The millionth Steam Next Fest of the year is coming to an end—don't worry, it'll be back before you even have time to uninstall all the demos—and a quick glimpse of the charts might leave you a bit down in the dumps if you're tired of multiplayer games sucking all the oxygen out of the room. But I find myself looking at the list with some uncharacteristic positivity: it's a great showcase of just how surprising—strange, even—PC gaming continues to be.
At the top of the list is returning tacticool dad shooter turned modern PvP shooter Delta Force. Back in the late '90s, the first Delta Force was one of the big lads, laying the foundations of the tactical FPS, and boy did I sink a lot of time into it, trudging through ugly deserts to save POWs and blow stuff up.
It's not my bag these days—there are only so many games featuring stern men in camo one can take in a single lifetime—but seeing this throwback reboot snatching the #1 spot is weirdly reassuring; not because I'm Mr. Jingoism, but because, like so many of these demos (multiplayer focus aside), it's very much doing its own thing. It's not another roguelite or survival game—two of the most exhaustingly popular trends which, surprisingly, don't get a look in within the top 10. It's got some of the hardcore milsim vibes of its originator, but then there's the twitchy shooting and a bunch of operators with abilities and cooldowns—a mix of old and new that doesn't always mesh perfectly, but still helped it snatch the top spot.
Supervive, which our Harvey was very keen on, is sitting at the second spot, and hey, weren't MOBAs supposed to be dead? Aside from the stalwarts like LoL and Dota 2, anyway. Given the early success of Deadlock, we know there's room for at least one more, but it hardly counts—of course everyone's gonna take notice of a Valve game. OK, maybe not Artifact.
Anyway! This is another one that isn't my kinda thing. To my uncultured eyes, it looks like something that would have come out back in the mid 2010s, when everyone was trying to make their own MOBA/hero shooter. The era that gave us Battleborn, a game mostly remembered due to Randy Pitchford's ridiculous tweet.
Battleborn is: FPS; hobby-grade coop campaign; genre-blended, multi-mode competitive e-sports; meta-growth, choice + epic Battleborn Heroes!July 8, 2014
For this to gain so much traction in 2024 is… well I definitely didn't have it down on Steam Next Fest bingo. Especially when you consider the fact that battle royale players have also, much like their MOBA counterparts, largely found their forever games—your Fortnites and your PUBGs—with those games eviscerating the competition. But clearly there's room for an upstart. Supervive's pedigree no doubt helps, of course: a lot of the team have Riot on their CVs.
Then we've got Strinova, which initially struck me as a kinda anime Valorant thirst trap, but then I clocked the real hook: the ability to switch between 3D and 2D forms, which is honestly fucking rad. It might share some tactical sensibilities with Delta Force, but there's a pretty wide gulf between grim soldiers doing presumably very serious things and hot anime lads and lassies fucking with reality.
It's followed by Rivals of Aether 2, where cute critters kick the crap out of each other; Popucom, a match-3 shooty platformer that looks like an absolute eyesore but which my young nephews would probably vibe with; Fast Food Simulator, which is one of those drudgery sims, but with a co-op twist; and Gladio Mori, a melee fighter with such an unappealing aesthetic I'm surprised it's so far up the list, but which nonetheless sounds incredibly cool, with its organ specific damage and player-created fighting styles.
As we hurtle towards Halloween, I've also gotta give KLETKA a nod. It's a co-op survival horror affair with a PS1-era aesthetic, and the influence of Lethal Company is hard to ignore, but its spin on the formula is undeniably delicious: you're imprisoned in a vast gigastructure, forced to go down and down and down, encountering traps and anomalies, as well as an unknowable entity that kills everything in its path. Oh yeah, and the elevator you're using to travel down said gigastructure? It's alive. And hungry. So you'd better keep it fed. It's a shame it's aiming for a December launch, because it's perfect for the spookiest of seasons.
While the bulk of the chart-toppers don't tickle my fancy, I can't help but love how so many games that weren't really on my radar have grabbed so many players. It's such a random assortment of things, not really fixated on a specific trend, and it speaks to the diversity of the hobby. Sure, there's nothing utterly, uncompromisingly new: tactical shooters, MOBAs, co-op horror games, sims—they're tried and tested—but there are few entries high up on the list that come at any of the mainstay genres from the same direction.
And, about the whole multiplayer thing: no, it doesn't say anything about the future of singleplayer games. The simple fact is that multiplayer games are a lot more demo-friendly. You can get the feel for a multiplayer game immediately because, in a lot of cases, they're match-based—designed to be played in bursts and sessions. They're not slow-burn affairs where stories and characters and mechanics are slowly teased out over hours of play.
I hardly ever play singleplayer demos or early access games unless it's for work, just because I don't want to get invested in a story or its cast and then spend the next year or more waiting to start again. And if you search further down the list, there are still plenty of singleplayer games that folks have been checking out—as well as a couple that managed to get pretty far up, like cop sandbox (no thanks) The Precinct and story-driven card romp Sultan's Game.
So yeah, nothing to worry about here. But enough of me trying to dissect some demo charts—what was your Next Fest obsession this time?
