Day of the Demos: Highlights of the Steam Game Festival
In this spring’s Steam Game Festival – an event featuring dozens of demos mostly from smaller indie games – I found some incredible gems that have a plethora of potential and are worth paying attention to on the road to release. In the limited window that these game demos were available, I played a handful of titles that piqued my interest from an art and storytelling perspective. After sifting through these demos, there are eight games that I’d like to share for people like me who get excited about upcoming indie games.
The first demo that I’ve been following for about a year on Twitter comes from a game known as Röki, a project led by former Playstation art directors who have formed their own studio known as Polygon Treehouse. This team has assembled a game rich in Scandanavian setting and lore, championing the wide-eyed protagonist named Tove, searching for her little brother who has gone missing. Over the course of this short demo, Tove makes friends with a troll who blocks her path under a bridge. By assisting this troll in yanking out an embedded sword left in its shoulder by an aggressive human, Tove makes friends with this troll, opening the way through. Through the abundant animations for Tove and the troll, as well as the other handful of barely introduced characters throughout this demo, I fell in love with the polish already present in this game.
The next game is known as Moncage, a visual puzzler centered around a cubic device – a framed camera within a glass box – which slowly reveals layers and interactive methods to open up unorthodox solutions to obscure puzzles. The beautiful geometry of this game is not to be missed, as well as the heartfelt narrative that can be assembled through the collection of splotchy photographs that, as collected, hang displayed in the room around this cubed box. I didn’t find Moncage to be terribly easy – in fact, I got impossibly stuck a few times before making incremental progress once more. But my time with the game was quite brilliant, encouraging me to think in ways I wouldn’t normally be required to by a video game.
She Dreams Elsewhere made the biggest impact on me of any game I was able to demo through the Steam Game Festival. I have been following this game for many months on Twitter, drawn in by the art style and focus on experiences unconventional to most video games. But I was not prepared for how drawn in I would be in the hour-long experience I spent with the game. She Dreams Elsewhere touches on themes of identity, diversity, self-hatred, social anxiety, delusions, and other themes that many games dare not touch. The visual identity of this game might initially come off as something from RPG Maker but quickly complicates any such naive assumptions through an idiosyncratic color pallete and art style. The topics and language in this game are more mature than I was expecting, including a word or two that I wasn’t quite comfortable reading aloud, but I respect the game for dealing with such complicated issues.
Like Moncage, Superliminal is a challenge of player perspective. Unlike Moncage, which fixes your perspective on a circular camera dolly, forcing you to navigate within tight confines of a cube, Superliminal invites you to place physical objects in varying perspectives, causing them to differently impact your relationship to the environment. In one of the opening rooms, for example, a table in the corner has a few pawns on it. Pick up a pawn – something about the size of a thumb or larger – raise it towards the ceiling, and let it drop. BOOM! Your pawn just took on the size that you would expect a pawn at that distance to have the size of – in other words, this game enlarges and shrinks objects based on physical perspective. It reminded me of a childhood quirk where I would close one eye, squint through the other, and pinch my fingers over someone’s space, as if the hand of a giant was crushing them. That, by and large, is Superliminal.
Lord Winklebottom Investigates is a point-and-click adventure game that might be summarized as a giraffe detective simulator. As reductive as that might be, Lord Winklebottom is an eloquent giraffe of high society with a hippopotamus deuteragonist. Through simple observations, Lord Winklebottom solves various issues for local citizens – things like reaching his giraffe neck up to the second story of a locked-in pub to obtain the keys, or sawing up a barrel to get wood to patch a seaward ship. Nothing in this game reinvents the wheel, but it does feature eloquent dialogue and well-designed anthropomorphic animal designs that sell the overall experience.
Since its E3 reveal in 2019, Spiritfarer instantly established itself as an indie darling within many circles. Getting my hands on this game was not only exciting but completely surpassed my expectations in a few respects. The already great art style presented in the announcement trailer looks animated and drawn by hand, causing the floppy movements of the playable character to pop with vibrance. Playing this game on a controller felt like a dream because of how fluid all the inputs and responses were – something many indies often struggle with perfecting. The story, characters, and setting presented were all compelling, and the music was surprisingly rivalling the art style. And I can’t neglect to mention that the companion kitty plays with the loading screen icon during idle moments – way too cute.
I had never heard of When the Past was Around until seeing it on the Steam storefront for the Game Festival event, but as always with games, I tend to judge a book by its cover. In this instance, doing so paid off. What grabbed me about the beautiful art style kept my interest through surprisingly intuitive puzzles. Featuring a protagonist who seems to be hallucinating or at least fantasizing about their now-gone partner, this game requires you to scan the environment for logical clues that help deduce how to entice this lost partner to help you progress into the next room – the next memory.
I was going to outright ignore Chicory’s presence in the Steam Game Festival but for the fact that Greg Lobanov, lead game maker behind Chicory, announced that there were changes and adjustments from the initial demo that backers played months ago. I wrote about Chicory: A Colorful Tale back when the initial demo was released to Kickstarter backers. I highly praised the demo at the time for establishing a cute, fun, whimsical, and engaging world that I had never encountered before. In addition to a new co-op mode, which I was unable to explore, the world has been expanded in terms of additional screens and characters. But the familiar core that impressed me remains perfectly intact; I remain entirely optimistic and good-willed towards Chicory.
2020 and beyond will continue to be a wildly exploratory time for the indie game scene. These eight demos alone express the breadth and creative ambition of the medium. It endlessly fascinates me how indie games find ways to innovate – in terms of visual and auditory direction, in terms of interactivity and gameplay, and in terms of narrative crafting. It’s gratifying to be able to look forward to this myriad of small games, and I wish all of these developers the best in creating something with lasting power that extends into the future.
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