Steam’s summer event is starting again soon, where you’ll be able to try out a lot of upcoming games. This is our second roundup of the most interesting demos!
Books and capitalism
Now it has become a real tradition that Steam, as a precursor to the big summer sales, organizes its own mini-game festival called Next Fest. One of the most interesting parts of this is the game demos: at the event, which officially begins on the 19th and lasts a whole week, more than a thousand games in progress are expected to be tried for free. Although, of course, it is impossible to try the entire collection, we will show and present a few more interesting pieces in the coming days. Of course, this is just scratching the surface: whether someone is looking for more experimental and abstract genres, or well-established and often seen genres, no matter what style, atmosphere and visuals the player prefers, there will definitely be something interesting for them to choose. Although the official start of Next Fest still has to wait a few days, the developers have released two-week demos, so you can try these out already. Good game, we are waiting for other interesting demos in the comments!
wandering
Based on the visuals, I expected something very different from what the demo for Wanderful offered: what looked like a bland city-building game turned into a – still bland – wandering game. Bonfires of various sizes must be reached on square-shaped terrain, because they provide the substance called man, which is in fact the fuel of our migration. However, in addition to people, each campfire also gives something else essential: a new building, which in a different form clears the impenetrable jungle terrain. (And at sea, they just create a walkable floor out of the water.)
Looking at the trailer, the task will be to create small villages, and the description of buildings that modify the terrain shows that synergies can be built with them. However, since in the demo you have to walk around to get people, and for that you have to use buildings to build paths as efficiently as possible, I didn’t get a chance to settle down and build a nice little town. The demo might still be missing some important game mode or feature, so for now Wanderful works like a road-building logic game. Since it’s not bad either (it’s easy to hit the 3-day limit for the demo), I didn’t regret trying it; I will be back for the final round.
The Bookwalker: The thief of tales
For me, Bookwalker has been the biggest surprise of the festival so far: aside from a nondescript CG demo clip, I haven’t seen anything of it, but after the demo kicked off, the world immediately pulled me in. Our hero is a writer who considered his book anti-regime, so he was sentenced to 30 years of forced labor. Aside from being transferred to a labor camp, his only chance is to successfully complete some special missions, in exchange for which his employers can cancel his sentence. Your task is to hack into certain narratives and retrieve an item from them – in the first task, for example, you have to escape the potion of eternal life from a fantasy board, and in the second you have to directly destroy Thor’s hammer.
Bookwalker uses two perspectives: in the real world you get realistic graphics and an interior view, and in books you get a very visual and isometric rendering. Most of the gameplay takes place in the books (but we can “wake up” at any time if we need to leave a fake key in the apartment or a hammer borrowed from the neighbor), usually within the framework of a modern adventure that works as an excellent game. Sometimes you have to participate in battles that are divided into smaller rounds, and other times you can collect various useful things from the crap you find in the world. A fun game is made even more interesting by a shared quirky character who knows the book well – a good dubbing would improve the quality of Bookwalker a lot, but I really like the gameplay and storytelling a lot!
institution
In terms of gameplay, Corponation is clearly the heir to the cards, please: here too, the task is to sort out the data that comes before us. It is true that we are not acting here as border inspectors, but parts of the genome have to be sorted in a more complex way every day. A corporate empire, which looks nice on the surface but avenges every little mistake with money deductions, condescending emails, and condescending comments, dominates our entire lives. The elevator from our one-bedroom apartment leads directly to work, and our only video game is in our “State Approved Entertainment” folder on our computer, and it’s an outrageous fighting game, but at least it’s full of microtransactions that outshine any real example. Final Corponation also promises an interesting story, and the demo only shows the game mechanics – however, it is already clear that the implementation is difficult, and the criticism of the company’s culture is quite sharp.
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