I played 50 Steam Next Fest demos this week and these are my top 5
From deckbuilders to city builders, these are the demos you shouldn’t miss.
The most delightful surprise of this Next Fest, Oddsparks is basically an adventurous and brilliant combination of Pikmin and any number of automation games. Set in a whimsical fantasy world, Oddsparks doesn’t concern itself too much with being super hardcore, something welcome in the automation world. I found the loop really great: Grab a mission, explore the wilderness for resources, then fulfill the mission by automating a product or two… which rewards a new blueprint that you’ll need to go find some resources for and get to automating. It’s a combination of gameplay types so obvious I’m shocked nobody has done it before. (No, your giant Factorio drone swarm doesn’t count.)
Synergy
I’m a huge fan of games about ecologies and building a self-sustaining process. I’m also a huge fan of French artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius—as are all right-thinking people. The combination of those two things in Synergy blew me right past my lukewarm feelings about Pharaoh or Caesar-style city building games and pushed this to the top of my most-anticipated games list—just like it did for Fraser.
The basic concept is that your people are newly arrived in a harsh, hostile world where the water is poison and they’ll need to learn everything they can about the unknown plants and ecosystems around them. From there, they need to figure out how to build a sustainable life cultivating these resources and exploring the world beyond. It wins extra points because it focuses not just on material goods, but on social needs: Decorating your city with meeting places, cafes, and more alien amenities—scent gardens, for example—gives them the social stability they need to have kids and expand the town. Synergy is can’t-miss stuff for city builder fans.
Abiotic Factor
Look, as a man who grew up with Half-Life and all the other tropes of ’90s weird science, blocky shooters with a low top speed, and then came of age with the crafting game, I think I can recognize when I’m being pandered to. When I’m being pandered to is when a game lets me be some kind of weird PhD at a secret research facility who makes laser guns out of trash. Abiotic Factor is explicitly for me, folks, and it’s working because it’s a dang fun videogame. I urged people to try the last demo, and I’m back at it again.
I can’t help but love the cold open driving through the Australian outback, taking an elevator ride that reveals terrifying creatures from another dimension, and then half-assing a safety demonstration at the kind of black science research site where you do not ever half-ass a safety demonstration. The part where this thing lets me play cooperatively with my friends? That’s 100% pure buttercream icing on the cake, right there.
Balatro
Generally speaking I wouldn’t expect to enjoy a Poker roguelike. I think a lot of the fun from poker is probably in the bluffing, the social aspect, and the guess-or-be-outguessed nature of the whole thing. Reducing it to pure odds is useful for game design, I recognize, and I’ve enjoyed poker-based games before. Anyway, despite my dislike, Balatro is really dang good because it takes the appearance of poker and transforms it into something else entirely. It’s about figuring out how to play weird, illegal poker hands and use the odd superpowers that a Joker card gives you in order to push out bizarre and broken combos.
That’s before you just start doing even weirder stuff: Putting Tarot cards in your poker deck? Sure, why not, that doesn’t make any sense. This is a card game you’d play in a dream and wake up at 3:00AM and try desperately to write down the rules before you forget them. Except you could never do that because it never existed and there are no rules. Except Balatro exists. It’s right there. You can play it today.
Solar Expanse
It really wouldn’t be a list made by me unless I put a complicated-looking strategy or management game with a really weak interface on it, so here’s Solar Expanse. This is basically a space program management game extending from the recent past into the relatively far future, emphasizing the growth of space-based infrastructure.
The demo is a short but tantalizing taste for any space enthusiast, as you begin on Earth, set up a remote colony on Mars, and then launch a human mission there. I particularly like the little interactive porkchop plots you use for choosing when to launch a mission, and the emphasis on doing stuff like getting telescopes and observatories set up on stellar bodies to scout for future missions.
Farida, 45, a mother of four, went missing on Thursday night as she was walking through woodlands
The temple, built over a razed mosque, was thought to be the project that would guarantee a landslide for Modi’s BJP in the 2024 general elections
KUALA LUMPUR, June 9 — The Malaysian Meteorological Department (MetMalaysia) predicts wetter weather conditions, also…
President Joe Biden is committed to his reelection bid and is unlikely to exit the race. But speculation about whether he’ll bow out continues to swirl.
Ukraine has hit Russia’s most advanced stealth fighter jet for the first time in a drone strike 365 miles behind the frontline.
KUALA LUMPUR, June 8 — PichaEats was shocked when the social enterprise realised that a bumper 500-person catering order…
A new war video released by Ukraine appears to show a US-supplied M2 Bradley attacking a Russian personnel carrier at close range in Donetsk.
JOHOR BARU, June 9 — The Vehicle Entry Permit (VEP) requirement for foreign-registered vehicles entering Malaysia sho…
Lucy Morgan died four days after the incident
The passenger says he told the flight attendant “she was doing a great job under the circumstances” during a retelling of the incident
In 2011, Timmothy Pitzen’s mother took him out of school for a spontaneous road trip. Three days later, she had killed herself but there was no trace of the boy, who is still missing 13 years later. Loved ones say a clue to his whereabouts was in her suicide note. Andrea Cavallier reports
Toma, which offers empanadas, salsas and pandebono, had a launch party on Friday, June 7, at Hyde Sunset Kitchen + Cocktails
A rhinoceros photobombed the mother-daughter duo in the snapshot
A man watched as his wife and son were killed after a dangerous driver ploughed into them head-on and hid from the police.
Biden and Macron release ‘roadmap’ to support Ukraine, including using frozen Russian assets
Kate Middleton addressed her absence from the Trooping the Colour Colonel’s Review by writing a heartfelt letter.
Spain’s hard-Left pile-on against Israel is a foretaste of dangerous things to come under a Labour government in Britain. Madrid is the latest capital to join South Africa’s obscene accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice. This twisted charge comes straight out of the Soviet playbook which denounced the Jewish state for the same alleged crime in the 1970s. It is intended to taunt and vilify a country that was built to a large extent by survivors of an actual genocide, and is
點擊“了解更多”以查找本地選項!
Teigen shared two posts filled with photos of her four kids — Luna, Miles, Esti and Wren — on Instagram on Saturday, June 8
Nicola Peltz Beckham is one of eight children born to Nelson Peltz and Claudia Heffner Peltz
Louisville police officers asked Scottie Scheffler how good he was at golf – before realising he was the world No 1 – and at the same time as arresting the golfer also probed him about the prowess of Tiger Woods.
このサイトはコレクションに関連する記事のみを収集しています。元のテキストを表示するには、以下のリンクをコピーして開いてください:I played 50 Steam Next Fest demos this week and these are my top 5