I bloody love a Steam Next Fest, me. Sure, like everything on Steam there’s vast amounts of total shite to wade through in order to find the diamonds but for me, that’s part of the fun. You read the descriptions for each game and grab what sounds interesting, only to sometimes find that are held together with tape and Unreal assets while some are polished to a ridiculous degree. It’s a total grab bag of ideas, genres and quality levels, so if that’s something you can’t be arsed to deal with, here’s the ten games I’ve enjoyed the most out of this current crop.

Steam Next Fest Recommendations: February 2023

Bleak Sword DX

Bleak Sword DX is basically just a series of challenging rooms full of enemies to hack and slash your way through. However, simple but engaging combat, meaningful upgrades that offer variety and a really satisfying parry make Bleak Sword FEEL good to play. It’s kind of like a melee version of Robotron: 2084 - just kill everything to move onto the next screen. There’s a sprinkle of Dark Souls in there too, like every single videogame ever made these days, in regards to how the game handles death. Drop dead and you get one chance to beat the screen you died on to recover all of your lost EXP and items, so do you start from that screen and give it another go immdiately or do you start from a few stages back and try to upgrade a bit first? A really fun, basic core with some rewarding depth and a banging aesthetic? Devolver Digital doesn’t miss.

Slave Zero X

It is somewhat fitting that a prequel to 1999’s Dreamcast release ‘Slave Zero’ has some pretty major Sega Saturn vibes about it. The high resolution sprite artwork juxtaposed against low-poly 32-bit style 3D is very much up my street. Slave Zero X is nowt like its predecessor, as it is a scrolling beat-em-up that lifts combat mechanics from Guilty Gear (you can even BURST out of enemy combo strings, which is a mechanic I’m surprised hasn’t found its way into this genre before this), meaning there’s a focus on long, technical combos that reward practice and execution. It should speak volumes that TWICE this game has soft-locked on me, preventing me from continuing in two different spots once I had cleared out all the enemies and I’m STILL thinking I’m going to push through to the end of this demo before the end of Next Fest.

Die By The Blade

We always should’ve gotten a sequel to Bushido Blade. I mean, I know we DID but we try to ignore that one, alright. The format is perfect - tense, knife edge battles where any solid touch from a weapon can mean victory or defeat. Die By The Blade takes that and combines it with something resembling a much more traditional fighting game - there are combo strings, special moves of sorts and characters with specific differences - to create something that manages to feel quite fresh, despite clear influence from Squaresoft’s PS1 masterpiece. The indicators on screen as to whether you’re aiming high, mid or low perhaps boil things down to too much of a mechanical level that could get tired with prolonged play but in the online matches I played, Die By The Blade was thrilling.

Valfaris: Mecha Therion

The original Valfaris is a genuine favourite of mine - Contra-meets-Dark Souls by the way of 2000AD style sci-fi and black metal was always going to get me bricked up - but it was an extremely pleasant surprise to find that this follow-up has ditched the Contra element to instead be a side-scrolling shmup! All of the other elements from Valfaris have been transplanted perfectly into this new genre - checkpoints, upgrading weapons, creating a your favourite loadout, hidden secrets, challenging difficulty and rad bosses - alongside the flawless, effortlessly badass heavy metal aesthetic. It’s apparently the second level from the full game and confirms that this is a must-buy for me when it drops this year. The soundtrack absolutely RIPS, too, again by Celtic Frost guitarist Curt Victor Bryant. Honestly, at this point I’d play anything set in the Valfaris world. Valfaris Kart, anyone?

Radio The Universe

Probably the one game making the most noise coming out of this Next Fest, Radio The Universe is a top-down dungeon crawler meets Metroidvania with smart, satisfying combat and some clever puzzles. Honestly, I didn’t feel it deserved such high praise initially, as it seemed like decent little game but with the admittedly excellent cyberpunk aesthetic doing a lot of heavy lifting but once it opened up, I’d experimented with some of the unlocks and I had beaten the really fun, challenging and smart boss at the end of the demo, I quickly changed my opinion. A bit Enter The Gungeon, a bit The Binding of Isaac, only without the random roguelike element and instead a crafted exploration experience. It’s going to be a good one, this.

Cavern Of Dreams

There’s nowt like a good, comfy N64 platformer. Cavern of Dreams heavily borrows from the Banjo-Kazooie structure - loads of individual levels full of mini objectives and challenges to tackle and get the key item needed to progress. Here, it’s rescuing the eggs containing the brothers and sisters of the main character, a young dragon called… er.. ‘Young Dragon’. That’s probably placeholder, I imagine. Acquiring these eggs eventually unlocks more abilities, which in turn allow you to complete more objectives, which get you more eggs, which unlock more abilities and areas and you progress through the game. Simple, effective and with that soft focus N64 aesthetic, feels like a big warm, well worn hoodie. It nails the aesthetic too, which is something a lot of ‘N64-like’ titles get slightly wrong. Hopefully this one can keep the creativity and inventive objectives throughout the full game - the signs are looking good.

Shadows Of Doubt

For me, this was THE standout game of the current Next Fest. A detective simulator set in some weird retro future cyberpunk 1980s city that is randomly generated for you. Not just the city streets and buildings but also the people, their stories, the history and, of course, the crimes. How you go about solving these is completely up to you - hit up the crime scene, find clues and investigate leads in a totally freeform and flexible way and when you’re finally ready to commit to an answer, you fill in a form and present it in city hall. Or, you can bring the crim in yourself for some extra money. Finely balanced to make you feel like the smartest detective in all the land or an absolute calamity - you’re either going to end up being fucking Batman or Frank fucking Drebin. This one is going to be massive, believe me. Also; a peerless, flawless aesthetic.

Full Void

They don’t make them like this anymore! Full Void is a ‘cinematic platformer’ in the style of Flashback or Another World, something I haven’t seen for a long, long time. It appears to be set on Earth in the aftermath of an alien invasion, where these xenomorph looking motherfuckers roam the streets, ready to kill you instantly if you cross their path. In fact, everything in Full Void kills you instantly, accompanied by a brilliantly grim cutscene of your lad drowing or falling to his death, for instance. The lad you play as is only armed with a laptop used for hacking terminals, so you have to use your wits to stay alive - either solving a quick platforming or environmental puzzle to get out of a scrape or, of course, just legging it. It’s beautifully animated and, perhaps due to the fact there hasn’t been a lot of games like this in recent memory, feels remarkably fresh despite hitting a lot of my nostalgia buttons.

City Of Beats

A fairly standard roguelike structure, where you try randomly generated runs at an objective, pick up skills and bonuses en route and try to shape some kind of class, unlocking permanent upgrades to slowly improve your baseline abilities, is elevated by the concept - everything in the game is synced to the music. All projectiles, both yours and enemy, build and add to the soundtrack, with dodges and charged shots getting a little bit more to them if you perform them on beat. There’s something amazing about getting in the zone on this one, with skilled play creating a visual and audio spectacle that really helps focus you in on the action as it creeps up in intensity. Rhythm action Geometry Wars wasn’t something that ever crossed my mind but that’s why I just write bullshit about games and don’t come up with them. I am creatively bereft. I’m glad these devs aren’t.

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WAIT! BONUS ELEVENTH GAME I PLAYED AFTER I FINISHED THE ARTICLE!

System Shock Remake

I think I put this one on the back burner because I’m DEFINITELY going to play it - it’s fucking System Shock - whenever it gets released, so I’m not looking for something to surprise me here. It’s a Nightdive joint too, which is a massive sign of quality as far as I am concerned. It’s going to be good and I’m going to play it. So I just sort of skipped over it, until just now.

It is incredibly good. Really, really good. Of course it is. There was never any doubt. System Shock provides a brilliant base for this rebuilt version, with this really unique visual style that sits somewhere between the classic chunky polygon models of the mid to late 90s and the lighting and textures of a modern, high end title. Despite looking nowt like the original (which was all sprite based!) it manages to capture the tone, the vibe. They even got the SHODAN actress from the second game in to re-do all the dialogue. I can’t recommend giving this one a go enough. Essential. A glimpse at what could be one of the my favourite games of 2023. If it comes out, of course…