The best games from Steam Next Fest: June 2024
I got the chance to try a lot of games during this month's Steam Next Fest. Here are the standouts and some others to watch for.
Not all of those games were Next Fest exclusives and many of them still have their demo up so grab them while you can and wishlist the others for their future release or a future Next Fest.
The best ones
Minishoot’ Adventures
I had a lot of fun with this one. You control a small ship that you control with your left thumbstick while aiming and shooting with your right thumbstick. The map is quite open and you can often go down a number of different paths. As you progress and improve your ship, new paths will open up. You also gain experience from defeating enemies or from destroying some elements on the map. In combat, the enemies are shooting at you or trying to run into you, so you’re trying to both dodge and destroy them.
Minishoot’ Adventures on Steam
The Rise of the Golden Idol
If you’ve played the previous game The Case of the Golden Idol (I recommend you do), this game should feel quite familiar. There’s no mention of the Idol in the demo, but there’s a curious curse and some cultish things happening. The demo has 3 scenes to play that seem to the whole first chapter of the game. New to this game, the chapter concludes with a rather difficult report where you have to put the right information in each slot, just as in each scenario, to show that you fully understand the first chapter.
The Rise of the Golden Idol on Steam
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
Arranger had the most satisfying movement of the whole Next Fest. Instead of controlling the character directly, you control the whole row or column of tiles that your character is on. If you move left, all the tiles in your row move left and the leftmost tile wraps around to the right, including you if you’re on that tile. This makes for some very unique and interesting puzzles where you have to figure out how to get an item (or multiple items) from one location to where you want it to be.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
The Steam description says it best:
Thank Goodness You're Here! is an absurd comedy slapformer set in the bizarre Northern English town of Barnsworth.
The humor very much worked with me. The demo was not difficult, but it was very enjoyable to go around the tiny part of the town I had access to and talk to the villagers and figure out how to help them.
Thank Goodness You’re Here on Steam
Dungeons of Hinterberg
Exploring dungeons seem to be a common tourist attraction in this game world. The game plays in 2 phases, exploring and resting. While exploring, you’ll be fighting monsters, using your skills to move around and solving puzzles. While resting, you can chat with the villagers and other friendly faces, improve your equipment, buy supplies, etc. The unique twist here is that much of your progress is locked behind improving your relationships with the various people around town. I think it’s a really neat idea, but it makes me a bit uncomfortable in the way it’s representing relationships as a mean to gain a bonus instead of just a way to learn more about the characters and the world.
Dungeons of Hinterberg on Steam
The good ones
Mind Over Magnet
The game from the man behind Game Maker’s Toolkit himself, Mark Brown. You’re playing as a tiny robot turning on switches to activate magnets and other tools to find your way to the end of the level. The puzzles were quite easy in the demo, but I could see that there was a lot of potential for more complex and interesting puzzles.
Dungeon Clawler
In this game, you control a claw machine to pick up items to fight a bunch of enemies. Pick up swords to attack, shields to block, and other items for various other fun effects. After each fight you can manipulate the content of the claw machine to include better weapons, better shields or new items with new effects. Once you fail, you start over from the beginning and try again and hope for better luck or better upgrades. I don’t know if this would still be interesting after a few hours, but the demo was fun.
Bô: Path of the Teal Lotus
Fight enemies, jump across platforms and solve puzzles in this difficult 2D game. The combat itself wasn’t too bad, but one puzzle in particular took me quite a few tries and required a couple of precise and quick inputs to succeed. I don’t know if the whole game will be like this or get harder, because it might be a bit too much for my liking. Otherwise, the game has a beautiful art style and controlled well, maybe you’re better or more patient than me at those kinds of games.
Bô: Path of the Teal Lotus on Steam
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
This one was quite chaotic and fun. You control a taxi (a yellow one obviously) and you need to make your way up platforms and ledges and slopes using a very limited set of moves in a 3D environment. You need to gather gears to unlock more levels and even with the few levels available in the demo, I could see that some of the gears will be very difficult to get to. Controlling the taxi is very fun and once you get the hang of how to combo the moves, you can go where you want surprisingly quickly.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom on Steam
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Armed with your trusty yoyo, you’re tasked with defeating the local criminals in order to save your aunt. Throughout the demo you’ll learn new tricks allowing you to solve more puzzles and defeat enemies more efficiently. The writing was fun and the puzzles were already interesting in this short demo, so it’s definitely one to watch.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo on Steam
Machinika: Atlas
The sequel to Machinika: Museum (which I haven’t played yet, but plan to), Atlas is a pure puzzle game. Explore the environment, find items and tinker with them to figure out how to use them to keep progressing and unlocking new areas and new puzzles. The puzzles in the demo weren’t particularly difficult, but they were still fun and seeing how the previous game was received, I’m sure it's going to be a good game.
The rest
Not necessarily bad games, but ones that I’m either not interested in playing more or that I need more information about the whole game before knowing if I want to give it a try.
One Btn Bosses
The demo was fun, but I could already see that this wasn’t for me. You’re going in circles around a boss while continuously shooting bullets at it. As the name of the game implies, you only have one button and depending on the ship you pick, that buttons does different things. The ones I tried let me change direction or speed up, both of which you do to avoid the boss’ attacks which are helpfully telegraphed.
Garden Galaxy
This is a very relaxing game without much of a goal. You put coins in a pot and you get random items that you can then place however you like. Put rarer coins, get rarer items, and so on. It controls well and looks good, but I prefer more structure in my games.
Tiny Glade
Another similar cozy game without a goal. This one is very impressive in how it manages to generate gorgeous looking buildings, walls, terrain, paths, and more. You can place walls, decorations, etc. anywhere, change their dimensions, textures, colors and the game will figure out how to render the whole thing beautifully and realistically. You can probably make some very impressive structures using the simple to use controls.
While Waiting
A game about literally waiting. You can interact a bit with your environment, but you’re on a timer. Each scene has a few achievements for things to do while waiting and you can try to guess what their slightly vague titles mean. Some of them looked quite difficult to achieve. But all in all, the game is still about waiting and each level I played would automatically end after a couple of minutes, no matter what I was doing. Maybe this could be a fun distraction on a phone while actually waiting in line somewhere.
Broken Lens
You get two views of the same scene and you need to find the differences. You can move around the scene, but it didn’t seem like there was much more to the gameplay than that.
Blue Prince
Maybe the one with the most potential from this last list, Blue Prince asks you to find a special room in this ever-changing manor. Each day, the rooms reset and you need to try to arrange the rooms differently to discover how the manor works and ways to progress further. You kind of need to play it to truly understand what kind of game it is. It has a lot of potential, but I’m not sure I’d want to go through re-arrange the rooms again and again if the game doesn’t change much day after day.
The August Before
I was expecting more of a puzzle game, but the demo is more about just cleaning up the room and putting a couple of items in a suitcase. It’s satisfying to steadily make progress and check the to-do list items, but if the whole game is similar and so light on puzzle elements, I think that’d be a pass for me.
Bilkins’ Folly
I actually quite liked this one, but technical issues makes me reconsider going for the full game. The demo tasks you with finding a few items based on rough maps of the tiny island. As you progress, you unlock some helpful tools like a lens to zoom out and a rule to mark lines on your own more detailed map. The first few puzzles are very simple, but the last puzzle suggests that the full game probably has some surprises up its sleeves. Unfortunately, my whole experience was a bit painful with lots of stuttering and slow animations even if it doesn’t look graphically demanding at all.