Video games rule. Sometimes. They can be really cool. It can be tough, though. Finding them. The games are good, but the discoverability? Miserable. Storefronts prioritize what’s already selling in a frenzy despite an intimate record of your playing habits. If your tastes generally lie outside of roguelikes or survival games, you’ve noticed you’re not always being served to your palette. That’s why I love Steam Next Fest. A publicity window, sure, but an easy opportunity to dredge the trenches of the video world.
Steam, for all of its resources and data, never seems to match my freak. In my experience, the moment I buy Capcom’s Pocket Fighter on sale my discovery queue gets force-fed every Monster Hunter under the sun. I think of 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 reruns and Raj clips. As if to say, “Now this I can work with.”
Three times a year, Steam puts on Next Fest. A digital alternative to the E3 trade-shows of old, the event prioritizes demos for up-and-coming works. It’s a great, zero-investment opportunity to not just check out the biggest and most curious hits on the horizon, but to flesh out a sense of what games excite you, specifically. Because gaming doesn’t have common third spaces like rep theatres or record shops, this is as good as it’ll get for most.
Surprisingly, it’s on that note that Steam runs especially flat. The games that make Next Fest’s front page are just as traffic-oriented as what the store calls attention to every other day of the year. If you’re like me, you keep tabs on interesting curators and creators, squirrelling games away into your wishlist. But even if you are proactive, Steam doesn’t offer a function to see if anything you’ve earmarked has joined in the festivities (you’re welcome, by the way).
No one knows you as well as you do. So unfortunately it’s on you to try to shape an environment by following developers, creators, critics, curators and feeds that seem to gel. Like an esoteric game? Check out its Backlogged page, peek into its lists to see what company it keeps. Hit the wishlist button on Steam as if that rainy day is going to be a biblical flood. You should probably hit up some itch.io feeds, too, where creators you’ve purchased from eagerly share what they find exciting. And if you aren’t in the habit yet, here’s a little tour through some of what I’ve hit up so far, speaking as someone extra invested in the outer orbits than most.
When I first played Corn Kidz 64, it dawned on me that not only can indie devs pursue the games they’ve always wanted to make, they can make the exact game they would have made if they could have made one back when they were a brooding adolescent mall goth. That thread has beautifully blossomed. There’s a slate of games I’ve mentally categorized as “self-medicating interplay,” games in love with the magic-hat nature of what can be rendered on a computer and intense, uncontrollable energies taking the first multimedia shape they can.
One of those is Downsouth, a manic and lurid platformer from Troopsushi about a grinning purple bean descending into an urban underworld, its brisk pace distracted only by the fidelity of detail. Each environment is stuffed with more loaded imagery than a ‘90s MTV bumper. In a similar class is RUBATO, a fun, physics-based, frog-based platformer with visual tonal shifts rapid enough to make you feel like a sleeper cell agent being shown their trigger code.
Reemerging after some time is Blast Cats, an eclectic, explosive 3D platformer reared on all the PlayStation games you saw ads for but never saved up the allowance to play. Another long-awaited bit of goodness is PSI, a first-person adventure about cults, plumbing, and frogs. And if you’re snowed in this week, may as well force the chill deeper with Subjectivation, an off-kilter horror game about a bitter frozen world.
Mommy’s Best, who have long made games from a world where the Amiga beat the Super Nintendo, have a demo up for their latest, ChainStaff, a pulpy, Metal Hurlant-flavored run-and-gun. Another retro-inspired game that would make more sense in another dimension is Bad Pixels, a 3D western shooter rendered to resemble something you might find on a floppy disc the size of your outstretched hand. And if you miss light rail shooters and adore names that would make an arcade operator scrunch their nose, you owe it to yourself to check 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 works for you, keep tabs and broaden your video game world. The major industry won’t. If you do it for anything, do it out of spite.
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