Steam Next Fest October 2023 ranked

1-3 are day 1
4-8 are looks good wishlisted
9-14 not fully convinced/wait for big sale
15 you would have to pay me

Other fest lists
February 2023
June 2023
February 2024

Various miscellaneous demos

This was a fantastic demo. The demo is for the first 3 levels into a boss fight. Each of these levels is huge, even if it doesn't seem so at first. There are lots of alternate pathways and secrets to find. All the levels exist in the same area, so you don't need to go to a menu screen if you want to go between them. Eventually, the game opens up a lot, with some mobility increases (dash, double jump) and weapon alt-fires allowing you to discover previously inaccessible areas. 

The enemies have their own neat little mechanics, like how this heavy enemy will be armoured up, not allowing normal shots to damage them. You need to land a shotgun while they are charging you to break it off instantly, allowing any other damage to work. When you find the pistol alt-fire, you can use that instead, giving you more options and letting you use your shotgun for more important enemies.

There is also a resource outside of health and armour called omnifuel. You can find a lot of these all over the level or by using your melee on enemies, and you are given a lot of opportunities to do so. You can use the omnifuel to get more health, armour, or specific ammo while on the move. There's a nice sort of flow to the resource management, which only gets even better during the boss fight. Trying to manage my pistol ammo to open the boss up, dashing away from his attacks, jumping over the room-wide aoes, collecting resources on the edges of the arena, and all while trying to conserve ammo to actually damage the boss or adds was great!

I spent almost 2 hours just in this demo and still missed a lot of secrets and enemies (in the first map)! Wonderful game, excellent level design, fun enemies, and great movement. I cannot wait to play the full version of this game. It looks like the highest difficulty even remixes all the enemies and items.
This level was great with just how tight and interconnected it was. I really enjoyed going through this city, and it had some fun secrets to find. The guns felt pretty good, but they just need to work a bit more on the combat.

The enemies are not really placed in interesting places; hard is way too easy, and you're given so much ammo. The developer did say the game was only balanced on normal for the demo due to time constraints, and to be fair, it is also the first level. They said they would also be adding more interactivity to the levels.

I'm looking forward to this in the future, and hopefully they can fix the difficulty.
Yeah, it looks like a shitpost, but there are actually a lot of great things. Lots of the enemies are unique here and have some really great animations (the flying frog is amazing).

You have some usual genre staples like projectiles, hitscan and fast melee variants, but there are also some very creative ones in the demo. For example, there is an enemy that exists just to teleport other enemies to annoy you and another that will speed up all enemies temporarily if you get hit by the projectile they spit out. That same enemy can also set up all the enemies to attack you on the same beat. All the weapons are really fun to use and they sound great. When you die, you can even rewind 5 seconds or the entire level up to any point you choose.

You are also forced to scythe-start each map, which was great to see. It's just a very enjoyable little game that pleasantly surprised me.
The enemies are pretty boring here... My computer runs this pretty slowly, and it doesn't help that there's no sprint button at all (not sure if I'm being gaslit but people are complaining about moving too fast on steam???)? It's good with some nice art, but I did get a bit disappointed when I saw you could upgrade weapons and get equip perks at the hub...Hopefully the game lives up to all the praise I've been hearing for this series.
This plays like a source engine puzzle game, and it even has the turrets & lasers from Portal. I can see this being great for a lazy day if the price is right.
I think just seeing New Blood as the publisher made me expect something closer to a shooter. Anyway, it's more like a brawler with some light stealth/imsim elements, to which I'm ambivalent. It looks really nice, though, so maybe I'll get more into it later down the line.
The first one of these games I've played and is about what you expect. It is pretty unique here, since you can just wave your mouse like a madman rather than wasd slowly. It seems to go a lot faster, although this demo was only 20 waves and I finished in like 5 minutes. 
I played this with a friend over parsec because, for some reason, the demo has no online. Anyway, it was pretty fun and chaotic, with lots of distractions to throw you off your rhythm. I just expected more Konami songs, and the price isn't really making me want to rush for it. Who knows how the online will be?
It's definitely in an early state here, with even the tutorial being laggy. It's a tutorial, and then you're thrown probably halfway into the game for a level, which honestly makes me hate every demo that does this.

I didn't really like their previous game, so I'm fine with waiting for the full game.
I'm not really into score or combo-based shooters, but this was decent, and the style did add to it. I feel like it's hard to tell when you take damage, or I just suck at noticing.  
It's about what you expect from a 2D souls-like. Having to use the control stick and not being able to rebind anything sucks especially for parry. I only played for a little bit since if I do end up wanting to play, I'd rather go in fresh.

It seemed average so far; I'll see how well this turns out.
Everything just feels bad to me and is lacking something. You run way too slowly, enemies aren't really interesting, and there seems to be a lot of emphasis on being a collect-treasure game. 
Everything about this just felt awful. The guns felt unsatisfying and limp; some buttons barely even work like sprint; enemies are literally nothing except for the couple heavily armoured ones that a few more seconds to down; the demo is a very short, boring train level with a boss fight that does nothing; good thing we had a crane segment; it really feels like there is no weight or impact to anything. The only upside I have is that they might fix this before release.
More of a proof of concept than a demo. It is missing a lot, but I can see the foundation of elemental magic + dungeons in 1st person being fun. Still a long ways to go and not really fair to rank this, but oh well...
Baby's first imsim with a pretty broken ability to climb things and an anime girl. I had my fill pretty quickly. Not for me.

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