Steam Next Fest: June 2025

possible salmonella and reviews of demos for new games soon to be released on Steam

Last week, I was sicker than I had been in a while. I’m not sure what happened but I did eat some eggs that I found out had been recalled for Salmonella. Suffice to say, I’m excited that there’s going to be less food safety under our current administration.

My moments outside of nausea were like waking up into a nightmare. I would lie half awake and incredibly nauseous, throw up and feel briefly better and look at my phone and see images of civilians being shot with “non-lethal” projectiles in L.A.

I feel physically better and slightly more optimistic after attending a hilariously genteel “No Kings” protest that was perversely moving. There was something about seeing frail elderly people with protest signs and Hispanic families out on the streets that touched me. But things are fucking dark.

I distracted myself with Steam: Next Fest. Several times a year, Steam features tons of demos from indie games as well as bigger publishers on their site. I tried quite a few, I only wrote reviews for the ones that actually left me with some sort of impression. I probably only played each for about a half-hour, in general I don’t like to extensively play demos because they could spoil the full experience for me.

So rather than fair reviews, these are more like an attempt to describe my experience and see if it’s something that would interest you.

I decided to rush out this piece in time for Sunday, so people could still play the same demos I am discussing here. So, if you’re reading this on Sunday, June 15, you have one day to try out any number of games on Steam, including the ones reviewed in capsule form here

Azaran: Islands of the Jinn

This “Ocarina of Time” influenced game is charming but shares some of the pitfalls of its source material. I’m someone who has never finished the original game because i find something about it off-putting.

You play a prince with a talking owl companion who starts out trapped in a cave. The aesthetics have a 90’s Disneyfied “Arabian Nights” feel to it.

The graphics and controls feel like a cleaner version of the N64 era. The game even uses the idiosyncratic use of multiple actions tied to one button, with situational prompts appearing on the screen. Your character also jumps automatically as Link does in “Ocarina of Time”.

I found this pleasant and involving. What started to grate were the instances of timed puzzles with a very tight timing. I’m hoping these won’t be a major factor in the final game, because I tend to find this kind of design very irritating.

The other thing that kind of made me lose interest was after beating a boss (maybe a mini-boss) I was still stuck in the cave which made me wonder if the entire game would be in the same tileset. I’m guessing beyond the demo the world will open up, but I started to feel claustrophobic.

Outrider Mako

This Japanese game is incredibly cute and has a lot of nice touches. You play a girl who has been sucked into an afterlife and is now a marebito (a kind of spirit creature.) You have to make deliveries of materials that you gather and fight other hostile entities.

All the animations and characters are very adorable and give the impression of a fun time. There is a wealth of background details in the main hub, where lots of bizarre little creatures are cavorting around.

The actual gameplay is pretty complex as well are the many systems that you interact with. I couldn’t fully tell if the combat was something that would eventually click with me or if it was a bit off, but it probably needs more fine tuning. It revolves around jumping on top of creatures, covering them with red wax and making them explode. This is really fun but the timing to do it correctly felt a bit finicky.

Gathering materials is very satisfying with a nice animation and satisfying sounds. I was a little concerned that this being an integral part of the game would become tedious.

There appears to be a roguelike element to the game as well, with picking up different “blessings” or buffs that lasted for each run. But this didn’t bother me as it did seem to more backgrounded.

Baby Steps

Benett Foddy’s new game feels a lot less combative than some of his output in the past but still retains the same experimental spirit of his other games. Baby Step’s opening is almost a punchline; you see your awkward man-child protagonist in third person as the first cut-scene ends, you press the left joystick to move forward and he faceplants. You discover that the characters legs are controlled by pressing the left and right triggers of your controller. The experience of walking, usually a given in video games, is part of the challenge of the whole game.

This could be as difficult as it was in “Getting over it” but it’s also feels like it’s less in a spirit of frustration than experimentation.

I’m not entirely sure about the ergonomics of the controls. I think too many current games bind action to the triggers rather than face buttons, so by the time I was done playing my fingers were getting pretty sore from pressing the triggers.

Holstin

Despite the art style being very lovely, I found something quite grating about “Holstin”. Set in a Polish city, where your journalist friend has disappeared during an investigation of a slaughterhouse. Of course, being a survival horror protagonist, you immediately sally forth and start killing the infected. Much like “You Will Die Here Tonight”, the game switches from a fixed camera perspective to third person when aiming your firearm. It feels and looks cool to shoot creatures in their weak points.

However, once I left this more tutorial area, I found myself a lot more frustrated than intrigued by the world outside. Everything in the town was blocked off except for two different construction sites where NPCS both demanded some sort of item to move forward the plot of the game. I wanted to be able to explore a bit more.

More effective were the actions of a childlike NPC in a military unform who kept bumping into me and initiating pointless dialogue. This was also annoying, but it was also a bit unnerving because I kept mistaking him for an enemy.

The game uses the left and right bumpers to changed perspective in the fixed camera view it normally operates in. So the entire world will rotate, and you can see things from a new perspective.

This seems like this could be used for interesting puzzle solving but all I kept finding were bullets and more cigarettes. After spending a fruitless half an hour searching for a crowbar at the construction site, I gave up.

I’m also not very good at adventure games, but one of the pitfalls I find the genre often has is not giving you very much to go on. One of the things I like about survival horror is while there are puzzles, there’s not much difficulty in figuring them out. In that way, I get to scratch my adventure game itch while being stupid.

Devil Spire Falls

One of the things that has surprised me about Iron Pineapple’s fandom, is that millions of people watch his series “Soulslikes you’ve never heard of” (which inspired my first bit of writing on this platform). But out of those millions, comparatively few seem to check out the games he features. Despite the original “Devil Spire” being featured on a video that had 3.6 million views, the actual reviews of the game are under 500.

This is unfortunate because “Devil Spire” had interesting first person combat and felt like a roguelike “Kings Field” mixed with an immersive sim.

Now, one of the developers has put out a sequel and it’s one the more eccentric and involving demos I played this weekend.

If “Devil Spire” was a straightforward Dungeon-crawler, Devil Spire Falls is an attempt to make an experience more like “Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall” albeit procedurally generated.

To explain this, if you’ve never played “Daggerfall”, the game was one of the first open world sandboxes with the in-world map being the equivalent size of the U.K.

While not at this level of complexity, “Devil Spire Falls” has a greatness of ambition. Unlike a run-based structure, an entire open-world is generated and seems to have some complexity. It remains to be seen how complex it will get as it seems what is here is at an alpha stage with simple enemies and dungeons.

Nevertheless, there’s something pretty cool about what is here, being able to sneak into a dungeon and massacre a bunch of bandits is one of my favorite things about another Elder Scrolls game; Morrowind. And that is what I mostly did on my playthrough, although I discovered that you can talk to them as well.

The bandits also had a ton of different weapons and classes which made combat interesting, although a bit slower and more basic than the original game.

Oddly the entire world seems to be on a timer, so I’m not sure what happens when that timer runs out. But this is yet another bit of oddness added to the whole thing.

It must be said that at a graphical level, this is quite a downgrade from “Devil Spire”. But if a compromise has to be made for one person to do this, I would rather graphics be sacrificed than gameplay complexity

At any rate, the demo is involving stuff and I’m hoping it becomes bigger and better than “Devil Spire” ever was.

Knight of Nevermore

While definitely a more amateurish looking title than some of the other Indie games, I thought Knight of Nevermore was cool looking, resembling some sort of shareware sidescroller from the 90’s. The backgrounds and many of the enemies look like a plussed up version of “Lode Runner”

There does seem to be some effort putting a more complex combat system with parries and stuns. There is also some interesting stuff with differing weapons with special abilities. This looked cool, my only qualm was whether the game would ever move on from the basic tile set at the beginning because I could see this growing quite old.

“Knights of Nevermore” is operating in the mode of the roguelike structure which everyone is justifiably quite tired of. I personally am a little disappointed every time I see a roguelike structure being part of a game. But I also accept it, as I realize it’s one of the only ways for small dev teams to make products that can seem professional on very limited resources. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if “Knights of Nevermore” will be able to go beyond its inspirations or will end up being simply more of the type of thing that people are sick of.

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound

The game with the greatest pedigree, a new “Ninja Gaiden” game by The Game Kitchen, the studio who made “Blasphemous” was also sadly a bit disappointing.

Granted I might be more of a stickler than a lot of people, in that I am a huge fan of the incredibly difficult Tecmo “Ninja Gaiden” for the NES. So, I had hoped a new 2D Ninja Gaiden would perhaps be a return to form.

But the problem to me is that “Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound” felt much less like a Ninja Gaiden game and more like a remake of The Messenger (2018). The Messenger was a game I loved but I wasn’t particularly eager to dive into another precision platformer with finicky mechanics.

“Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound” also suffers from a long tutorial that you can die in. The issue is that if your tutorial contains parts that are that difficult than just put them in the main game?

By no means is the game bad, I just had much higher expectations given who was making it and the property itself.