Steam Demo Roundup: May 2024

Published on Jun 3, 2024

Every once in a while, Steam puts on an event it calls Next Fest, where a bunch of developers (largely indies) open up demos of their upcoming games. These are some of the demos I played:

SCHiM: You're a little shadow frog. You get from place to place by hopping into the shadows of objects and people around you. Been looking forward to this one for a while. Played only as much as I needed to realize it's as fun as I hoped.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit: Retro 3D Arcade Racer. All the racing takes place in parking garages. Drifting features heavily. Very fun, very simple, feels good to control.

Tiny Glade: Chill building/city creator. Like Townscaper, but more freeform and with a brush tool.

Gourdlets: Animal Crossing without the structure. Make a cute little island full of stuff for some cute little guys to bop around for absolutely no reason.

Angeline Era - Wow wow wow the vibes are off the charts. Please please download this one and give it five minutes of your time, you will fall in love with it.

Cryptmaster - Dungeon Crawler where you type words to do things. Some cool mechanical hooks playing into that. You can type stuff and the Cryptmaster will respond to it. Extremely cool premise, love the art, voice acting is top notch.

Hauntii - Twin-Stick Shooter Adventure. Don't think this is entirely up my street, but it's VERY pretty, and very cute.

Follow the Meaning - Really pretty point-and-click adventure game, colored pencil-like art style. Lovely music. Not sure about the vibes on this one. Didn't click with it despite loving the art. Real shame.

That's all for this roundup! Until next time!