From trucks in space to backpack management sims, and everything in between.
Back in the days when E3 was still a thing, a relative handful of approved journalists and industry members had to pack themselves into the Los Angeles Convention Center once a year to awkwardly stand in front of demo stations to play some of the hottest upcoming games. Today, any PC gamer can easily sample similar early preview demos from the comfort of their own homes during Steam’s periodic Next Fest events.
While we weren’t able to try all of the literally hundreds of demos on offer during the most recent Steam Next Fest, we did have a great time trying out a few dozen offerings that caught our interest. Here’s a selection of the demos that made the biggest impression on us over the last few days.
Backpack Battles
Developer: PlayWithFurcifer
Planned release date: March 8, 2024
Steam store page
Too many RPGs these days are layered with a lot of unnecessary cruft. Backpack Battles distills the genre down to one core component: inventory management.
It may sound like an odd basis for an entire game, but Backpack Battles really is, at its core, a game about stuffing as many weapons and items as you can into that titular backpack. The game then makes use of that assembled item grouping in automatic battles that play out against other real-world players at a similar level. After each fight, it’s time to take your winnings and go stuff your backpack some more.
Things start off simple enough, but pretty soon, you’re buying expansion compartments for your backpack and arranging items using complex positional interdependencies to boost each item’s effects. I spent a good ten minutes at one point trying to squeeze a veritable fruit salad into my pack in just the right arrangement to maximize the stamina-boosting and enemy-poisoning effects of every individual component. What’s more surprising is that I loved every minute of this careful arrangement.Advertisement
Backpack Battles is great for that part of your brain that needs to have everything organized just so and wants a tangible on-screen reward for exercising that skill.
Balatro
Developer: LocalThunk
Planned release date: February 20, 2024
Steam store page
Video Poker doesn’t seem like the most likely basis for a compelling roguelike experience. After putting more hours than I’d care to admit into Balatro‘s demo, though, I’m just glad that the game doesn’t charge real money for its in-game deals like a casino would.
At its core, Balatro is a game about crafting the best possible poker hands from nine randomly dealt cards, using a limited number of discards to manage and replace bad cards. Each hand comes with its own base value and multiplier, and each round requires you to earn more points to progress.
Between rounds, though, you can use accumulated cash to buy all sorts of jokers, which add to a hand’s base value or multiplier in specific situations (playing spades, for instance, or playing exactly three cards). Things start to get ridiculous with rare jokers that multiply the multipliers, leading to an exponential scoring effect that can really help as the scoring requirements build up in the later rounds. And that’s all before you account for the vouchers and booster packs that can add to, subtract from, or just modify your deck of cards in any number of ways.
Managing the delicate economy of all of these shop options—and adapting your play to whatever options get randomly offered to you—forces you into some deep strategic planning if you hope to make it through a full run. That’s true even in the limited demo, which offers tantalizing hints at unique jokers and unlockable options that will be in the full game. If my time with the demo is any indication, I imagine I’ll be spending a lot of time unlocking all of those bits when the full game sees its imminent release.
Copycat
Developer: Spoonful of Wonder
Planned release date: “Coming soon”
Steam store page
Ever since Stray helped popularize the cat-as-protagonist concept in 2022, we’ve been hankering for more games that take a feline view of the world. Copycat seems set to expand this (hopefully) burgeoning genre with a more grounded tale of rescue cat Dawn and her new owner getting to know each other.
Taking control of Dawn as she strains against her new domestic surroundings is fun enough. But the most intriguing part of the Copycat demo is the access it gives to Dawn’s internal monologue, which appears as floating white text that automatically materializes near relevant objects and locations as you pass.
Through those messages, you see firsthand how Dawn’s desire to escape back into the wild is slowly replaced with a grudging acceptance of her new master’s patient care. You also get a series of Edith Finch-like fantasy sequences where Dawn dreams of being an apex predator rather than a pampered pet (complete with an amusing nature documentary voiceover).
In the demo, we also get glimpses of drama in the life of Dawn’s owner as she struggles with distant family members and her ailing health. The demo still has some rough edges, especially in the animation of its human characters, but what’s on hand shows that its heart is definitely in the right place.
Geometry Survivor
Developer: Brain Seal Ltd.
Planned release date: February 21, 2024
Steam store page
If you owned an Xbox 360, you probably (hopefully?) sunk dozens of hours into the sublime twin-stick shooting of the Geometry Wars games. Geometry Survivor seems poised to bring back the look and feel of those classics without the pesky need to actually aim your guns at the incoming polygonal ships.Advertisement
Instead, Geometry Survivor takes inspiration from games like Vampire Survivor in automatically and periodically firing your weapons at the nearest enemy. This leaves behind experience tokens that you’ll have to pick up to level up and earn more firepower to help you manage the ever-increasing hordes of polygonal enemies.
Geometry Survivor already shows a good balance of tough-but-not-overwhelming bullet-hell style challenge, buoyed by various weaponry upgrade options, including mines, lasers, and an incredibly satisfying boomerang. But the game really shines in its Day-Glo neon presentation, filling the screen with simple shapes and colored regions that are instantly readable and easy to react to intuitively. It may not be the Geometry Wars 4 we want and deserve, but it’s close enough to fill the void.
Pepper Grinder
Developer: Ahr Ech
Planned release date: 2024
Steam store page
The key to any good platform game is a compelling movement system; everything else is just gravy. Pepper Grinder provides this in spades, with a unique drilling-based movement system that feels instantly intuitive, even in a short demo.
While you can run and jump normally in Pepper Grinder, the much more enjoyable way to get around is by using your handheld drill to dig through soft yellow sand, carving gentle curves with the analog stick as you do. Collecting underground gems and ramming your drill into enemies is fun enough, but the real highlight comes when you burst through the surface of the sand with an explosive projectile jump, which you’ll need to connect to yet another disconnected bit of sand to repeat the process again.
The extremely tight controls make simply moving around in Pepper Grinder a true joy. After just a few minutes of practice, I was already deep in the game’s groove, zipping through strings of gems that are laid out in perfect lines designed as a guide through some complex on-screen architecture. But I’ll need a little more practice to perfect my lines enough to maximize the in-game gem combo counter or beat the game’s challenging time trial requirements.
It’s practice I’ll be happy to put in once I can expand past the demo’s first few levels. I can also imagine the speedrunning community happily finding some amazing and enjoyable routes through Pepper Grinder‘s grind.
Quadroids
Developer: Blue Loop
Planned release date: Q1 2024
Steam store page
The basic interaction of Quadroids sounds so simple as to be boring. You control a robot that marches forward automatically, hitting a single button to make it jump (and/or wall jump) to get through some simple platforming challenges.
Quadroids makes this simple concept more interesting with a few crucial twists. The first is that the game divides the screen into four quadrants, with the robot-jumping in each controlled by a different controller button (or keyboard key). These quadrants are shuffled around from their relative on-screen positions, meaning a robot going out the right side of one quadrant may appear in a totally different part of the screen.
But things get really taxing once the game adds additional robots that march through the environments simultaneously from different starting points. Multitasking attention between multiple robots at once—and juggling the multiple buttons needed for syncopated jumping—tickles my brain just right. So does solving puzzles that require using one robot’s corpse as a platform over deadly spikes for the other, or others that have two robots essentially wall-jumping off each other in a delicious symmetry.
While it’s often easy to simply solve a board, doing so within a set time limit or a maximum threshold of jumps for extra achievement badges adds a nice bit of optional challenge. I can’t wait to see how difficult those challenges can get in the full version of the game.
Rotwood
Developer: Klei Entertainment
Planned release date: “To be announced”
Steam store page
A simple, bullet-point-style breakdown of Rotwood‘s gameplay wouldn’t exactly set the world on fire. The game combines basic side-view brawler action (à la Castle Crashers and its ilk) with some basic roguelike randomization and item progression. Nothing earth-shattering so far.Advertisement
But what really makes Rotwood stand out for me is the art and animation. Every player character and enemy is loaded with some of the smoothest and most expressive movements I’ve seen in a game since Cuphead. That’s not that surprising from a studio like Keli Entertainment, which used strong animations to make games like Mark of the Ninja and Don’t Starve come to life in the past. But the developers have taken things to a new level here, creating a game that looks like it was pulled right from some of the best Saturday morning cartoons.
Add in some incredibly responsive controls, interesting upgrade options, and the ability to join together for co-op brawling, and you have a game that makes impeccable execution of its simple concept.
Star Trucker
Developer: Monster and Monster
Planned release date: 2024
Steam store page
I’ll admit that the popularity of the Truck Simulator franchise has been a bit baffling to me—why would I spend my gaming time simulating what seems like one of the most repetitive and mind-numbing jobs in existence? Then along comes a game like Star Trucker, which has instantly enthralled me by taking the same basic concept and simply putting it in space.
Driving a big rig through the cosmos means going through a lot of space-themed truck maintenance, like donning a pressurized suit for a spacewalk to fix the chassis or replacing oxygen canisters in the rig to prevent asphyxiation. It also means navigating your slow, heavy rig in a full three dimensions, which can lead to some complex inertia management when you have to hitch or unhitch a massive trailer that doesn’t exactly want to turn on a dime.
A large part of the demo, though, is spent just thrusting through the great void of space to your next objective, maybe grooving to the radio or chatting on the CB radio as you do. It’s a notably chill alternative to the usual dogfighting and jet-style maneuvering that often characterizes space travel in video games, and it may just make a virtual trucker out of me yet.
