Steam holds a lot of events throughout the year, but “Next Fest” is, by far, the most creative. Developers big and small showcase their upcoming games and there is nothing too weird to show.
Case in point: Desktop Survivors 98.
This love letter to retro computing asks the question: What if Vampire Survivors, but you’re a cursor, and the dungeon is on your desktop, and Clippy is now Swordy?
The dungeon map is Minesweeper. Come on. How could you not like this game?
Inconceivable Rat Endeavor actually can be conceived, it turns out. You, the player, need to move a rat next to the cheese. The good cheese, not the old, ratty… I mean moldy cheese. Your only tool is a selector that selects six hexes in a circle, and you can rotate the movable elements in that circle left or right, as long as those elements (rats, cheese, alligators, etc.) don’t hit unmovable pillars. It’s a fascinating puzzle game in the vein of classics such as Sokoban, and I can’t wait to play the full game.
Inconceivable Rat Endeavor on Steam
Make Your Choice is a storytelling game. Each adventure starts with an empty snowglobe; as the story progresses and you make decisions, you fill the globe with reminders of your journey. The demo includes just two stories; the one above, which tells the story of a new wizard in a wizarding school; and an adventure, where you collect party members and go on a quest.
It’s a cute game, but think it wouldn’t take long to get through all the content. The two stories in the demo only took a couple minutes each to complete.
Infinity Cats Project is an idle clicker game. For some reason, you need to type the titles of all of Shakespeare’s works, over and over again, to ear “cat coins”. This sounds tedious; cats should work for their own coins, so you hire a cat or three to bang their little paws on keyboards and hope that somewhere in there, the works of Shakespeare pop out.
As you and the cats work, you’ll be able to buy items that keep them fed, watered, and energized, help them correct their errors, increase their typing speed, make each completed work worth more, and so on. Clicker stuff.
It’s cute, for sure, but half an hour in, I’d unlocked everything in the demo. The game is formatted as if to fit on a phone screen. The game is clearly a labor of love (the real life kitties are in the credits screen), but it would need to be expanded quite a lot to become a game worth buying.
