Steam Next Fest is going on until March 3rd, and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time wading through a seemingly endless carousel of games, filling up my Steam Deck’s internal and external memory looking for the Good Shit™. I’ve landed on four standout game demos that are worth your time now and whenever their full games release.
The Talos Principle Reawakened
The best way to describe The Talos Principle: Reawakened is if Portal was harder, less funny, and written by C.S. Lewis if he knew what a robot was. Reawakened is a remaster of 2014’s The Talos Principle. But according to the developers at Croteam, Reawakened doesn’t just take the original and slap on a next-gen coat of paint; it also adds new story content and a new puzzle editor so players can create their own challenges.
Reawakened strikes the perfect difficulty balance – not too simple, not too frustrating – that makes its puzzles delightful to figure out. In the demo, you play as a robot tasked with solving puzzles using lasers, signal jammers, and your own burgeoning sentience. The game gives you no tutorial on how exactly to use the tools you’re given. And while that can be annoying if their function is too esoteric to parse, learning what I’m being asked to do and how to use the tools to do it was part of the fun. With the lasers, it was thrilling figuring out that I can split a beam in multiple directions, something I only learned by going, “Hey, wonder if I can do this?” and finding out that I could.
As for the story, there is an overarching narrative involving the architects of the open-world place you’ve been dropped in, but the game’s graphics on the Steam Deck made those narrative sequences – which involve you using a computer terminal – impossible to read and therefore parse. I didn’t mind it because I’m just here for the little thrills you get completing a challenge which were manifold in the 40-minute demo.
Bundle of Joy was the most touching and heartfelt of the games I played. It’s a narrative minigame-a-palooza ala the WarioWare games in which you’re a new dad tasked with caring for your new baby and maintaining your sanity in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. Every day is split into tasks like making bottles, putting on baby’s socks, and making trips to the grocery store. The minigames are simple like hitting buttons in the right sequence and timing to rock your baby to sleep, but because being a new parent is inordinately stressful, each task adds to an ever growing stress meter. Fill it up, and you have a breakdown. Your partner taps in to take the baby while you take a breather.
What I loved about this demo was the sweetness and empathy with which it treats its subject matter. I don’t have kids (yet), but there was something about being asked to input my skin tone, my partner’s skin tone, and my baby’s skin tone that just got me. I’m a Black woman in an interracial relationship and it was really cool to see the game account for a family dynamic like mine would be. Also when you have a breakdown, it’s not treated as a failure, only as a fact of parenthood. The game encourages you with messages like “You’re doing great. It’s okay!” that I think would make any new or aspiring parent feel reassured when it comes to the ultimate game: raising a kid.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3
Listen, I don’t know how you could see a game named Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 and not play it. Same with anything the developers at Strange Scaffold put out. According to the description, CRDM3 (which, hilariously, is actually the first game in the series) is a comedic match-3 and metroidvania, which the developers helpfully call a “matchroidvania.” But it is so much more.
In it, you play as JJ Hardwell, an agent of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Super Science Bureau who is tasked with investigating a mansion for suspected dinosaur activity. You use match-3 action to take down the evil saurians while choosing which way to go through the mysterious maze of a mansion. Along the way, the choices you make contribute to JJ’s abilities that help him overcome the mansion’s many obstacles. An observation made in one area will, later on, open up a path that would have otherwise remained blocked off.
The match-3 elements are surprisingly deep, allowing you to use items and abilities powered by the gems you match to defeat enemies. CRDM3 is funny as hell, with all kinds of meta jokes about game development that I suspect will delight the players who know their way around Unity or Godot.
In Promise Mascot Agency, you play as a disgraced yakuza sent to a derelict town to raise $80 million by managing a mascot business. But instead of sending out real people in adorable cat or poop costumes to birthday parties or to promote a new business opening, you’ve got a larger-than-life sentient severed pinky or a partially eaten and crying block of tofu. As for the actual game mechanics, they don’t seem to matter all that much in relation to the story, but in a good way. You get job requests, send out mascots who fit the requirements, and if they get into trouble, there’s a turn-based, card battler minigame you play to overcome the issue. There are also open-world elements where you drive around in one of those kei trucks that have recently become all the rage, picking up collectibles, finding spare cash, and recruiting new mascots to help your business.
Once you get beyond the wacky premise, the Promise Mascot Agency actually has real heart. Yes, your coworker is a walking, talking, foul-mouthed severed pinky who is so unsettling and cute at the same time that I can’t stop staring at her. But your job is to work with her to revive a town that’s seen economic and social devastation by fostering real connections with the people who live there.
The singular best thing about discovering games via Next Fest is seeing developers’ creativity on full display. In games, the default way to drum up interest is by making something that’s easily explainable – Pokémon but with guns, for example. But for Next Fest, I loved finding games that defy succinct explanations like “surrealist Japanese mascot management simulator.”
Yes, that may make it hard to sell to the average consumer, but games don’t and shouldn’t have to be broadly appealing to be successful. The developers of these games know exactly what they are and that they are not for everybody. And in making these weird little freak games, they’ve managed to punch through all the “x but make it y” noise to truly stand out. Play them — or use Next Fest as an opportunity to venture outside your comfort zone to find something truly special.
