The Steam Games Festival Is Back With Plenty of Awesome Games. Here’s a Few to Get You Started
The Steam Games Festival was an awesome time that gave us a ton of demos for rad games. Good news: Steam is doing another one. The Autumn Steam Games Festival provides more demos of more upcoming games. Steam claims there are hundreds, and I can see that. It’s hard to play through them all, but we’ve at least gathered some of the best ones for you to give a try and check out in the future. So give these games a try and enjoy.
Horror Tales: The Wine
We’re all going a little crazy in the pandemic, but what if there was a cure? Horror Tales: The Wine is set a game set in on a post-apocalyptic island where the only cure for a pandemic remains, which is known as The Wine. Your goal is to explore this island and find The Wine. The only problem? You’re not the only person on the island. Other people want The Wine too, and they’re willing to remove you if they think it gives them a better shot at the cure.
It’s worth noting that this is “tales” for a reason. The Wine is actually the third of three games with the Horror Tales branding. The first is called The Beggar and is set in 1926, and has you looking around an open world in an effort to fight your inner demons. The second, The Astronaut, has you in a damaged space station, attempting to figure out what happened and survive before the air runs out. The games are only slightly connected and can be played in any order, but all of them look pretty rad.
Horror Tales: The Wine is being developed by Carlos Coronado and is set to release on July 30th, 2021. You can play the demo here.
Buddy Simulator 1984
We’ve all used a chatbot at some point or another. Something to feel like an actual person despite it being an AI. Buddy Simulator 1984 seeks to give us a fun AI buddy to play with. It can play some simple games, like hangman or rocks paper scissor, and will even remember the important secrets you tell it. You do, after all, trust your AI buddy enough to tell them some important secrets, right?
With a set up like that, it’s not much of a surprise that there’s something horrible lying in wait. The trailer shows your buddy concerned the games are boring, and things slowly take a twisted turn. The game glitches out, the minigames become corrupted, weird things start to happen. Your buddy may not quite be the buddy its all cracked up to be. Or maybe they really are the best buddy you could hope for. You’ll have to find out when the full game launches.
Buddy Simulator 1984 is being developed by Not a Sailor Studios. It’s set to launch on December 10th, 2020, and you can grab the demo here.
Wonhon: A Vengeful Spirit
Most of the time, horror stealth games have you hiding from the monster. This time around, you are the monster. Or, at least, in Wonhon: A Vengeful Spirit you’re a woman killed in a war, so really it seems like humanity is the real monster. Regardless, you’re not content to move on until you’ve had revenge, and, teaming up with the god of death, you’re going to do so by killing every single soldier you come across.
While you may be nothing more than a young girl with no protection, you have some very important skills that will help you survive. The most important? You can possess the living. Jump into a soldier, shoot some of his buddies, then jump out of his body and sneak away while he has to deal with the consequences of your actions. Or hop into a dog and tear someone’s throat out. It gives a novel approach to the stealth genre, letting you do quite a bit that you normally don’t get the chance. Plus, it’s just nice being the one with powers for once.
Wonhon: A Vengeful Spirit is being developed by Busan Sanai Games. It’s set to launch in Q1 2021. You can play the demo of it here.
The Night of Joe
Comedy and horror go together much better than most people would think. The Night of Joe is looking to continue that trend with running away from snake monsters inside of a massive supermarket. Why is he doing this? Well, it turns out he had a conversation with God and, when it was over, he was just sort of stuck in the situation. Happens to the best of us, really. Now he needs to escape.
Thankfully, God didn’t leave Joe totally empty handed. Joe will be armed with a flashlight, which may not seem like much at first. However, should he point the flashlight at the snake monster, he can spend some of the battery charge to stun it. Using this, he can run around the supermarket to activate generators and eventually escape via escalator. Or be eaten by the snake monster. Either or really.
The Night of Joe is being developed by TNoJTeam. It’s set to release on October 28th, 2020. You can play the demo here.
Clea 2
It’s never a bad idea to mix a bit of anime with your horror. After all, anime is basically horror already. Clea 2 seeks to do exactly that, by having you take the role of a house maid who finds herself in a house full of people that want to kill her. Unfortunate, but she has the upset anime character look down at least. You’ll play as Florine, who’s looking to bring her dead loved ones back to life. Just she can’t join them before then.
The game has these really nice drawings, that show off a ton of detail. It really helps sell the horror game part, as the monsters still manage to look scary despite usually not being much more than people with swords and cloaks. Add in a couple bloody crying masks to that as well, and you have some anime horror cooking. Hopefully just without the bad parts of anime.
Clea 2 is being developed by InvertedMouse. It’s set to release on March 25th, 2021. You can play the demo here.
