Games I played that you may like
Note: only focused on games that were newly added to this Fest and that I hadn't played earlier in the year. For your benefit, I mainly focused on good games, not the numerous shovelware I had to dig through.
Only two days left in the festival, but most demos stick around for longer than that if you download them ahead of time.
The outstanding category:
Odinfall
You have to be a certain type of person to like this game, but I am that person. I have 500 hours in Nuclear Throne, a non-traditional permadeath roguelike with no meta progression but the prospect of certain, cold hard death as you fight unreasonable numbers of NPCs with souped-up weapons. Perhaps by design or due to lack of time before release, Nuclear Throne is unwinnable, looping over and over each time you clear the last stage and getting harder and harder until the game is unplayable or crashes. No one has snatched NT's crown in the intervening years in terms of white-knuckle gameplay. Games like Enter the Gungeon have charted new ground in the twin-stick shooter genre, but nothing feels quite as insane as NT. Enter Odinfall, which is clearly steeped in the language of NT, down to the appearance of weapons like the "auto crossbow" and "auto shotgun." Interestingly, Odinfall introduces a mechanic where you can add up to three mods to a gun during the run if you can afford them, and they do things like decrease cooldown, reduce spread, or increase bullets per shot at the expense of things like ammo cost, range, etc. The sound design, impact, and punchiness are perfect IMO. The only problem right now is that the developers have pushed several updates that are causing CTDs for a lot of players and seem unresponsive on the issue. Not a great start for a game that has managed to capture lightning in a bottle. Try the demo, it may or may not work, but the gameplay is a blast when it does. I somehow racked up 40+ hours in the demo alone before Steam Next Fest. It's more like a public beta version with a ton of content.
EDIT: 2023-06-26: I tried the latest update, and they seem to have nerfed the difficulty considerably. There is a cool endless mode thing now, but the base game felt like a breeze. Not as many enemies onscreen, or something.
The favorable impressions category:
El Paso, Elsewhere
This game has been hyped up as a surreal take on Max Payne, and it certainly does what it says on the tin. The game recreates MP's third person camera movement, bullet time, and various other stock in trade, even mimicking the gravelly voice acting of James McCaffrey. There is something peculiar here, but in a good way: MP was already a self-referential game riffing on pulp noir and on videogames themselves, and El Paso, Elsewhere is a game that clearly riffs on Max Payne, down to the televisions and radios replaying a running dialogue over the main story. So you feel like you're playing at two degrees of distance, which puts you in a weird frame of mind, because the gameplay feels simply fun in a videogamey way, but you're also constantly making note of the meta references, so it almost feels like watching yourself play a game at times. But then you're back to just crazy bullet time shooting sprees and right into the gameplay again. The game has some performance issues and some of the concepts feel a bit half-baked, but the elaborate staging shots and use of color in the brief interludes before the levels begin are very ingenious and take me back to early FPS games like Half Life with the larger-than-life map design and cinematic angles. There are also just some oddities in here, like the protagonist trying to talk while there are vocal music tracks playing in the soundtrack, so everything just gets all jumbled up. Definitely needs a polish pass for its fall release. Recommend playing with motion blur off and lighting effects turned down.
Hammerwatch 2
I noticed some big stutters on this game when loading shards of the map, but it seems to take the Hammerwatch 1 formula and expand on it nicely, giving you a fun little fusion of an RPG-lite with an ARPG. Plenty of loot, quests, enemies, and skill iterations to upgrade, and a lot of secrets strewn through the map that remind me of old RPGs. Heroes of Hammerwatch was a big grindfest; I guess the best analogy I could make is that it's the Icewind Dale to Hammerwatch 1's Baldur's Gate. But the mainline Hammerwatch games seem to have a semblance of a story and overworld exploration where the pixel art shines. The game is a bit mundane by yourself, but is clearly designed around co-op.
Remore: Infested Kingdom
This game trended high on Steam after getting picked up by some YouTubers, and that kind of surprised me, because I didn't know there was such a huge audience for tactics games. I'm struggling to come up with the right genre definition for this came, but it's somewhere in the vein of a tactics game, traditional roguelike (in terms of grid micromanagement), XCOM-lite, something like that. The graphics look like a direct nod to Stoneshard. You get a party of two or three people and some action points, and you have to get through the map by fighting skirmishes with zombies and ration out your AP and consumables. There is also some kind of micromanagement thing involving making use of resources you collected to do stuff at your base. What I liked about it was that the pixel art is very sharp and well animated, and combat is fairly punishing in that if any one of your guys wipes, it's game over. Granted, this leads you to the same kind of absurd corner camping you tend to use in games like DCSS, where you are funneling mobs through a doorway and spliting them into manageable engagements, but it still feels strategic.
Echo Point Nova
Honestly gives Titanfall 2's movement and gunplay a competent run for its money. Very movement-based FPS with cel-shaded graphics that lets you ride a hoverboard to skate and grind on walls, alongside using a grappling hook and various other abilities to zoom zoom around the map. The gunplay is really tight. I liked playing it on the hardest difficulty, which gives you a nice twitch experience. Reminiscent of Ultrakill or other movement-based shooters. I'd definitely give this a try if you are jonesing for a twitch shooter.
The Isle Tide Hotel
Wales Interactive has carved out a niche for itself with hi-fi FMV games such as Late Shift, The Bunker, The Shapeshifting Detective, etc. Their games usually trend towards mystery/suspense, because it fits hand in glove with the FMV genre. By the way, I should note that these aren't FMV games like the ones of yore, which blended point and click gameplay with FMV sequences. These are more straight choose-your-own-adventure visual novels, as far as I can see, where you get a series of dialogue options and a short timer to choose a response, akin to the Telltale Games formula. Whether this is merely an illusion of choice is up for debate, but The Isle Tide Hotel had an interesting Lynchian weirdness in the short 10 minute demo, with rich colors and a weird cast of characters, and ended on a cliffhanger that left me intrigued to see more.
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew
I happen to be replaying Commandos: Behind Enemy lines right now, which I recently learned is considered one of the hardest games of all time. This explains why it's taken me over twenty years to beat. I finally had a moment of enlightenment the other week and got past level ten for the first time ever, and since then have managed to plod through most of the rest of the levels (the D-day invasion, Berlin, and Up on the Roof levels were sheer insanity), although executing everything perfectly is at times a test of patience as much as it is a test of strategy. Anyway, Shadow Gambit is the latest Commandos-like from Mimimi Games. Its interesting to see the iterative UI improvements they keep making to this niche genre (remember when stealth games were all the rage in the 90s and seemingly every game had NPC vision cones?) and making it more accessible and mainstream. This feels like a bit of a step down from Desperados III in terms of complexity, and I feel like there's a "Fortniteification" of the character design and overall graphics, but it feels generally smooth and intuitive to play, albeit a little easy. I'm not sure if it's dumbed down or it just seems like a cakewalk compared to Commandos, but it's still fun to execute strategies, and I like that Mimimi's games make it easier to queue up multiple actions from your team, whereas in Commandos it's next to impossible unless you use Starcraft-level APM.
The "so stupid it's funny" category:
Vampire Hunters
This game was getting as many wishlists as some of the top games on Steam, so I was morbidly curious. It attempts to mash together all of the memes from recent best selling indie games and presents itself as a fusion of Vampire Survivors and, I guess, Brotato, but in first-person 3D, with movement somehow resembling Timesplitters or House of the Dead. The whole thing is a bizarre bricolage of ideas that don't gel together but is intended as a dopamine simulator. Basically, you get a gun in the center of your screen that you can keep upgrading into a Frankenstein monstrosity of multiple guns welded together, and enemies are constantly spawning in your face as you move on a conveyor belt towards the horizon. Lots of the usual upgrades, coins, slot machine sound effects, and sensory overload you would expect here. The strangely low FOV and perspective almost make it feel like a blobber dungeon crawler at times, with enemies completely up in your face, which doesn't work well at all with the need to spin the mouse around to aim and shoot at stuff. This is a truly weird game that I'm sure will nonetheless find its share of devotees, but I think it proves that you can't just shoehorn ten mechanics from other games and make them work.
The "so funny it's stupid" category:
Conquer Humanity
Robotron/horde arena style game where you play an evil superhero with outrageous abilities like flying, pounding the ground, picking up cars, shooting lasers out of your eyes, launching shock waves, and generally causing mayhem to the waves of cops, civilians, bosses, and rescue teams that fling themselves at you. The presentation and sound effects are totally over the top, and it seems honestly hard to die in this one because of how forgiving the game is, but it's worth five or ten minutes or so for the sheer silliness and seeing-things-explode factor. Videogame equivalent of popcorn. Fun but not filling.
The rules, seemingly a carbon copy of the ones from Reddit, state to "use primary sources," but I think there is a tendency for this to cause undue emphasis to be placed on "authoritative articles" from big online magazines for the sake of posting news. Those links usually have grandiose/clickbaity titles and are often thinly-veiled advertisements or PR hype campaigns in advance of a game's release (not on the part of the poster, but on the part of the web magazine).
It seems like the posts with the most engagement on a pure post count number tend to be actual questions or comments from users, such as someone waxing about a game they really like, or some kind of meta conversation.
Obviously you want to disincentivize low-effort posts like "My keyboard broke--how do I fix it?" but some middle ground would be good here, so that enthusiasts can actually discuss the nitty-gritty of games with each other, rather than the magazine turning into a silent news aggregator.