. I’ll let Edwin guide you through the finer details. He’s part Italian, I think. Always talking about rococo this and baroque that. I can’t get the man to stop.
The demo is on Steam.
Faceminer
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What is the price of a face? $43. That’s our Ed’s guess, based on the time he spent playing Faceminer, the dystopian idle game about avidly hoarding human portraits. You sit on an old PC with the gray interface of yesteryear and click on as many faces as possible by browsing through datasets and folders. You get emails about it. Management needs more faces, it seems. Install more RAM and auto-click software to increase your facerate. Buy a few solar panels to satisfy your hunger for the face of every human ever photographed. Where does it end? When are you satisfied? Don’t know. This is just a demo. These are all just demos, dude.
This is also on Steam.
Lost and Found Co
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You’re a duck. Excuse me, you goods a duck. Until some decent goddess turned you into a human because she needed an intern for her “magical startup dedicated to finding lost objects.” Let the search for hidden objects begin as you make your way through stages of crowded tea houses, busy cabaret clubs and flowery landscapes. Graham is the permanent Hidden Objectifier at RPS. “I appreciate that there’s also a story that carries you through every scene,” he said when he first saw it at the Wholesome Direct, his eyes full of fierce and slightly unsettling focus. He must be looking for a lost cat.
Find the demo hidden on Steam.
Revelation: Suspicious Developments, the makers of Tactical Breach Wizards, is led by Tom Francis, who has written for RPS in the past and knows all our darkest desires.