Demo round-up for Steam Next Fest 2021
Steam's latest game festival is upon us, and that can only mean a host of new demos for promising upcoming adventures to check out. But you'll have to act fast, as most if not all of these playable samplers will available only until Thursday, October 7th. Below are just some of the many adventures available as the event kicks off; the list will be expanded as more games are added.
Acolyte
Become an employee of Nanomax, a well-funded tech start-up looking to change the face of consumer AI with its upcoming Acolyte application. As a remote-worker for the company, you'll interact with its employees and absorb its culture. But unexplained firings, missing employees and a strange, highly classified bug in the Acolyte codebase point to something being very wrong. As you work with your new Acolyte, who seems to be intrinsically caught up in the company’s problems, you’ll find yourself at the very heart of the conspiracy.
Ashland Dossier
1960, Cold War. The atrocities of WWII are almost forgotten. Nonetheless, a special task force is set up to hunt Nazis down. As its leader, your goal is to find the war criminals' trail, gather all the possible evidence, and finally bring them to justice.
Aspire: Ina's Tale
Trapped in perpetual slumber inside the cruel Tower that feeds off the dreams of its victims, one prisoner awakes. Lost inside the Tower's inner chambers, the heroine Ina must now search for a way out. Along the way, she'll traverse marvelous scenery, meet enigmatic characters, and solve intuitive puzzles as she comes closer to her goal, but farther from innocence.
The Bookwalker
You’re a Bookwalker, a thief with an ability to dive into books. You are forced to use your powers to track and steal famous items like Thor’s Hammer and the Excalibur for clients, to regain your ability to write again.
Born Punk
Born Punk is set on the Danish island of Bornholm in the year 2155. Bornholm has transformed from a quaint holiday getaway to a mega-city governed by a corporate council. You play as Eevi, an ex-corporate combat hacker down on her luck, who gets infected by a rogue AI. She must seek answers about the nature of the intruder, either come to terms with it or try to expel it from her body, struggle with suffering from what is essentially a digital multiple personality disorder, and ultimately uncover a conspiracy that could change humanity's future forever.
The Case of the Golden Idol
In this wryly amusing pixel art detective game set in the 18th century, you must piece together clues and reconstruct the events of a historical murder mystery using a unique drag-and-drop evidence mechanic. Solve each scenario by building theories of what happened there and changing them. As you encounter more evidence, gradually the scenarios start revealing a larger overarching narrative.
Cleo: A Pirate's Tale
Cleo is a fourteen-year-old cynical girl, living a repetitive life with her father in a bar. She knows everything about the epic adventures of pirate legend Captain Cabeca, but in her everyday life she is surrounded only by boring fishermen and unsuccessful buccaneers hanging around at the counter. But when Cleo finds a strange logbook and sees a ghost who gives her mysterious hints, her boring life is about to get turned upside down. She is thrown into a dangerous adventure and finds herself in a world of lies, deceit, greed and bad breath – the world of pirates – and most of them are after the same thing: The Treasure of Eternal Memory.
The Crimson Diamond
Follow amateur geologist and reluctant detective Nancy Maple to the ghost town of Crimson, Ontario to investigate the discovery of a massive diamond in this retro-inspired, EGA text parser mystery adventure.
Ejected Star
Join Tommy Tektite as he explores the galaxy in a quest to hunt down Havok, an evil conniving robot who has framed him for the destruction of his ship and all those aboard. Along the way he must make friends, obtain a spaceship, build up his crew and follow clues to uncover Havok's whereabouts and bring him to justice.
Escape Simulator
Think you have what it takes to escape? Face ingenious locks in ancient Egypt. Hack the system in an adrift space shuttle. Decipher mysterious notes in the oddball Victorian library of Edgewood Mansion. Play online with pals for double the fun. Or brave the mysteries alone, with nothing but your smarts to aid you.
Eternal Threads
As an operative tasked with fixing corruption in the timestream, you have been sent to the North of England in May 2015, where six people died in a house fire. Prohibited from simply stopping the fire, you must instead manipulate the choices made by the housemates in the week leading up to it so that they all survive the event.
The Good Life
Naomi Hayward finds herself far from her New York home. Out of her depth and drowning in debt, she is commissioned by The Morning Bell newspaper to uncover the mystery behind Rainy Woods, a rural English town considered to be the ‘happiest in the world.’ With her camera at the ready, she starts her investigation but soon finds that the town – and its wonderfully quirky residents – are hiding many secrets. Not least is why they transform into cats and dogs at night. Soon caught up in the town’s enchantment herself, Naomi must use her newfound animal skills to uncover the truth.
Growbot
Nara is a student growbot on her first day of captaincy training on board a space station. Before she can learn more about her new home’s ecosystem of alien flowers and strange creatures, an attack by an unknown force infests the station with large and quickly growing crystals. Communication is cut off, and so she ventures out of her room in search of her captain. Along the way, she must make new friends, fix the station’s strange machinery, and discover the origins of the crystalline force spreading throughout the station.
HELLSEED: Chapter 1
In the 1980s, a group of Italian doctors from a psychiatric hospital in the province of Turin report the disappearance of one of their colleagues to the police. As the detective sent to investigate the case, you begin your first-person search for clues at the doctor's house, where many strange things will happen and a dark presence will seem to follow you everywhere you go. Be careful and don't panic, because someone will try to catch you and take you to hell.
Hourglass
You play as Aywa, a young adventurer who is traveling to Egypt to find her missing father, an archeologist who never returned from his latest expedition. Aywa is helped by her unique ability to record her actions for a certain amount of time. After that, time winds back to the beginning of the recording and a copy of herself appears, repeating the actions. Throughout your adventure, you will have to use this ability in creative ways to get through various areas filled with difficult puzzles.
Ikai
Ikai is a first-person psychological horror game set in a feudal Japan steeped in poverty. The story revolves around the spirits of the past and present of Naoko, the priestess of a shrine who woke up within the unholy walls of the formerly sacred place, almost dead, almost alive. Now there are countless yokais wandering around, too close to humans, too close to gods. The thin limit between the world and the underworld has been broken.
INCANTAMENTUM
In this mystery adventure game inspired by tales of English folklore, a mysterious letter brings noted barrow-digger Thomasina Bateman to the isolated village of Bewlay, England. Her excavation of Hob's Barrow, however, will reveal more than she ever bargained for...
The Last Campfire
You are a lost ember trapped in a puzzling place, searching for meaning and a way home. Travel deeper into the lands beyond the dark forest and overcome the adversities before you. Discover beautiful wilderness filled with lost folk, strange creatures and mysterious ruins. Find hope and carry it with you on your Journey to light the last campfire.
Last Days of Lazarus
After his mother's suicide, Lazarus returns home to his sister Lyudmila. But unexplained events make the world and even reality collapse around him. Looming death, a spreading malediction and the supernatural threaten his sanity, yet Lazarus pushes forward to find the truth about his family.
Life of Delta
After the Great War, all humans are wiped out. The only survivors are decaying service robots and humanoid lizards that were born from a long nuclear fallout. Our story follows Delta, who is a small service robot and like any other robot, he is just trying to survive in this harsh environment. One day he is forced to embark on a journey through a vast post-apocalyptic world in order to find his lost friend. Because of his small size, he needs to use all of his wits to overcome dangerous scenarios and challenges.
Lone McLonegan – A Western Adventure
Lone McLonegan was once the the best outlaw in the Old West, but he's let himself get rusty and out of practice. What's worse, his complacency has let his archenemy, Bragg Badass, jump to number one on the most wanted list. Determined to reclaim his spot by robbing the Bank of Oldewell, Lone soon finds that returning to a life of crime is much more difficult than he expected.
Lord Winklebottom Investigates
Set in an alternative 1920s where humans don’t exist, the game stars Lord Winklebottom, the gentleman giraffe, aided by his hippo companion Dr Reginald Frumple. You are invited to an isolated island only to find your host, Admiral Gilfrey, is dead! Suspecting foul play, you must search for clues, solve puzzles and interrogate suspects in order to solve the crime.
Martha Is Dead
It’s 1944, and the body of a woman has been found, drowned and desecrated, by the side of a lake in the depths of an Italian countryside. Martha is dead, and now her twin sister must deal with the fallout from her murder, all whilst the horror of war draws ever closer.
Mechanic 8230
Help Mechanic find his robot friend RO-2 and unveil the secrets of this destroyed world.
Nightmare Frames
Alan Goldberg's luck is about to change. He's a frustrated slasher film scriptwriter in 1985 Hollywood, and Helen Westmore, an eccentric millionaire, will grant him any wish if he can discover the whereabouts of the last, unpublished work of genius horror director Edward Keller, considered to be the scariest film of all time. To find it, Alan must make his way through B-films production companies, VFX workshops, religious cults, and a small haunted town whose dark reputation began when Keller was last seen there.
The Phantom Fellows
Oliver Cobblestone can communicate with a dead – not THE dead, but rather one Englebert Picklebender. Together they investigate the paranormal to bring peace to occupying spirits and haunted hosts alike.
Saint Kotar
Benedek and Nikolay are two troubled godly men in search of their missing relative in an ancient, deeply religious town called Sveti Kotar. Here an unknown presence preys upon the weak and feeds on devil worship and witchcraft. Evidence points to your missing relative being involved in grisly murders and the occult, but what is the truth? Are you also to blame for what happened?
Skábma: Snowfall
Based on the culture and stories of Sámi, Skábma tells a fictional story of Áilu, a young reindeer herder who becomes mingled in an adventure of celestial proportions after finding an old Sámi shaman drum. As they attempt to fight the disease spreading across their land, they step onto a challenging path of becoming the first Noaidi, Sámi shaman, in centuries.
Split
In the future, giant city-states have emerged, separated from each other by indestructible barriers. After the recent war, engineers from Epsilon Energy created the Split indestructible shield system. It was to protect individual giant cities covering almost the entire planet from armed conflicts. The Split control panel is riddled with numerous traps that will require both good reflexes and composure. You can try to destroy enemies or escape from them by using time manipulation and your own clones to distract them.
The Tartarus Key
Alex Young awakens to find herself trapped in a dark mansion filled with deadly traps, bizarre puzzles, and cameras following her every move. Now Alex and her fellow captives will have to use their wits to escape or die trying.
Torn Away
As the fires of World War II rage across Europe, yet another life is ruined when Asya, an ordinary ten-year-old girl, is torn away from her home. Just like millions of others, she becomes an Ostarbeiter, a common worker in a forced labor camp. Now through the darkest of times, Asya must find a glimmer of hope and endure if she ever wants to be free. When an opportunity arises, she runs away, fleeing eastward across Germany and Poland. To her home.
Unusual Findings
The ordinary lives of a trio of kids living in the suburbs is shattered by a series of grisly murders, and the prime suspect might just be out of this world. Join Vinny, Nick and Tony on a journey into mystery and danger, 8-bit gaming, alien conspiracies and VHS rental stores.
Watch Over Christmas
Cisco, a twelve-year-old boy, is smart, witty and occasionally a little stubborn. This year on December 24th, the night before Christmas, a strange call comes through his radio asking urgently for help. In his effort to assist, he stumbles upon a strange glow to follow, only to find out that Santa has been abducted. The holidays are at stake, so Cisco sets out on a quest to save Christmas.
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