This iteration of Steam Next Fest, AI has utterly ruined another nice thing. While last time time I’ve found 39 demos without too much effort, this time I’ve scrolled a while and I’ve got … 6. Of which I played 4.

Death to AI, sorrow to its boosters.

Ballistic.exe

This one is frustrating to me. In this game, you run tests on deeply customizable guns, which means fulfilling tasks in different shooting galleries. The tasks range from “Shoot 5 different things” to “Shoot a moving target, that is more than 50 meters away, and is also a fruit” and beyond. The trick is, you need to manipulate every part of the gun by hand instead of just clicking. For the starter sporting pistol this means:

Opening the breach
Inserting a round
Closing the breach
Aiming by lining up the front and back sights
Pulling the trigger

Proceed to unlock many guns, attachments and even ammo types.

Now, this game loop is Very Much My Thing. BUT.

It’s also a horror game with jump scares … Fuck.

Since I’m still a wuss, not for me.

Warhammer Survivors

Do you like Warhammer? Do you like Vampire Survivors? Good news, you like Warhammer Survivors.

I like that it’s made in partnership with poncle (the Vampire Survivors guys). The thing where you get more little guys to walk around with you is cute.

That’s pretty much all there’s to it.

Valdrin

Low-fantasy city builder. Looks neat, not a lot of meat on the bone in the bit I played. Features in the game description sound interesting, but either they aren’t in yet, or I didn’t get there before I got bored of the monotony of the same old resource chains.

Wyldheart

This has a real cool concept. Play short campaigns of fantasy action RPG, preferably with friends, thanks to a super flexible drop-in-drop-out system. Game has a nice clean art style, not super realistic, not super stylized, lovely vibes and lights. Gameplay though is very barren and made me quit before it could hook me or get more interesting. Playing solo was a chore, enemies are damage sponges and hit detection feels floaty.

So, all in all, might be cool in the future, but isn’t really anything right now.