Rules of video games. Sometimes. They can be really cool. This can be difficult, however. Find them. The games are good, but the discoverability? Miserable. Storefronts prioritize what is already selling frenziedly despite an intimate record of your gaming habits. If your tastes generally lie outside of the roguelikes or survival gamesyou have noticed that you are not always served to your palette. This is why I love Steam Next Fest. An advertising showcase, certainly, but an easy opportunity to dig into the trenches of the video world.
Steam, for all its resources and data, never seems to measure up to my monster. In my experience, the moment I purchase Capcom software Pocket Fighter on sale, my discovery queue is stuffed every Monster Hunter under the sun. I think about my poor YouTube algorithm, so confused, so eager to please me, that the moment I watch an old Gordon Ramsay clip, the whole feed switches to Kitchen nightmare rebroadcasts and Raj clips. As if to say: “Now This I can work with it.
Three times a year, Steam organizes Next Fest. A digital alternative to the old E3 shows, the event prioritizes demos of upcoming works. This is a great opportunity, without investment, to not only discover the biggest and most curious hits on the horizon, but also to flesh out an idea of the games that excite you in particular. Because games don’t have third-party common areas like show theaters or record stores, this is as good as it gets for the most part.
Surprisingly, it’s on this note that Steam runs particularly flat. The games that headline Next Fest are just as traffic-driven as what the store draws attention to every other day of the year. If you’re like me, you keep an eye out for interesting curators and creators, putting games on your wishlist. But even if you are proactively, Steam does not have a feature to see if something you booked participated in the festivities (you’re welcome, by the way).
No one knows you as well as you do. Unfortunately, it’s up to you to try to shape an environment by following developers, creators, reviewers, curators, and feeds that seem to freeze. Like an esoteric game? Discover his Page latetake a look at his listings to see what company he keeps. Hit the wishlist button on Steam like this rainy day is going to be a biblical flood. You should probably find some itch.io feeds too, where creators you’ve purchased from enthusiastically share what they find exciting. And if you’re not used to it yet, here’s a quick overview of what I’ve covered so far, speaking as a someone very invested in outer orbits than most.
When I first played Corn Kidz 64I realized that not only could indie developers pursue the games they always wanted to make, but they could also make exactly the game they wanted. would be would have done if they could have made one back when they were a brooding goth teenager at the mall. This yarn has blossomed beautifully. There are a series of games that I have mentally categorized as “self-medicating interactions”, love games for the magic hat nature of what can be rendered on a computer and intense, uncontrollable energies taking the first possible multimedia form.
One of them is South-Southa manic and sinister Troopsushi platformer about a smiling purple bean descending into an urban underworld, its fast pace distracted only by the fidelity of detail. Every environment is filled with images busier than a 90s MTV bumper. In a similar class is STOLENa fun frog-based physics-based platformer with visual tonal shifts fast enough to make you feel like a sleeper cell agent being shown its trigger code.
Reappearing after a while is Explosive catsan eclectic and explosive 3D platformer built on all the PlayStation games you’ve seen ads for but haven’t saved the money to play. Another long awaited piece of goodness is psia first-person adventure about cults, plumbing, and frogs. And if you have snow this week, you might as well force the cold deeper with Subjectificationan offbeat horror game about a frozen and bitter world.
Mommy’s Best, which has a long history of making games in a world where the Amiga was beating the Super Nintendo, has prepared a demo for its latest, Chain sticka luscious, Howling Metal-run and gun flavored. Another retro-inspired game that would make more sense in another dimension is Bad pixelsa 3D western shooter rendered to look like something you might find on a floppy disk the size of your outstretched hand. And if you miss light rail shooters and love names that would make an arcade operator wrinkle their nose, you owe it to yourself to check it out. ᴛᴜᴍᴏʀ ɴᴇᴄʀᴏꜱɪꜱ ꜰᴀᴄᴛᴏʀ:// αᴍᴇɴ.
Again, just a vertical slice of what’s out there for those who have hit a wall. Find the routine that suits you, keep tabs and expand your video game world. Big industry won’t do it. If you’re doing it for something, do it out of spite.
