Steam Demo Spree, Jun 2026

30 June 2026

Another steam next fest has gone and went! And here's my opinions on a bunch of games i played. I am once again splitting them into thumbs up and thumbs down:

Thumbs Up! 👍

• The Postman Cometh - Cute funny little package delivery game
• ⭐ PHASE ZERO - One of the coolest original Resident Evil homages I've seen in a while. Really great atmosphere!
• ⭐ Hypnagogia: Broken Dreams - I love these sort of Dreamcast-core games, a little bit walking sim, a little bit platformer, just a great little adventure. Also some GREAT character designs, Oracle is... 💦
• $$$://somnialys i am tired, so i bought a couple of dreams - a 3d dream diary! kinda cool, though you gotta already be into that
• Normal Golf Game - A modal golf game which is half physics-based golfing game and half walking sim
• Surface - Here we go! Megastructure exploration. A little bit backroomsy but much more Portal 2 in variety, a lone wanderer just trying to reaach the surface. I'm into it!
• REPOSE - Really cool vibes for a dungeon crawler with a very dark and oppressive atmosphere.
• ⭐ vholume - WHAT IF MIRROR'S EDGE WAS BRUTALIST. THE JUICE IS BACK. Also the soundtrack is GOOD.
• ⭐ Tetrachroma - Since the Tetris company is a wholly evil enterprise I heartily recommend this amazing spin on tetronimo action. The color-swapping gameplay is really engaging and the package is, in my humble opinion, smoother than the well-regarded Tetris Effect.

Thumbs Down... 👎

• Slaughter House - Awesome CGA graphics but not my style of game. Love the vibes though.
• A Game About Feeding A Black Hole - I think incremental games have locked into a place where they're so purely skinner boxed at this point that there's no interesting edges any more.
• Sweepin' XS - It's minesweeper with Balatro progression, but uh... the UI isn't very good and it's hard to figure out where you're supposed to click and things.
• Cloudrooms - Man everybody wants to be Exit 8 so bad but they're stuck in this like SCP / Backrooms / Liminal Subreddit frame of mind about it and nobody can recapture the juice of Exit 8's classic corridor haunting.
• Wordatro - I think a thing that happens in indie game development is that a game gets really big and then everyone assumes ther must be some dilutable element of it that made it tick, and as long as we clone that element our game will be a success too! And the fact is: This is false.
• LOOTPLOT - Fun little factory game with some Balatro-ish mechanics, pretty well thought out but not really my thing.
• Preserve - Doesn't quite itch the gardening game itch I have, but it's got some pretty solid concepts.
• No Up - This is like one mechanic of a puzzle game but they made a whole game out of it so its very, very thin.
• Sorry, James - I genuinely can't tell if I finished the demo or it somehow permanently glitched out but I didn't really get enough of it to see whether the kind of edgy writing is worth it.
• Pereelous - I don't really like games where you have to try and time pulling slots. Cool aesthetic otherwise.
• RE_ALLOC - It's sort of like TIS-80 except the demo is literally 1 basically language intro. No idea if this would be worth it.
• Clutch Time - I think this honestly pretty accurately simulates the tension of the push and pull of a basketball game. That part's really fun! It's also pretty repetetive without the fun of watching the ball go through the air and girls running across the court.... watch the WNBA.
• Spilled! - Extremely cute and wholesome game, for better and worse. I worry with this genre of cleanup games that they may delude people into thinking environmentalist action is as easy and simple as the games depict. It's a trend I've slowly seen occuring, and it alarms me because of the overwhelming and unrelenting state of pollution in the modern world. I think it's good to promote environmentalism and show how beautiful the world can be, but I think we also need to think about whether gamifying things so simple might be making us feel good about solving the problem without actually doing so in any material way.
• Magnus Positive Phototaxis - Simple little adventure game with some very interesting little computer animation segments. Unfortunately the animation segments don't really feel like they connect to the game in any way, and I think they would sort of do better seperately on a YouTube channel or the like.
• Wild Growth - Good visual and audio design but like many Nodebuster clones it drags on too long and becomes repetetive and uninteresting. A lot of these games are optimized to try and take over two hours to beat so people can't refund them on Steam, and that ends up making games which should only be about 20 minutes go 6 times too long.
• Life of a Cockroach - This is very jank and the writing is very thin, but I do find wandering around as a little bug is always fun. I don't know, maybe if it's developed a whole lot more it could be something.
• Pseudo-Haunting - I love the vibes of this, even if the progression and writing is a little opaque at times. It's very slow and methodical, and I sort of got bored with the demo, but mostly because I thought, well, if I play the full game of this, I don't want to replay these parts. Not sure if I'll pursue the whole thing, I think I want a little more meat on those bones.