⭐ I've had my eye on the development of this one for a long time. It's a 2D platformer where you have a big drill that allows you to quickly travel through sand and jump out of it to move between patches or attack enemies. That's not a very good description, but if you see 5 seconds of it you'll immediately get it, and it controls just as well as you'd hope from how it looks. I quit before finishing the demo because this assuaged my only concern that it wouldn't feel good to play, will be picking this up day 1.

⭐ A top down metroidvania that takes small bits and mechanics from a lot of different games. You play as a ghost of a cat tasked with cleaning up the world of the dead. Very cute and stylish art and good music. None of the individual parts here between the combat, exploration, and story are particularly deep from the hour or so I played but it comes together as a really nice feeling overall package, will likely play the full release.

⭐ This has been a very popular demo so you probably don't need to hear it from me, but this is pretty great. If you're not aware, it's a poker-based roguelike where you modify your deck as well as the changing rewards for forming different hands to get higher scores, and each round you have to pass a certain score within 5 hands played. It's much more streamlined and approachable than I expected from watching. Runs seem a bit on the long side, could just be first-run reading time adding up but my run in the demo was around an hour. Really fun though, will be playing the full release.

⭐ Very refreshing take on tower defense. Each round you get tetrominoes to build the walls of the level, which serve to make paths for the enemies as well as allow you to place towers on them. The game is run-based, with you adding pieces and towers to your selection between each map, and your health carrying over between levels. Only played one fairly short run but it seems fun enough that I'll probably play the full game.

🌚 This is an adventure game with a really unique stop-motion art style set in a bioshock-esque underwater city, I believe the devs made most or all of the things in the game for real and scanned them in somehow. You can see the seams with things like lighting looking more like a game, but it's a very impressive and unique style for sure. At the start of the demo I was really thinking it wouldn't be for me, it's painfully slow in a lot of ways and the dialogue feels kind of stiff initially. I'm glad I stuck with it though because I think the story was getting pretty interesting by the end. It's a game that demands a lot of patience from you and I'd need to be in the right mood to play more of it, but I'm certainly considering playing the final game.

🌚 A city builder with a very nice art style and theming, it's set in a desert and a lot of the mechanics revolve around stuff like purifying water and making sure your citizens homes don't overheat. I like a lot about this, but also had pretty bad crashing issues with the demo, and also think the UI could use some QoL. Very promising and I sent a lot of feedback to the devs, will be keeping an eye on it.

🌚 This game is bizarre. It's kind of like if The Witness was made by Ubisoft...? I don't entirely mean that in a bad way. It's a puzzle game primarily centered around grid-based puzzles where you place black and white tiles, with a variety of different rules that it slowly teaches you and then combines and builds on. It's also open world and littered with a dozen different types of side-puzzles, and each type of puzzle gives you different kinds of XP and resources, and there's a skill tree which unlocks QoL for the puzzles as well as movement mechanics for platforming challenges. It's also inexplicably multiplayer, there really doesn't seem to be any interaction other than seeing other players standing around solving the puzzles. It's very strange and messy, but I did have a surprising amount of fun with it. My biggest complaint by far is that this game runs like absolute shit. Even on the lowest settings with FSR turned on, with a pretty high end PC, I was getting below 30fps a lot of the time. Maybe because of all the other players? I have no idea. I really hope they fix that, because it's not a huge deal for the puzzles but really makes the exploration and platforming feel awful. If that seems better at launch I could see myself buying it.

🌚 A Townscaper-esque toy for building pretty looking things without much effort. I like this one but it does feel like there's a lack of building blocks in the demo, and cycling through the selection is sort of awkward. Not as elegant as Townscaper but might check out the full release.

🌚 It's a new Tribes! I'm not exactly a series veteran, only really played Ascend, but these games are cool and it's neat to see a new one. To my uninformed view it doesn't seem like they've fucked it up, feels like the same stuff is here. Some good old school multiplayer fun.

🌚 A first person exploration game, not really a walking sim, it wants to feel like an immersive sim in parts but the gameplay isn't quite that. I like the style of it, and what's here is intriguing enough that I might check out the full game, but it's a little shallow. So few objects are interactable that it kind of spoils that the things you can actually click on are mostly useful, and it feels like the sort of game where everything should be physics objects you can pick up to obscure that but they're not. Dialogue trees were very shallow as well, didn't really feel like conversations at all and despite having an options system most characters were just "press 1 to advance" basically. I'm interested, I like the vibes, but will wait and see how this turns out.

Classic F-Zero-like, only played a few minutes because it does not control very well and runs surprisingly poorly for something emulating SNES graphics.

A "twin-stick" shooter (in quotes because controller support is broken in the demo) version of Risk of Rain. I'm not the biggest fan of RoR's approach to roguelite design in the first place, and this seems to copy just about everything. The style isn't terrible or anything but it didn't do as much for me as RoR. It has the exact same problem with how items work that you have a very small amount of control over your build and it's a lot of mostly incremental upgrades determined by luck. The main thing this does differently is having different level objectives. Sometimes you stand in a circle, sometimes there's a boss, sometimes you have to clear a certain amount of normal enemies. The aiming is kind of awkward because of the camera angle, and also there's verticality to it and small bumps and inclines can cause you to shoot over enemies heads, a small thing but made it feel much less polished. Maybe check it out if you're a big fan of RoR and think a not-as-good version of that doesn't sound too bad, but to me it's very mid.

Thought Euro Truck Sim in space sounded like a cool idea. Controls more awkwardly than you would expect, runs terribly, and I got stuck pretty shortly at a part where it doesn't give you very good instructions and I couldn't be bothered to figure it out.

A speedrun-focused first person platformer, not bad but didn't do enough over similar games to keep my interest, didn't play much.

Another game in the vein of Townscaper and Summerhouse, but this one is for making Blade Runner-like cities. This one seems incredibly shallow without much creative input from the player at all, wasn't impressed.

A mash-up of Superhot and Sniper Elite, with a very unique style. The levels are puzzle-like, you scout around and tag enemies at the start, and once you shoot you control your bullet and have to fire again from the location of the person you hit, so you need to plan out a path where you can kill everyone without being stranded. It's definitely a cool concept with a unique style, but the gameplay wasn't entirely up my alley. Would recommend checking it out if it looks neat to you though.

VR rail shooter, played a couple minutes and was very unimpressed all around, not as fun as it looked.

This is a spiritual successor to Starcraft, it's got some interesting ideas on making the game more accessible and reducing the skill floor, but I didn't play beyond the tutorial because the game seems in a rough state. I hope this is not launching anytime soon. Performance was pretty bad even just sitting still looking at a simple base on flat ground without much going on, and there's also weird bugs with drag panning the camera where your mouse jumps around which makes it basically unplayable for me.

An arcadey take on rally racing that I was really hoping to like more than I did. I've dipped my toes in the water with the Dirt Rally games, and something a bit easier than those but still providing that same sort of gameplay is appealing, and I like the visual style here. The controls here, at least on the one car in the demo, are incredibly touchy. Steering goes too far in the direction of immediately turning that it hardly feels like a car, and you can accelerate so fast that crashing your way through sharper turns doesn't even seem bad. My biggest complaint though is with the navigator voices, the game seems to be leaning into them being strong personalities, which equates to them saying fucking quips and missing giving you directions for a turn, and even during the handful of races I did I was already hearing repeat lines a lot.

A survivors-like/bullet heaven/etc, this has some neat ideas and the visuals look higher budget than most, but it has too many problems for me to play more of this when there's so many other interesting games in the genre. You have a mech and pilot, the mech seems to be focused on melee or more mobile abilities, while the pilot has a gun and ranged abilities but your gun requires reloading and you move slower while shooting so you're encouraged to alternate. Unfortunately it's visually too messy, Vampire Survivors is great at having hundreds of enemies on screen and making you feel great for being able to dodge them, and this is the exact opposite where even a small amount of enemies feels hard to avoid damage constantly chipping away at you. Combine that with very annoying and unpolished menus (fuck virtual cursors) and I'll probably give this one a pass.

2D platformer where you play as a rabbit with a teleporter. It's an okay central mechanic, but I wasn't overly impressed with it. Simple art style that didn't do much for me, level design is just passable. It did have a pretty neat boss fight, if it has a lot of those and keeps up using unique mechanics for them I could see it being interesting for that. Also very strangely a timed demo, and the timer continues running during dialogue and tutorials which was very annoying. I finished the demo content with time to spare, but just... why?

An ultra-fast-paced roguelite shooter, the style of this definitely stands out even though it wasn't as appealing to me as it seems to be for others, I was hoping the gameplay would click with me but it really didn't. Levels are extremely linear and boring, you can tell they're procedurally generated and not in an interesting way. Because everything's in these narrow hallways and the pace is so fast the enemies really can't provide much variety or threat. The levels are incredibly short too, around 30 seconds, and then you spend just as long picking an upgrade between levels (partially from reading descriptions, partially from slow animations). These upgrades are all over the place, some of them are useless 3% chance shit and some are ridiculously overpowered. You also get new weapons through this system, I tried a couple and wasn't really impressed by the feel of anything. The upgrades also end up not mattering much for your overall run because they get reset after each boss. Really don't get what other people see in the gameplay of this one.

I like the idea of a noir duck detective going for a comedic tone, but this seems very simplistic in the detective gameplay. To be fair it's a very short demo at the beginning of the game, but I wasn't too impressed. Only worth checking out if you really like the style I think.

A gameboy-styled fishing game where you quickly find out that things aren't so normal with the fish in this lake and the citizens of the nearby town you live in. The subversiveness of it didn't appeal to me too much but I could see people being more into this than me, and I did hear positive things about this. The fishing gameplay is different from others I've played and decent enough but nothing to really write home about, I think the main appeal here is seeing the mysterious stuff unravel.

Checked this out just because it's a new immersive sim, I really did not play much but was very unimpressed by the tutorial/early part of the game. Seems really unpolished in a lot of aspects and didn't hook me.