Steam Next Fest is back and this month the color choices are immaculate. The dark purple and neon green are perfect Halloween colors, good choice Valve! Steam Next Fest is a week long celebration with hundreds of free game demos as well as developer livestreams. It happens thrice-yearly and its amazing for finding upcoming indie games to Wishlist. Here are some I tried out and enjoyed.
The OG Cake Factory
Does anyone remember Purble Place? The cake decorating game pre-installed on computers back in the day. Well this is a Purble place with a spooky twist. You create cakes shown on the screen to complete the orders. But the main goal is to єรςคקє Շђє รเ๓ยɭคՇเ๏ภ. Its a really fun throwback game and the twist at the end of the demo is too good to spoil for you here.
Fruitbus
I’ve had my eye on Fruitbus for a while. It’s a cute little food truck game where you inherit your grandmas fruit bus. Her final wish was to throw a Farewell Feast with all her old friends. You travel around dishing out fruit and convincing her old friends to come to her Farewell Feast. The controls feel a little weird, it feels like it was a VR title. The stunted way the animals move is pretty creepy too to be honest but this game is not a horror game (I’m pretty sure). This is just a nice little cozy cooking game about the power of friendship and homecooked meals.
Trash Goblin
A cute shop keeping game were you play as a little goblin, uncovering, cleaning and selling little trinkets to quirky customers. You chisel blocks to uncover the tinker then you have to manually wash them. You can also upcycle them by connecting clean trinkets together. The coins you earn from selling trinkets can be used to upgrade your little shop. Its a very satisfying experience to chisel and clean little items, I’m excited to see what else this game has to offer when it releases.
Call of Boba
Call of Boba does a lot. Its a boba shop management sim, life sim, and shooter. Your a down on your luck cooperate worker who left the big city and came back to your hometown. You run into an old friend who inherited a boba shop so you start working there and rooming with him until you figure out what to do with your life. The gameplay consist of creating boba recipes, running the shop, farming, fishing and talking to the townfolk. At night, our main little guy here Bobo, has nightmare about his past corporate job. You will run around an office building with a gun that shoots boba and defeat all the people that use to scare him at his old job. This nightly mini game gives you ingredients to craft more boba the next day. You can also fish and farm but I didn’t know what to do with the fish and crops so maybe that will be used to improve the boba or the shop somehow later down the line, or maybe its just another way to make money. Regardless it was a fun little game and I’m excited to see where the story will go, its rare to find a story where moving back to your hometown is a positive thing and not seen as giving up, its a nice change of pace.
Heartworm
Heartworm is a love-letter to classic survival horror titles like Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and Silent Hill. You play as Sam who goes to a house in the mountains that’s supposedly allows you see the dead, but everyone who visited the house hasn’t come back. While running around a surreal suburban environment you get attacked by static creatures and the only way to push them back is take photos of them. You can choose to have tank controls with movement and aiming but if that’s not your style the developer was nice enough to add modern controls as a option. The games atmosphere really captures walking around your suburban neighborhood at 3AM when no one else is awake.
The Haunting of Joni Evers
Yes yes I really like walking sims, lets move on. The Haunting of Joni Evers is about (as you probably guessed) Joni who lives in her old family house. Her family seems to have left small-town Oklahoma leaving Joni with this haunted house and an old family curse. One night when the power goes out Joni starts to hear objects in her house whispering to her and text is starting to appear out of thin air. I think the demo has a good hook, I especially liked when you turned on the TV and there was video feed of your basement very spooky. I would be interested to see who or what is haunting Joni Evers when the game releases.
Blood Bar Tycoon
Blood Bar Tycoon is just what it sounds like, you are a vampire and you run a bar. It caters to mainly vampires but regular ol humans can come in at there own risk (maybe there blood will get harvested in a machine in the back, who knows). You can build separate rooms for your vampire clients so they don’t have to interact with the cattle. Your minions that run the bar get thirsty every now and then and have to feed on the human cliental. You then have to have them dispose the body without anyone seeing so probably best to do it in the bathroom or backrooms. Its a fun and pretty easy to understand management sim that I look forward to zoning out and playing in the future.
Noiramore Academy
Noiramore Academy is a 3D mystery game taking place in old gothic academy on a planet of unicorn people. You play as Judith, a sassy wannabe detective student who is trying to solve the secrets of the school. Its made by the same dev who was working on Mariposa and Galaxy Man, another demo I played during a pervious Next Fest. I really like the Mariposa demo and I was bummed to hear the Kickstarter didn’t reach its goal. Ink Rose is trying again with Noiramore Academy. The Academy is full of quirky characters and really interesting world-building. The demo does a good job of incorporating the world-building into the puzzles. You will be solving a puzzle in the history classroom for the demo so you will need to learn the history of this planet in order to solve the puzzles which as a nice touch. As an enjoyer of mystery point and clicks like Her Interactives Nancy Drew games I’m excited to see where this game goes. I hope this game reaches its Kickstarter goal.
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