GamingTrend’s top demo picks at Steam Fest
With hundreds of demos to choose from, how did we do it!
Editorials
Here at GamingTrend, we decided to comprise a list of demos some of our lovely editors connected with when playing the thousands on offer at Steam Fest. It was a challenge narrowing it down, a testament to the event itself. You never know what gem you’ll uncover next.
You’ll immediately gather from our lists that we have diverse tastes, making sure there’s something for everyone here! We will include links to where you can still play these demos and please, please make sure you wishlist any you like! It means the world to all these amazing developers and to us.
Olivia
MIO: Memories in Orbit
I’m not normally drawn to games that blend side-scrolling platforming with combat, but when I do, I end up really loving them. From Mario Bros Wonder to Hollow Knight, even though they’re HARD, for me anyway. I had an inkling that MIO: Memories in Orbit would be added to this list when it's fully released. This was immensely helped by the demo I got to play at Steam Fest, a hefty demo that allows players to experience between 2-3 hours - essentially the beginning of the game. You play as an android that’s woken up in the Vessel, a large derelict space which is now overrun with corrupted machines. The world has been left to rust and its caretakers, the Pearls, have ceased action. It’s up to MIO to figure out why.
The opening of MIO is like any typical Metroidvania, committing to the mystery and intrigue of what exactly has happened. It reminds me of Hollow Knight’s abandoned sprawling spaces, with the rare NPC to help you in your journey. I only played around in the main area and a frozen area and the visuals were what stood out to me the most. The Steam page says it’s inspired by comics, paintings and anime, and it definitely has its own unique take on these influences, with environments full of color and character.
MIO’s movement and controls are bouncy and airy; you basically fly across the screen which is aided by your ability to double jump straight off the bat. In the ice area, the platforms are covered in slippery ice, which helps propel you across large spaces. Combat also feels light and sharp, especially when you’re attacking an enemy midair. Enemies are varied so far, all with their own movesets that test how much you’re paying attention. If you don’t position yourself carefully, you’ll end up taking a lot of damage. I didn’t get to try a boss, but It’ll probably be a case of memorizing attack patterns to hack away at their health bar. Getting hit feels punishing as MIO only has three health slots, if you die you respawn back to your last save point, which can be quite a way back. To help you, you can find - scarcely - health-up points where you spend your in-game currency to gain a health point back. You get this currency from defeating enemies so don’t be afraid to splurge on getting your health back up, you do not want to be trekking all the way from the beginning again.
Overall, there is a lot of promise in MIO: Memories in Orbit with the trailer showing off varied environments, bosses, enchanting music and tons of different game mechanics to keep your time with the game fresh. The game seems to be quite punishing, but I’m up for the challenge. It has a planned release for 2025.
The Drifter
I love me a narrative adventure and even more, I love me a narrative adventure with puzzles! However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows because The Drifter is a gritty thriller about death and the power to prevent it. Mick, a drifter, wakes up in a train cargo carriage with a drunken man who is gunned down when he tries to leave. After a violent encounter escaping the train, he finds himself in the underbelly of society with the homeless, trying to charge his phone so he can contact his wife.
The game is definitely punchy and left a great impression on me in its hour-long demo, with an amazing full voice acting cast and point and click puzzles to piece together what to do next. The gameplay has Mick interact with different items which can then be subsequently used for something else, like a crowbar can be used to open the train doors. You can also interact with characters who will give you curious topics that you can then question other people about. It’s simple and easy to grasp, but what makes games like these great is the story and by the time the demo ended I was hooked.
You see, Mick has a special power that is totally unexplainable: at the end of the demo he is captured and thrown to the bottom of the sea, weighted down with a bag over his head. This begins a pulse-racing scramble to figure out how to get him out of this situation, but time runs out quickly. Obviously, I failed the first time and Eugene died, but then a pulse of white light resets the scenario so you can try again. You have infinite times to figure out how to save Mick and when you do crack it, it’s really satisfying. I also found - in that particular scenario - that it’s not a matter of just doing it quickly, I had to wait for a specific item to get in range so I could breathe in air, adding to that dire suspense. After all this, floods of whys and whos and whats came into my head, but then the demo finished! This intensity matched with puzzling works great and I cannot wait to get myself into more perilous situations.
Lost and Found Co
If you’re looking for something light hearted and a game that you’ll probably play as religiously as my grandmother plays Candy Crush, then Lost and Found Co may be the answer. I played many puzzle games at Steam Fest, but this one stood out in its sheer expansiveness. Lost and Found Co is a find the hidden object game, a pretty basic concept, but the devs for this game go above and beyond to make this into a proper little game. The game is really quirky and such a delight to explore as the beginning scene sees a goddess transform a snoozing duckling into her servant - anthropomorphic animals are a big quirk in this game. She has recruited you to her business where you help patrons find their missing items.
The artstyle is very cartoonish and anime, with popping colors and objects and characters drawn with thick outer lines. This works amazingly for a find the hidden object type game, as you don’t feel like you’re finding a needle in the haystack, items are punctuated and still mix together well. The locations you visit are jam-packed full of things to see and are bursting with life and personality. In the first job, you have to help a kid find 6 hidden rare candies so he can bring them to his sick mom in the hospital. However, I was getting side-tracked all the time by clicking on every object I saw as they often provided a cute animation. The detail is paired delightfully with an optional to-do list that traps you in the scenario for a much longer period of time, clever, you got me. They’re quite straightforward or very obscure tasks, from ‘experience the paranormal’ to find all the lost sheep.
You get access to two main quests and three optional requests in the demo and oh my god was I blown away with how detailed and beautiful these all were; they were a feast for my eyes! You have the bustling sweet shop, a nighttime party on board a ship at a harbour and a Japanese inspired garden full of mythical foxes. I spent a lot of my time just exploring the screen in front of me. If you get stuck, the game gives you natural pieces of information of a general area you should look in, as the spaces get rather big. However, if you need more assistance, you can spend hints - which you must find as a hidden object - to gain more information on the location, normally pointing you straight to where it is. However, just because of the sheer spectacle of the locations, I wouldn’t mind spending ages looking.
Lost and Found co also includes other fun features such as a hub you can decorate to your heart's content in which Ducky has a room that you can embellish with furniture. The character interactions and humor are also delightfully pleasant, making this game a must-get when it releases this year.
Jackson
Bloodthief
My first run-in with Bloodthief was from a YouTube video by Blargis, the developer, titled “Speedrunners broke my game. I embraced it.” To summarize, Blargis goes over his borderline laissez-faire attitude towards game-breaking movement tech. This philosophy has led to one of the best movement-based games I’ve played to date. The mechanics are tight, the levels offer multiple avenues to success, and finding new routes is rewarding. If you have a need for speed, then check it out.
Hell Is Us
Fair warning for readers, this Hell Is Us piece is very spoiler heavy. It’s pretty impossible to talk about the game without delving into such territory, so consider yourself warned.
In the initial moments of Hell Is Us, a man whom I could only describe as Judge McHolden interrogates us as truth serum courses through our veins. During this interrogation, we learn a few things. First, the locale we smuggled ourselves into, Hadea, is exceedingly hard to get into and out of, and breaking in has made us some enemies. Second, the setting is embroiled in a civil war. Third, we’re looking for our family. Narratively speaking, it’s a strong start, as we’re given just enough clues about the situation for the plot to hook us. The voice acting stands out in quality, which aids massively in immersion.
Soon enough, we’re dropped into a dreary forest setting, the player character abandons the “O.N. peacekeeper” gear he used to break into Hadea, and the gameplay starts. The first thing that stands out is how beautiful the graphics are, which is emphasized by the minimalistic HUD. First, we talk to a farmer, who grants us a little bit of war lore and introduces us to the investigation system. Then we approach a cave with a military APC outside, as well as a wounded soldier. We’re told that the rest of his unit is inside, and his commanding officer has the key. First, we need to get into the cave, which is done by finding a med kit for the soldier, then completing a puzzle ripped straight from Skyrim, turning three pillars with symbols to match an answer key. After we head in, we find the remains of the other soldiers before being treated to a cutscene. The anomalous entity that slew the soldiers is revealed, and a random woman with a sword and a drone comes out of nowhere to fight it. She gets killed, and we take her stuff, fight through some more entities, and complete another Skyrim puzzle. Remember the three layers of rings that locked crypts? It’s that.
The entities themselves are some premium glitchy body horror. They’re plaster-white humanoids with hollow faces, some of which have pulsating red shapes extending from their bodies that must be destroyed before you can kill them properly. The process to do so is… underwhelming. I went into the game blind, and to my surprise, it’s soul-like. As one would expect for the genre, combat is slower and more tactical, but it's also just sort of clunky at the moment. Swings feel sluggish and unimpactful, enemy movements feel erratic, and your stamina is tied to your health, meaning on low health, one swing of your sword will exhaust you (Why? Just why?). In addition, there’s an odd healing system where if you hit an enemy, a grey bar appears on your missing health. The bar will briefly flash white, and if you have a chance to activate a healing pulse to get your health back. It’s a little awkward and feels dissonant to the souls-like gameplay. It’s like the game is drawn and quartered between souls-like gameplay and features that would be more at home in a hack-and-slash game.
The final area of the game re-hooks me with lore intrigue, revealing the true horrors caused by the civil war and anomalies who stalk the land. Remember the “O.N. peacekeeper” gear we abandoned at the start? Well, on one sign, we find the full title of the ONAMHA. The Organized Nations Assistance Mission for Hadea. That’s right, Hadea is in such a bad spot that a global task force was created to deal with it. I’m honestly incredibly interested in the lore, as the storytelling is compelling and the setting is unique. I just really hope they polish up the gameplay.
David Flynn
Mina the Hollower
I’ve been waiting for this side scrolling action title for a long, long time. We unfortunately missed out on the initial press demo, but I finally got my hands on the game with this Next Fest demo and… it’s a bit different than what I expected. That’s not a bad thing, far from it, but I was expecting a Link’s Awakening style title with furry Castlevannia aesthetics, and what I got was much more Castlevania and Souls-like in practice. The demo seems to be the start of the game, with Mina making her way to a mysterious island after receiving a letter. The ship is attacked by a sea monster, and even after fighting it off she wrecks upon the island. The rest of the demo has you making your way towards the castle to inform the King of this and the letter’s contents.
You have a choice of one of three weapons in the demo, but I went with the whip as it’s the one on the box. Combat features a surprising amount in the demo, with tons of enemies on each screen and the only way to heal being to fill up vials by attacking foes. You can also find sub-weapons occasionally that’ll give you more methods of attack, such as tossing an axe. Defeating enemies will give you Bones, which you can spend upon reaching a threshold to increase one of your three stats or save them for something else later.
The biggest sticking point, however, was the constant requirement to judge depth despite the game being 2D. There’s a lot of platforming utilizing Mina’s ability to burrow underground for a short time, and it can often be difficult to tell what you can jump on and what you can’t. It was a frequent pain point, and I got stuck more than a few times just from not being able to read the screen properly. Hopefully they can iron this out before the game releases, as I’m still hungry for more.
Dispatch
The moment I saw Dispatch, I was hooked. In college, a fellow student pitched a game in one of our classes: one about Superheroes solving problems around the city. However, you don’t play as the heroes, you play as their handler. Assigning heroes to tasks suited to and then guiding them through the job. Dispatch has very similar bones to that original idea. Add in the fact that it’s being made by former Telltale Games staff and looks absolutely gorgeous, and the moment this demo hit Steam I was downloading it.
Dispatch puts you in the shoes of Robert Robertson, formerly known as Mecha Man. After his mech-suit was destroyed fighting his nemesis, he’s invited to take a job as a dispatcher for superheroes. He’s assigned a team of misfit heroes, and needs to assign them each to jobs around the city as they pop up. Each hero has stats, making them better suited to certain tasks over others. However, after assigning a hero to a job, they’ll be unavailable for a time afterwards. For example, if you assign your two flyers to get a kid out of a tree, they won’t be available to chase after a stolen boat. Heroes can also cause problems accidentally or need advice on a job, so you’re constantly doing things or listening to banter while things happen in real time. There’s also a weird hacking minigame you can do sometimes, which isn’t very fun.
Outside of that though, you’ll be watching cutscenes and making dialogue choices in the typical, post-Walking Dead Telltale style. These cutscenes appear to be pre-rendered, at least I assume because there are no graphics options and you can’t set the game to go above 1080p. Even so, it looks great, the dialogue is fun, and I’m eager to see what the rest of the story holds.
Dead as Disco
Character Action and Rhythm games are two of my favorite genres. Put the two together and I’m in heaven, like with Hi-Fi Rush. Dead as Disco is a slightly different take, but still retains everything I love about both genres: cool combos and catchy music. The game takes more of an Arkham Asylum approach to combat. You press the normal attack button to the beat, then press the counter button whenever a circle appears over an enemy’s head. You can’t counter every attack though, and will need to dodge some instead. Fighting will build up a meter, which you can spend by holding the trigger for some powerful, automatic attacks. When an enemy is close to dead, you can perform a stylish finisher on them.
It seems very simple on the surface, but it all flows so well that it’s constantly a blast. The demo only has one level, but I actually spent most of my time in the training mode just fighting infinitely spawning baddies until the song ended. Not only is the soundtrack great, but you can also import any song you’d like into the game to fight to. All it takes is some BPM calibration, then you’re punching and kicking to the beat of literally any song. For that feature alone, Dead as Disco is worth checking out.
We only talked about a handful of demos here - trust me I played so many more but a girl can’t write for 5 pages - and with Steam Fest over, you’ll be surprised at how many of the demos are still active. So even if it’s just a quick browse on your Steam page, you could find something new and unexpected to look forward to this year!
For all Steam Fest news, stay tuned to GamingTrend!
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