Steam Next Fest is a week-long celebration featuring hundreds of FREE playable demos as well as developer livestreams and chats. Players try out upcoming games on Steam pre-release, developers gather feedback and build an audience ahead of their Steam launch, everyone wins!
Anyone find something interesting? Most of the games under “Trending Upcoming” don’t appeal to me, so I have to dig a bit deeper.
Gatekeeper looks like it could be fun, and I’ve downloaded the demo, but haven’t checked it out yet.
I play a lot of genres of games and as a result like weird genre mashups, so Helskate really stuck out to me. Hades meets Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater isn’t a game I would have thought up myself, but it seems hella cool.
I just messed around with the demo a bit. There are some rough edges and no meta progression yet, but the core concept feels good. Landing a trick on an enemies head to proc stone effects and then following with a couple attacks to put them down is a super fun concept when you hit everything just right. A little bit of tactile feedback when you get hit and land things would really push the gameplay into the amazing territory.
I might give Backpack Battles a try. It doesn’t look like my usual style, but I heard there’s some good strategy under the surface, and I like that it’s made with Godot.
I enjoyed it for quite a while. Last I played, the meta gets a bit stale at the higher ratings, but it’s a really great game up until diamond ranking, at least.
I’ll probably buy the full version when it releases.
Pacific Drive was interesting but short. Then went 0-7 on Tribes 3: Rivals. 🥲
Crow Country looks and feels really good. It’s by the same folks that did a whole bunch of flash games back in the day, notably Detective Grimoire, which is getting iterations today.