Another Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close, having had to compete with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing none of its knack for highlighting interesting and offbeat games set for future release. A quick dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a few months off the next Next Fest, though at the time of posting, there are still a couple of precious hours to download and try out the best samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played something you think deserves some more attention, why not share it in the comments?
DoubleWe
James: I don’t have the psychological knowledge to truly grasp why paranoia, a feeling so rooted in mistrustfulness, stress, and fear, makes for such entertaining games. Yet it does, as the proliferation of high-tension battle royales and extraction shooters – and, I guess, the word “sus” – has demonstrated. Maybe it helps when that paranoia is entirely justified, as is the case in DoubleWe: a lo-fi, first-person roguelite where your murderous clone could barge through crowds of twitching NPCs and make you a victim of pseudo-fraticide at any moment. Fighting back is the goal, but DoubleWe constantly blurs the line between hunter and hunted, with slow-opening weapon cases and lookalike civilians keeping the tension at a piano-wire tautness. Even checking your mirror, to remind yourself of your randomised appearance (and thus that of the clone), feels like a lapse in concentration that could easily result in a surprise knifing.
Play the demo on Steam.
Deliver At All Costs
Brendan: I like the way driving feels in this comic 1950s top-down delivery game. It’s got all the correct vrooms and zooms. The story, about an underachieving courier who takes on wacky jobs to pay overdue rent, takes absolutely nothing seriously. And that mood continues when you donk a pedestrian off the bumper and crash your rusty truck through the nearest fruit stall. Almost everything is destructible, and when your only tool is a big car, everything starts to look like a too-smug traffic cone.
Play the demo on Steam.
Wanderstop
Brendan: The “cosy” farming sim offers a lot of relief to the banjaxed brain. Simple chores in an often conflict-free world where the grass is green and the clouds threaten only predictable rain that doesn’t dampen your spirits so much as water the crops. Wanderstop is taking aim at this genre and making it slant. Your hero, Alta, is not the classic “likeable” protagonist or plain-faced player cipher, but a grouchy arena fighter who doesn’t know what’s good for her. In this case: chilling the flip out and making a cup of tea. The demo gives us a chunk of the game’s opening (if not many examples of the tasks you’ll be doing) and I walked away desirous of many more cuppas than it teased.
Play the demo on Steam.
The Horror At Highrook
Edwin: Shortly before the latest Next Fest, I expressed a desire to dig up some “weirder”, “more surprising” game demos that reach beyond the established genres and “get me out of my comfort zone”. Then I got waylaid by press events and other things and exhausted my capacity to process novelty, so here I am bigging up The Horror At Highrook, a haunted house boardgame that ably channels my passion for cosmic horror, Hell Boy-style occultism, and play environments that resemble desiccated parchment maps. I’m looking forward to scraping the dust from that blueprint, and unearthing whatever diffuse malevolence lurks within those card-crafting systems.
Play the demo on Steam.
Artis Impact
Edwin: My enthusiasm for Artis Impact is checked by my distaste for the demo’s wacky script, in which your protagonist is sleazily hit on by various otaku-ass NPCs, but it’s possible some of that is due to the WIP English localisation. Beyond that, this is a dishy production indeed. It’s a pixelart RPG with turn-based combat and presentation that is both grandiose and deft. Look forward to: picture-in-picture manga panels for actions like pushing buttons; a florid art style that ranges from elegant minimalist scribbles through emojis to live photography, without ever quite losing itself; delicately observed animations for cloth, hair and sword strikes. Exploration happens in top-down snowglobe environments, while battles are set within a pop-up book computer OS. Really hope the script finds its feet.
Play the demo on Steam.
Is This Seat Taken?
Nic: Despite concluding with readers that, yes, this puzzler is a play on the logic questions you get on tests, I’m still fizzling to get my hands on the full thing. Jumping between massive RPG reviews recently has given me a toucan’s appetite for snack pecking, and this particular fish fits in my bill. Stuffing fussy punters in seats is mellow – but still crunchy enough that the game doesn’t shed its own skeleton and collapse into a formless puddle of cosy. Also I respect anyone that struts into the cinema with a tall cowboy hat and, when questioned, states “I am wearing my big hat”.
Play the demo on Steam.
Sandustry
Ollie: Usually in factory games, whenever you have to do manual work with your own two human hands, it’s tedious. Deliberately so. This is the driving force behind the desire to automate. In Sandustry, a game where you’re building a big dirt-sifting factory to plop buried gold into a big bin of dollar signs, everything’s powered by one of those lovely physics-based falling sand engines. And so whenever I had reason to hoover up a cube of sand with my own two human hands, it was hella satisfying. I’ve barely had time to do more than the basic setup of dumping sand into water, then hoovering the wet sand up onto a conveyor belt that sifts the gold into one pile and the useless slag into another, but that’s enough to see that there could be something in this. The demo’s a fun little proof of concept; I’m hoping the devs go big on depth now.
Play the demo on Steam.
DeadWire
Graham: There are plenty of cyberpunk games which allow you to use hacking in combat, but few with such immediate, explosive consequences as DeadWire. This is a topdown shooter in the Hotline Miami mold, but you can switch at any moment into a Gunpoint-style view that lets you link almost any element of the environment together. Enemies, TVs, doors, explosive barrels: all can be wired up so that when you shoot one, the others all die and explode, too. You need line of sight with what you’re linking, so there’s some element of puzzle-solving here, and instant restarts if you back yourself into a corner, but mostly it’s about the delirious power of making a barrel explode when a door opens because you flicked a switch.
Play the demo on Steam.