I did not expect to be walking through a forest at eight this morning. Trees rising out of the sandy earth around me and forming a dense canopy overhead. Buildings poking through the mist. Gnomes or goblins of some kind. Oh god, they’re shooting at me! Duck! Run! Get out of here!
This is The Explorator, but it could have been something else – Parcel Corps, which combines Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio, or Kill Knight, which finally builds on Gears’ active reloads and makes a whole arcade game out of it. Most of all, this is Steam Next Fest, the carnival of demos for upcoming games which always marks the start of summer. For a week this job feels like being in Quantum Leap, jumping into different worlds, different situations, different challenges. A forest! Oh boy.
So this is our game of the week: Steam Next Fest. The whole thing. We’ve been trying to keep up with it on Wishlisted, but in truth the joy of Steam Next Fest is that you can’t keep up with it. There’s always something else you should be playing, something else someone is whispering about and telling you they can’t believe how good it is. It’s patchy, of course – The Explorator shows great promise, but I think it’s maybe a little early for a demo – but that’s part of the fun as well.
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