Steam Demo Spree, Feb 2025

4 March 2025

This post is basically a compilation of posts I made to my girlfriend over roughly a week and change during the back half of Steam Next Fest. I am the kind of autistic who needs to wrap up threads in my brain, and being able to clear out mental space by wiping off part of my wishlist was really fun! And my girlfriend really enjoyed hearing my reactions to trying various games.

If you don't know me or know much about my taste in games this will probably mean very little to you. For a more objective discussion of more recent demos, I recommend you read her recent article about NextFest demos.

Stuff i liked

• Angel at Dusk: GREAT NEWS the angelic body horror shmup plays like butter tooooo, this is good shit
• The Beekeeper's Picnic - A Sherlockian Adventure: I think Sherlock and Watson as old retirees should kiss.
• Blood Typers: I would gladly play this with other folks. It feels great and it's got a really fun style. It's a little thin on narrative hooks for a single-player experience, but the monster design is great and with friends I could see this being super fun.
• Cornucopia: this feels like Stardew Valley 2, and I mean that in a good way. why did Stardew Valley have to have like 4 major content updates why didn't they just make me a sequel.
• COVEN: sort of hrm witch stuff aside THEY MADE BLOOD FOR WOMEN-SCORNED, HELL YEAH
• DEAD LETTER DEPT.: oh we all KNEW this was going to leave me salivating, come on
• Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken: I played five minutes of this before I bailed because I already knew it was my shit and there was no point me continuing to play a demo which would simply confirm that I already knew I would enjoy the new scriptwelder deep sleep game. come on, I know me.
• Discolored: ahhh I love dumb 3d adventure games, I need more games like this
• Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers: I actually never tried playing this until now and it turns out the only thing i might be more autistic about than poker hands is blackjack
• The Drifter: Great narration in this point and click and a really slick vibe, def into this mystery.
• Escape from Lavender Island: psychedelic adventure games are good actually
• HITM3: once i hit the thruple lying in bed after a night out at the club where tehy got called fags I closed the game because i was so hooked i didn't want to spoil myself further
• Idle Colony: fuit gummie...
• Kotel Ne Gori: A Friend of Lena Boots: somebody obsessed with Samosbor made a game about their negaverse Touhou OCs and injected it with psychedelics. I need to show you this later just for the visual effect
• LOK: anything Draknek publishes is gold
• Miss Paint: Incredibly well designed puzzle game, and captures the feeling of making fake video games in mspaint as a kid.
• Pip My Dice: Turns out Yahtzee + Balatro fuckin whips
• POOLS: I love dumb backrooms exploration games, and they're even better with no monsters. uh, somebody needs to fix the sound design tho cause the L/R footstep panning nearly drove me insane alkdjakdj
• Proverbs: oh this is literally mega mosaic again cool alright I'm down
• Relentless Frontier: It's a gzdoom game, course it's my shit lol.
• Rogue Voltage: HOOOOOOO this one is FUN, the wiring mechanic is super satisfying and when it pops it feels sooooo gooooooood.
• S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH: OH SHIT WOW THIS IS MY KIND OF VISUAL NOVEL.
• Slitterhead: SICK monster designs, great urban environment, fun possession mechanics with good combat, and Akira Yamaoka is on the score. Baby I'm sold.
• Succubus Roulette: It's buckshot roulette but the loser gets fucked by animated chains. cool fuck yeah
• Yumeiri: i love weird RPGs, and this one is super charming
• 交界线 Red Line: I love horror RPGMaker games they're dumb but I love them
• The Time I Have Left: the way this is blending time-based adventure game progression with turn-based avoidance battles against psychological opponents is very surreal and does it for me, even if it is a bit weirdly modal. like idk if it really works but it's extremely cool

Didn't make the cut

• ANNO: Mutationem: Oozing style but its substance is basically just Anime Cyberpunk and the gameplay is kind of lackluster. Alas.
• Blood on the Thames: meh I just don't really like this kind of visual novel mystery
• Butcher's Creek: wow, it's all the granular melee combat of Condemned: Criminal Origins but without any of the story or an ideology beyond "masculinity grifter hicks are scary"
• Cats and Dice: Turns out Yahtzee Balatro is just okay. Definitely fared a little poorly in comparison to Pip My Dice, which has more compelling features. This felt a little barebones.
• Copycat: This was so cloying I got distracted trying to figure something out and gave up playing
• Dice Gambit: The game prompted me to "Follow our memes on X!" and I promptly exited the game.
• Flambeau: Unfortunately the porn game targeting my dumb wax ghost shit is about as much fun as a Cartoon Network flash game.
• Hypnosis Card 2 Happy Life: Very slick presentation, & i do sorta like the mechanics. Except the map sucks and I locked myself out of ever getting to visit a shop because one didn't spawn in region three lol. But more than that, I just wanna ask dudes who are into this kind of hypno noncon: hey, can we talk? I just wanna talk to you. I just wanna talk a sec.
• I doesn't exist - a modern text adventure: I'm gonna be real, and unfortunately quite mean, but this plays horribly. As somebody who has played a lot of text adventures this feels so clunky and blugh that after I accidentally quit the game I decided it wasn't worth bothering to try again.
• LiDAR Exploration Program: They made Scanner Sombre for people who didn't want there to be a story. It's great if you like lidar gameplay! Alas, I want a story.
• Minigolf Blast: A little too Monkey Ball, doesn't quite capture the kitsch thrill of the original Sierra game.
• Mirror Layers: actually this one was disappointing it just didn't have much going on
• Phoenix Springs: Yooooo this is so fucking sick, I love adventure games.
• Usurper: this really needs some UI tune-ups because it's honestly a little gruelingly unresponsive but the CONCEPT is really fun and i love the idea of hyper-granular chess with all the insane additional pieces
• Luto: Literally the graphics would be a smooth 60 fps and then I would turn a little too fast and then the game would freeze and rotate me 170 degrees in the opposite direction I was turning. So nauseating and disorienting that I gave up trying to play it.
• The Axis Unseen: Generic Trailer Metal Music: The Game
• Tom the postgirl: Honestly the tone of this one didn't quite land for me? And it felt a little empty.

That's it for me! I think I'm officially cutting myself off from demos until next demo fest.