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 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.
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.
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.