And I've rated them all below. I'm very glad Steam decided to do a big promotional event around them- it helped point me toward a lot of games I would have never tried/heard of otherwise. Some of the good ones might not be good the entire game, but they were at least good in the demo.
I would recommend trying any demo I rate 4/5, and maybe purchase the full game if you like it. Anything lower, and it's probably down to personal taste, or willingness to hurt ones self.
Robocop Rogue City
It's been years since I last saw a Robocop movie. It's good to know that Robocop has still not gotten over the death of his family.
Gameplay consists of trudging heavily through densely decorated levels, gunning foes down in the dozens. The developers make sure to dress this gameplay with a cheesy story, throwing campy voice acting on top. It should be the kind of FPS I hate, but I loved the feeling of being a strong robot boy destroying everyone. Recommend getting it on sale, but demo is well worth the effort.
4/5
Last Train Home
This is one-part squad RTS, one part resource/base manager. I've not played many RTS games, but I would say the game controls like those single-man units from Red Alert, except you don't really get to feel like an invincible badass. Game is stupidly gorgeous as well, with a strong and interesting historical base where you are a group of Czech soldiers looking to get home in the middle of the Russian Revolution.
Good challenging gameplay, while feeling very fair, or at least "accurate" to the grim reality of this era's world. I'm definitely going to be playing my way through it on release, or shortly after.
5/5
EMPTY SHELL
It's meant to be a mysterious and sinister horror game about exploring a strange and abandoned industrial facility. The game depicts you as an obscure grey figure, being chased by monsters your brain can only envision from lack of detail, as if captured by satellite footage. It's a very stylized game.
The gameplay is that of a top down shooter, where you aim with your mouse and gun/hack down the horrible monstrosities in this place. It's one of those great horror games where the controls are good, and it means nothing in the face of the overwhelming odds you face.
However, the demo was held back by lack of interesting story beats after the start, and overall samey gameplay. I could already find myself getting sick of it without anything new to provoke my interest.
There could be something better further beyond, but I didn't find it.
3/5
Interregnum Chronicles: False Prophet
Somewhat iffy review. The demo begins with you in a freezing apocalypse with mysterious stuff being hinted at around you. You launch immediately into the strategy game, which seems to be based off of stuff like XCOM (which I've never played). Once you die (if you're bad at video games like I am), you find yourself as someone new exploring in an overhead map where you get to make fun and horrible choices, before going off to pick further fights. When you get into fights, you go into that XCOM-like battle system.
I didn't get a tutorial in the demo or a good idea on how to play, so I kind of got fucked early on, and couldn't figure out how to progress meaningfully. If you've played this kind of game before, you'll probably have fun with it. The story itself seems pretty intriguing, albeit with mid voice acting.
3/5, but barely. Worldbuilding really saves it.
Microcivilization
This was the most dangerous game in the entire Steam Next celebration for me. It's one of those addictive kind of "cookie clicker" style games, and it even adds some actual management gameplay into things. The moment I launched the game and resized the window so that it looked right (it can't be stretched to alternative resolutions without messing up the pixel art), I immediately groaned because I knew that I was doomed. I ended up playing for five hours straight until I accidentally closed the game and lost all my progress.
Potential detractors include an inflexible resolution, lack of explanative demo (I still don't know what some of those icons and stuff means), and the complete ability to absolutely cheese the hell out of invasions in this game.
5/5. Don't play this if you've gotten addicted to Runescape in the past.
Cobalt Core
This is probably the cutest game of the bunch. It features a pixel art aesthetic with cute animal friends. You're in a time loop (established from the start), so have fun with your new animal friends in your endless runs. Gameplay is FTL, but with cards and deck building instead of opportune weapon and personnel management.
It's a very simple premise. At the start of each turn, you get three energy. You also get to know what your enemy will do. Each card costs some level of energy, show in the top left of each card. Maybe you get some energy so you can move out of the way of an oncoming attack. May you put energy into your shields if you can't dodge, or just want to tank it. Maybe you just take the hit to your ship health without worry. It's great strategic fun. The game is as much about preparing for the future as it is fighting the current battle, but the current battle stays fun.
There is a small level of indie clunk. Video settings are missing for the game, and it's automatically fullscreen at 16:9- not that I think my ultrawide monitor would be needed for a game like this. Despite these technical limitations, it was an amazing demo. Really hoping the rest of the game will be as good when it releases.
5/5.
The Crust
A promising RTS about managing a colony's energy and infrastructural needs on the moon. It has an ok story, albeit with awkward voice acting, and audio jank (background music plays while characters talk, alternatively getting loud between their lines and making it awkward to listen to. There are a few other weird moments with audio as well). In addition, it's lacking a few nice hotkeys, such as the ability to select the last building you placed to place again.
It might be alright with another six months of final polish work, though I'm not sure if it will ever get it or not. The in-game bug reporter links to the game's Discord server, which is nice to have as an option, but should not be the only default way to report them. I may have gotten explosively angry with the world when this occurred.
Like Anakin Skywalker on the council, it has the honor of going on my wishlist, but does not receive the title of imminent purchase.
3/5.
Forgive Me Father 2
This is one of those 90s-inspired FPS, but actually good. You romp around with gameplay strongly influenced by Doom, shooting undead horrors in wonderfully creative levels, all painted with a fun comic-like style.
Potential detractors include:
- A stupid flashlight recharging system where you have to wind it up, immediately teaching you to babysit the stupid thing every moment you get and creating busywork.
- Problematic audio engineering, where music would play at odd times, in odd beats, with the occasional string (audio punctuation) becoming jarring as you dip in and out of combat with single foes on the first level.
- And it's one of "those" horror games where you're in an asylum, and you may or may not be hallucinating or something, as implied in the demo. Shmeep shmop!
Fortunately, I came for the fun FPS gameplay and not the story. This is Doom but Halloween. I'm definitely picking it up on release if it's for a good price.
4/5.
Hollow Cocoon
A horror game about visiting Gam Gam's house in the Japanese countryside during the 1980s, before they invented compact mobile fun devices. It has a beautiful and seemingly-authentic aesthetic. You only get about 20 minutes of demo though, with hints of stuff like hiding in cupboards and a drain puzzle to look forward to in full release. This is including my earnest exploration of the game, time that was also stretched by being one of "those" horror games with standstill walking, and walking "running".
The demo ends with a long and solid pan of the monster that's probably going to be haunting you in clear sight, ruining a good deal of the scariness. Not promising for the horror. Maybe the game is better, but the demo wasn't!
3/5.
TEVI
A platformer game about being a cute bunny girl. The bunny girl's apron appears to be a one-piece swimsuit, and the demo hints rather charmingly at a lesbian undertone romance.
The gameplay is a fun platformer where enemies have health that you attack, with about a million different surrounding systems that probably enhance the gameplay, but feel distracting to me. If you like a lot of added complexity with upgrade systems, equipable slots, and gameplay that feels a little like modern Shantae games, this might be for you. It's not for me though!
3/5.
The Thaumaturge
An incredibly ambient game about being a man wielding spirits and very subtle magic in early 1900s Eastern Europe. Has strong personality literally built into the gameplay in a very cool way.
The demo's gameplay consists of exploring around in an overhead view similar to Disco Elysium, through 1900s rural Georgia. You get little points and evidence pointing you onward toward other clues/mysteries, with cute Unreal Engine scenes and strange turn based combat in between. The story is well on its way toward developing into something very interesting before I stopped.
Unlike so many of the other games here, it had an incredibly strong audio backing too. It does have mildly janky performance, strange hitches, and a few other minor issues I really hope they iron out before release, because I desperately want to play this game in full.
5/5.
Europa
They made a Miyazaki movie into a game. You're a kid adventuring in a world cultivated by robots into bearing life. They were very successful. Gameplay is like a floaty, forgiving platformer. Kinda cool, but lacking any challenge. You could probably throw this at a kid for baby's first 3D platformer. I'm not a fan of games without any challenge, though the graphics and music carried it pretty far for me, questionable audio triggers aside.
3/5.
Japanese Drift Master
I probably shouldn't have bothered with this since I'm not into racing games, but this seemed like it was a little different. I still got lost and confused. The right stick isn't controlling your camera in this game strangely enough, which really screwed with me and my bad steering. At one point my right trigger started moving me backwards as well, which didn't help. Maybe I'm missing something as a non-racing fan, but I don't think so.
2/5.
Apocalypse Party
You start out with this bog standard, but really sad intro of a father watching his daughter get devoured by his zombie wife. It's an incredibly gruesome and sad comic-book intro. You then flash to him staying behind as the quarantine zone is bombed, as a sort of suicide.
Flash cut to this grief-stricken father landing in a medieval zombie village, drawn in Facebook-like graphics, with happy pinging noises erupting as you collect a score gunning down zombies. You can even turn on auto-aim if you want less of a game. It reminded me of Army of Darkness from the Evil Dead series, and that's not a great comparison to draw. Very disappointing.
2/5.
Enshrouded
A horror game about how terrible poorly implemented FSR 2 is. Playing the game at native resolution results in incredibly poor performance, even at lower res. Playing the game at reduced resolution in FSR is a jagged mess that performs kinda ok. No matter what, your player avatar is going to look weird.
It's a survival game about building a survival base, with a makeshift story around it. There's a lot of other multiplayer survival games out there these days, don't bother with this one.
1/5.
FatalZone
I don't know what you call this kind of game. You run around in an open field dodging zombies as your character automatically shoots at them, and occasionally grabbing loot where you are able to.
It's the kind of game that's not really a game. Don't play this.
1/5.
Echoes of the Living
The game launched promisingly, but at the wrong resolution. No biggie, right? Except that you have to click through each resolution like an old, bad PC port. And also, every time you click through a resolution, you change to that resolution. No confirmation asked or required! At one point I landed on the resolution I was looking for and then accidentally clicked again. Then I realized the game has a weird habit of greying out the resolution option and preventing you from selecting it. I never got to the actual game.
1/5.
Astra: Knights of Veda
It asked me for my Google login to play. Whyyyyyyyyyyy.
1/5.
The Inquisitor
A game about Jesus kicking the shit out of the Romans who tried to crucify him, and then many years later you're one of his disciple inquisitors, being a dick to others. Not really that different from the real inquisition, to be honest.
Everything in the game was super ugly. The people sucked and looked terrible, the main character looked terrible, and the voice acting was mid-to-poor. Even when you got into a nicer part of town, it still looked kind of gross, like that era of AAA games when they weren't allowed to look nice (see the COD MW3 era). There seems to be some cool worldbuilding in the game, and probably even a good story. I couldn't make it past the presentation, unfortunately. It didn't help that the gameplay (especially the chase section) was a boring QTE.
3/5, but only because of the worldbuilding. It probably isn't good.
Pioneers of Pagonia
It's weird how many management games I've played now, without any guide whatsoever. And here I've found another one. Why do indie developers keep doing this?
Game also has indie jank, such as poor support for higher resolutions with its text, and some weird exit menus with visual clutter obscuring the actual UI.
1/5.
Laika: Aged Through Blood
Trigger warning: This game has some serious content warnings I'd advise checking before trying the demo.
A morbid motorcycle apocalypse story about vengeance, blood, and how dogs are awesome. I deliberately avoided going too far in because I definitely want to beat this game in full. It has a great story, complimented by artwork that resembles a child's show based in the Mad Max universe. The gameplay is Happy Wheels with bullet parrying and wheelies to reload. My only concern so far is how easy it is to get lost in the expansive levels- there's a lot of "look-alike" areas and I hate getting lost in non-open world video games.
5/5.
Ghostrunner 2
A game about parkouring through mostly linear levels, through a Cyberpunk aesthetic. I've never played the first one, but this demo was alright. Was a little difficult, which is a nice change of pace from other demos. Expecting you to react immediately to being able to ignore gravity was a little iffy of a decision, admittedly.
Some parts were great little sections where you had to use creativity, and some were just on rails action. The former was a lot better than the latter.
4/5.
