More demos I'm enjoying!

Three games about lanes, plus two about brains.

And so we reach the end of another Steam Next Fest! It’s always a delight to log on and see a boatload of new demos to play, and always a little surprising since I have no idea when Next Fests are. (If this question has an answer, I don’t want to know it.)

Here’s a few I recommend you check out!

Rift of the NecroDancer

Steam/Klei Publishing

This is the only demo that made me sit straight up out of bed with the single-minded desire to go play more. I have bought full-priced Steam games and put less time into them than this demo.

My most succinct pitch for Rift of the NecroDancer is, “What if Guitar Hero had enemy types?” Slimes and skeletons march to the beat, while shielded skeletons require a beat-offbeat double tap to finish off. Zombies zag across lanes, dragons take a long button press to cleave from nose to tail, and plates of cheese refill your health if you time them right.

I never played Brace Yourself’s Crypt of the NecroDancer (to which this is nominally a spinoff), mostly because it seemed too complicated. Rift, by contrast, funnels its enemies down a three-lane track, all gorgeously drawn and animated, with a generous amount of screen real estate allotted to portraits of its really very hot characters. This streamlining narrowed my focus without overwhelming me, even on very difficult patterns. It hits the perfect flow state.

Needless to say, the songs also go.

I’m super excited for this game and have tons to say about it, but I bet I’ll get the chance to write more soon.

Keep Driving

Steam/YCJY Games

In my first playthrough of Keep Driving, a woman I’d just met dared me to share a drink with her before we hit the road. Inexcusable, I know—but I was young and eager to impress. We tore into the case of cheap beer I kept in the trunk, and anyway it all ended with me passing out in a traffic jam. After sleeping it off on the side of the road, we rolled into the next town and recouped at a diner. I bought a whole blueberry pie that we picked at for the rest of the trip.

Keep Driving is a road trip RPG with impeccable vibes and a radio full of garage rock. Its gameplay is understated, encounters resolved via a symbol matching minigame using the abilities of your “party” of hitchhikers. These are less fireball and defend, more chill out and step on it. And the encounters themselves are only about as dire as an argument between passengers or a slick road.

Managing gas, tiredness, and your ever-dwindling cash reserves, plus trunk space and intrusive thoughts, keep you plenty busy in Keep Driving. But these systems are far greater than the sum of their parts, as everything works in service of a particular feeling: youth, chance meetings, and a wide-open road. It makes for a weirdly emotional experience, and one I’d recommend to anybody.

StarVaders

Steam/Joystick Ventures

I resent that the Steam page calls this game StarVaders rather than Star★Vaders, which is how it appears in my library. Let no one dull your sparkle.

And besides, the star does a good job of setting expectations! Not only is this a Space Invaders-inspired roguelike deckbuilder—it’s also a mecha anime! Its designs are super fun and bombastic, and though I was initially wary of the sheer density of information it presents you with, I basically ignored the tutorial and still caught on very quickly. The art, tactical gameplay, and progression all flowed together and made it go down smoooth.

Certain genre elements, like the deckbuilding and node-based map, were familiar. Others were wholly unique: directionality matters, since most of your basic attacks only let you shoot upward; your energy each turn goes up, not down, so you can choose to play a few extra cards each turn at the cost of overheating (although, based on what little I’ve seen of the game’s other characters, it seems each one has its own vastly different playstyle).

I approached my first run with a strategy no more complex than “take everything with ‘bomb’ in the name,” so I was treated to frequent screen clears and chain reactions. Probably this also means I didn’t get a good sense of difficulty—but any roguelike you can break wide open on your first playthrough gets an A+ in my book.

Mindcop

Steam/Dear Villagers

Mindcop is a game with a ton of ideas. On the face of it, it’s a detective game. But you also need to manage how you spend your allotment of hours each workday, and that comes with meaningful choices in which leads you follow and which dialogues you pursue. On top of all that, there’s a puzzle minigame to access each witness’s subconscious—hence the name Mindcop.

What ultimately clinched it for me was the humor. You play as a dweeb maybe famous investigator who introduces himself as “the Mindcop” (as in, “Hello, I’m the Mindcop”). In an interstitial cutscene, he opines to his very tall partner Linda that it’s actually a good thing to be bad at your job, because if you’re too good of a detective, there won’t be any more crime to solve. His power of “mindsurfing” opens a whole other layer of psyche-related humor, like the little Mindcop fan club going on in the mind of a buffoonish small town cop.

The demo ends abruptly, before you really get a chance to make headway into the first investigation, so I can’t say how it all comes together. But it’s got some juice in its presentation and writing, and I’ll definitely keep an eye on it when it comes out.

Grab Bag

DEEPMESS. A turn-based tactics roguelike in which you lobotomize God. Star★Vaders took this game’s place in my main recommendations, and whereas that game is very kinetic, DEEPMESS feels more puzzley as your squad passes a single hammer between them to dispatch enemies and delve deeper into God’s dome. It’s got a 3D, almost claymation art style that I think will really hook some people. (Corey Hardt gave a more in-depth review over at Thinky Games, check it out!)

PLUG IT IN. Another all-caps puzzle rec! Each level presents you with a power strip and several plugs, giving you the meditative task of fitting them all in together. It’s clean, it’s minimal, and there’s a good mix of difficult, brainteasing puzzles and pleasant, brainscratching puzzles.

Lurks Within Walls. This game is full of surprises. I was offput at first by the oppressive film grain and camera effect, before realizing that this isn’t just another horror walking sim: it’s a full honest-to-god dungeon crawler, with grid-based movement and turn-based combat. The enemies are designed by Trevor Henderson, the artist best known for Siren Head, and these steal the show by far.

Ballionaire. This pachinko roguelike didn’t actually click with me. But I’m including it because, if you like games about seeing very big numbers (Luck be a Landlord and Balatro), I want you to tell me if it clicks with you!

Phew, almost done.

Office Overloaded. An office-themed typing game, pretty thin at the moment but a demo I wasn’t expecting to get as into as I did!

Gladio Mori. Slo-mo physics-based fighter with shades of Toribash, I hope this game gets a lot more support!

HYPERBEAT. The other rhythm demo I played, this one more osu! than Guitar Hero. Precision rhythm games aren’t really my speed, but the early computer art style and Miku’s grandpa vocals did hit!

Thanks for reading!

I had a blast playing all of these—even the bad ones I didn’t list here—so bear with me if I start doing more review-style posts. I’m planning an update pretty soon to talk about posting schedule stuff, but if you want more demo recs give a shout!

DR