Quoting: NezchanLinkito (Native): Electronics puzzles with a mid-20th century corporate/propaganda vibe. Looks like a solid game, but I don't have sufficient brain for the genre. Runs very well though, and the vibe is on point.

Tried it as well and due repeatable crash during tutorial, I switched to Proton. I was way too tired to properly enjoy it, but as far as the difficulty goes, it feels easier than Zachtronics games, though demo is almost all tutorial. Last few puzzles start to give some challenge.

I think I can recommend this, though might not be in my top five demos.

Heroes of Loot: Gauntlet of Power
Pretty solid roguelite. There's bit of arcade feel in there, though that could be the Gauntlet influence. Clear rooms and collect loot. I like how you can mount weapon to each direction when leveling up. Too bad the weapons don't have any explanation what they do.

Developer mentioned that the aim is that everybody is able to finish the game at least once. Which is rare in games like this.

If you like bullet hell games or rogue lites, this one is worth trying out.

Moon Mystery
Sci-fi FPS, with some actual plot thrown in. Demo is bit incoherent mess at times and at times it's easy to get lost what to do as the demo jumps through the game in random order. Ambitious for sure though and maybe they're even able to deliver some kind of game in the end. Maybe even too ambitious as there sure is some jank.

If you're starving for FPS, it might be worth taking a look, though I am Your Beast might satiate you better as it's in better shape. And there must be better FPS demo out there as I have tried only few so far.

Now it feels that I have played enough good demos to enlarge the top five to top ten. Sorted in level of excitement:

Alters
Tactical Breach Wizards
What the Car?
Schim
Just Crow Things
Aska
Heroes of Loot: Gauntlet of Power
I Am Your Beast
Linkito
Endzone 2

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Alters

Base builder mixed with crafting and mining. On top of that is sci-fi story wrapped in AA package. Slight Control vibes.

Basically you get stranded in alien world and have to figure out how to survive. Good fun, especially if they can keep the story going in the full game and there's hints that that will be the case. I have hunch that these AA quality games disappear fastest.

I think I played this with Proton 8 (I switched the default to 9 after this)

Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter

Souls like side scrolling RPG influenced platformer. There's lot of exposition in the beginning, though far from worst offender. Fights have lot of telegraphing and once you get hang of it, one or two enemies should be easy enough to handle. Though problem for me was how to keep my weapon sharp and health from running out in middle of battle. I gave up before I figured it out, though there is easier difficulty.

The RPG part seems to be collecting loot and choosing what to use. Seems solid enough, so if you like the genre, it's worth a try.

PS: gamepad works maybe for a while in the menu, rest of the demo you need to use keyboard (game suggest using a controller though, so maybe that will be eventually sorted out)

Aska
Openworld survival craft with vikings. Compared to Valheim though, the textures have higher resolution and objects have more polygons. Building are premade though, so there's less room for creativity.

Higher fidelity means though that seeing objects is harder. It takes a while also to figure out what can be interacted with. For example there's lot of bushes and stones that are there just to look pretty. Game has workaround for that as there's option that let you scan for interactive things.

The tribe management might slightly more unique feature. Tribe people do have some basic requirements, but after you get that sorted out, they can start doing all sort of tasks. I haven't played the demo all the way through, but there seemed to be several buildings that let you automate lot of the manual tasks if you have enough workers.

If you're not already bored with the genre, it's worth trying out.

I think I had Proton 8 still when playing the game, didn't notice any issues though.

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers
Does Balatro feel too complicated? In blackjack your decisions are just to hit or stay. Like Balatro there's lot of cheating opportunities, though I got bored after a while. Higher difficulty might make things bit more interesting. Though Balatro still wins hands down. And for those looking for simpler experience, there's also highly addictive Luck Be A Landlord.

PS: I had odd issue that if hit esc, hit and stay buttons stopped functioning. As keyboard user, I have instinct to do that.

VR

None of the interesting VR games happened to work. Lot of crashes and things not rendering in the headset. Only one game almost worked, but had double vision.

Switched back and forth between Proton Experimental and Proton 9.0, but that didn't fix any of the games.

Here's list of games that I tried:
- D-Day VR Museum (didn't start)
- On Point (started, but there was double vision)
- Pirates VR: Jolly Roger (crashed)
- Subside (not sure, but i think problem was that I didn't render anything)
- Frenzy Blood (didn't render in the headset)
- Rune Bender (didn't render in the headset)
- Phantom Bound (didn't render in the headset)

So probably just in case need to test game that's know to work, just in case if something is wrong in the VR setup. The On Point would be nice to get working as it's basically lightgun minigames.

Top five is now as follows:
Alters
Tactical Breach Wizards
What the Car?
Schim
Just Crow Things

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Quoting: Nezchan

Quoting: AnzaEndzone 2

This one feels like simplified Surviving the Aftermath. Not necessarily in bad way in some cases. It's post apocalyptic city builder where plastic and scrap are important resources.

Wait, it's not an American football sim?

As developers are from Germany, they might not have know the term. So now there are sports game developers who are pissed that they didn't using that name first...

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Just quick one today, spent lot of time with Endzone 2.

Wizards of Legends 2

Basically rogulite where you do randomly generated trial and probably die before you finish it. Second one seems to have gotten slight Hades influences. First one had more dungeon like structure, but this one has more open arenas.

I guess it's fine and might be improvement on the first one. Though I think I would rather play Hades.

Endzone 2

This one feels like simplified Surviving the Aftermath. Not necessarily in bad way in some cases. It's post apocalyptic city builder where plastic and scrap are important resources. There are multiple bad things that can happen starting from running out of food and water. It doesn't get easier as drought can limit your production quite drastically, so you need to have good stockpiles. Radiation and sickness you cause issues too. At least in the demo, the radiation was slowly raising, so you need to produce more and more different protection gear.

Exploration by car is rewarded with resources and small scavenging puzzles, which barely offer a challenge. If you decide to play the demo, when it asks you to find another site that might contain uniquer resources, there's total three sites in total and the unique resource is revealed only after you settled in.

Small exploration is needed to get knowledge points, but tech three is mostly blocked in the demo, you might need maybe five or six knowledge points in total to unlock everything.

One thing I was confused with is that people need houses, but there's nothing where you can check how many homeless people you have. Workaround is just build another house and see if it gets full. Not sure how much it affects happiness as mostly happiness is either rising or dropping.

I guess this is best out of three city builders I have tried this time. Though it's the most traditional one as Gourdlets is more of sandbox and Fera is in third person view. So 57 demos still to try if I want to have more complete comparison.

Still, Endzone was mostly fun, even when there were few indications that some essentials are still missing. Only annoyance I didn't mention is that autosave blocks everything and cancels whatever you were doing. At least there's warning that it's coming.

I think my top five remains the same for now.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: EhvisHad initial issues because my .steam directory was not what the setup script wanted and it couldn't find the runtime. After "fixing" that, it worked and I could enable async reprojection.

Yep. Basically, run SteamVR using `bin/vrstartup.sh` instead of launching it through Steam. This might also work:

https://github.com/Scrumplex/Steam-Play-None [External Link]

I have SteamVR installed in nonstandar location. Steam wouldn't otherwise like it, but I keep it happy by providing it a symlink, so it thinks the installation is in original location. My Steam installation is in slow spinning media, but I like to keep Steam VR on NVME.

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Fera: The Sundered Tribes
Seems to be some kind of openworld survivald craft thing with a tribe management. There's some verticality though some kind of grapling hook and gliding is also possibility. Sadly got soft lockup in building menu, so I didn't actually get past the tutorial. Might have potential, but hard to say now. It's indeed an alpha version.

Megacopter: Blades of the Goddes

Quoting: kaimanMegacopter reminds me of Desert Strike. Quite the fantastic game on the Amiga (at least graphically). But not something I feel overly keen revisiting, though ...

I'm also familiar with Desert Strike. Megacopters graphics at least are somewhat from that era. Graphics look slightly amateurish. Based on the screenshots I have seen, things will get even wackier and there's some taste of that in the demo.

Gameplay is fine though. There's some enemy variation and exploration is encouraged (especially if you're running out of health or missiles). Mouse and keyboard will probably make the game lot easier, but didn't try that out.

Still interesting enough, so if the genre interests at all, just try it out.

Just Crow Things
As far the technical issues, only problem I had was that the gamepad mapping didn't match to my controller. Took a moment to figure out what the controls actually where. Otherwise it's Rain on Your Parade, but with a crow. OK, not exactly, but it does feel familiar at places.

Basically there's some quests around the maps and lot of opportunities to cause mayhem.

Steam Next Fest flyers is nice touch.

Worth trying out if you have some patience with the technical issues

What the Car?

Quoting: NezchanWHAT THE CAR? (Steam Play): I mean what do you expect on this one? If you played WHAT THE GOLF? this is more of the same, but racing this time. It's very good and you should play

I don't have much to add. Soundtrack is nice, though this time around the surprise element is missing as cars form is announced before the level starts. Also wackier ideas seem to be drying out. Surprisingly demo had user created levels and it seems to be a thing in the full game too. Bad humor hasn't been drying out though, there's example bear that's waiting for steam release.

Still, had enough fun. It's worth taking a look.

Goblin Cleanup
Variation of Viscera Cleanup Detail. This time around you're goblin waifu who has to restore the dungeon for next set of heroes. Expect to die many times as the traps are intact. Some of them you can disable temporarily. So not exactly relaxing cleaning game.

It was fun enough, so it's worth trying out.

Top five at the moment, this time around they are actually in some kind of order:
Tactical Breach Wizards
What the Car?
Schim
Just Crow Things
Dungeon Clawler

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeI tried gourdlets the other day when I read your article

It was fun to build things but I was expecting more from the ai, they didn't seem to do much apart from weirdly just hanging out in the cemetery

Tried Gourdlets myself too and that's quite accurate description. It's kind of fantasy themed Sims. Gameplay loop seems to be to build something new and see if gourdlets interact with it. If they do, they might evolve and help unlocking something new. At the same time, you can make everything look nice, though gourdlets don't really care about that. Can be fun until you run out of new things to build.

Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeI'll probably try Schim next

I gave it a go and and it's positively weird one. Yes, there's jumping from shadow to shadow, but the world is alive. The world is telling a story, which at times hits right into feels. The objectives are quite vague, they just point to right direction and then there's something to interact with at the end. Not a blocker, just takes some time to adjust.

Worth trying out.

Quoting: PhiladelphusI don't think it's part of Next Fest as the demo came out last week, but I quite enjoyed the demo for Tactical Breach Wizards, the third game from Tom Francis, continuing his quest to make defenestration an integral part of every game he makes. It's a bit like a combination of Into The Breach and XCOM: Chimera Squad, with some great writing and interesting puzzle battles to solve. And watching wizards use Breaching Glyphs to breach 'n' clear is just hilarious.

It was surprisingly fun. Into the Breach inspiration is kind of clear as levels are puzzle like and pushing enemies mechanic is lifted clearly from there too. It's not exact copy though. Giving characters bit different spell set adds to the tactical depth for example.

The story is nice touch too. Lot of bit wacky characters and levels seem bit less random as they have some relevance to the story. The magic in sci-fi setting goes into weird places too.

Worth giving a go if you're into tactics games.

Cats and Seek: Kyoto
Hidden objects games are usually nice diversion and this one is not an exception. Nice touch is that cats have small descriptions. Also the color palette is adjustable. I watched the stream for a while and there's also coloring book feature and jigsaw puzzles.

Vampire Therapist
Ever wanted to be a therapist? This game lets you have a try and it does require some observation skills. There's bit of a story and it's mostly well written enough. Small section are bit oddly written and how one is transformed into vampire doesn't seem entirely logical. I haven't played lot of visual novels, so it's hard to compare it to other games.

I Am Your Beast
Boomer shooter mixed with speedrunning game. There's maybe bit of Superhot influences thrown in the mix too. Basically there's limited time to fulfill the objective and then escape. Demo shows how difficult it will get by throwing in level 17 as last level of the demo. Last level requires bit of tactical thinking and I was able to survive after quite many tries. Too bad time ran out and then I gave up.

Level design is quite nice and story is nice subversion to trope of getting people out of retirement for a last mission.

Worth trying out if you like fast paced shooters.

Top three at the moment for are:
Schim
Tactical Breach Wizards
Dungeon Clawler

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Quoting: NezchanDungeon Clawer (Native): Dungeon crawler with a claw machine mechanic. Your items, plus useless fluff, are tossed into a tank and you get two grabs per round, and what comes out is auto-applied to the enemies. Fun enough, and there are interesting mechanics like filling the tank with water, or enemies throwing poison in for you to pick up. But I think it needs a little more. no combat sound effects, which is odd, and the music is VERY repetitive.

There's actually promise that that there will be more. The claw part seems slightly useless at first, but it works surprisingly well once things get more complicated.

PS: fluff isn't totally useless as for example you can burn it, which makes it apply damage to enemies

Quoting: NezchanTiny Glade (Native): Probably needs no introduction. Works great, designing is intuitive. Very small amount of area or things to do at this point, but it's early days. Nice little diversion.

Can't say much more. Nice thing is how things adapt to parts you build. Hopefully there will lot of more things to build, otherwise it will get boring bit too quickly.

Airship: Lost Flotilla
As far as autoshooters go, it's fine. Short battles and you can choose your own route. Good amount of polish. Ship being on fire makes things slightly more interesting as it's another upgrade path. Still seems like it needs maybe one or two more interesting twists to make it actually interesting. I didn't feel like that I needed to play it more than half an hour.

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Quoting: JarmerOut of these, I've only played the Lego racing game. It's a perfect little game for the Deck! Runs well, and is very arcadey and fun which is great for short sessions. Definitely recommend.

Looked at the reviews out of curiosity and it's full of microtransactions and grinding. The bundle is actually great deal as it contains the costly DLC, which probably make the game probably much better. I wonder if they're using the bundle to get some positive reviews to balance out the current negative ones.

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It kind of gets worse with this bundle. Some of them are not meant to be installed, they're meant to be printed out. I guess most people do have common sense not to do that.

I actually don't install or even activate lot of the keys on Humble Bundle right away as I'll try to keep my list of unplayed games small (100 at the moment). Downside is that the keys might might become stale at some point (I do have one game which has been waiting for keys for quite long time), which hopefully doesn't happen that much on itc.io.

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