PC Gaming @kbin.social tangelo @kbin.social 1y ago

Next Fest June 2023 - NOW LIVE!

Steam is the ultimate destination for playing, discussing, and creating games.

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!

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Top 10 Most Wishlisted Games

Lies of P

For The King II

Sea of Stars

House Flipper 2

Wizard with a Gun

The Invinable

One Lonely Outpost

Gord

Warhaven

Steamworld Build
- Any chance you could edit your top-comment to include a link to Steam Next Fest itself? https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest
  
  The submission URL itself has a typo in it unfortunately, and I'd really encourage folks to browse through Next Fest and see what they can find beyond the 10 most popular ones. 🙂 Next Fest is a great event for indies, but it does suffer from Steam always seeming to set up these "rich get richer" loops where the games that came into Next Fest with the most wishlists (often from having the biggest marketing budgets), are the ones they make most visible, without providing any curation of or means for user-surfacing of lesser-known but promising titles.
  
  Sorry about that, I've edited the correct link into the top post.
Post your favorite demos that you played in the comments, guys. I have a number in the pipeline and will update once I review them all
- Wizard with a Gun has the potential to be a great roguelike hit. I describe it as Gunfire:Reborn and Hades had a baby in terms of how it controls and feels ( not the story). It's still super early for them, but I liked what I played a lot, and has controller support for comfy couch gaming too.
- Lies of P feels fantastic
  
  The Invincible looks really good, and seems to have a compelling story, but the execution is off. You basically click on things in the world, get some dialogue with your handler, then move on to more things to click.
  
  Sometimes the dialogue runs really long, and you are prevented from taking most actions while it goes on. I ended up sitting still for multiple long periods and it just completely took me out of it. Could be a good book.
  
  The Invincible seems to be more of a walking simulator by design. Provided the story is suspenseful and compelling, that seems fine. The main gripe I had was the extremely low FOV. Hopefully that is not by design
Seems fun!
The Black Pool is a...unique...experience.
If you have 28GB to spare and ample patience, its worth it.
Imagine Stranger Things and Control had a eurojank, roguelite baby.
Stray Gods (formerly Chorus) is one game I've been looking forward to ever since the original announcement on the now-defunct Fig (a musical RPG with Laura Bailey, yes please).

Little Cat Big City looks like a lot of fun. And so cute too!
- How does the gameplay work in that one? I checked the screenshots but couldn't tell
  
  I'm uncertain, but it seems like during the singing bits, it's a dialogue tree with with musical/lyrical matching parts as well! So you can set the tone to match the person you're singing with/against.
- Tried Stray Gods, it's pretty much what I was expecting, but good gods the audio mixing is bad. Dialogue volume is all over the place; one character is very much louder than the rest, and even within the same line of dialogue by the same VA the volume can go from loud to barely audible. Audio engineering is truly an invisible art when it's done well, because when it's not... it's really obvious.
  
  I was playing the game with one hand on the volume knob, it almost become some kind of invisible rhythm game as a result. xD

21 comments