I wanted to shill some of the better demos I played during Steam's demo event, as well as open the floor to talk about promising upcoming games. this is still a forum centered around gaming, right?
Ardenfall: basically Morrowind with Oblivion combat. the writing felt serviceable, I'll have to see if it gets bad later on in the full game.
Sword Hero: combat focused third person adventure game. the combat feels old school, but at the same time it feels fairly unique for sword fighting game. the demo was mostly just combat, but it's supposed to be an adventure game with dialogue as well.
Alliance Peacefighter: a FreeSpace inspired space shooter with an inertia system that feels plausible for space fighter combat. the controls take a bit of getting used to, but once you've got it dialed it's very fun.
Hark the Goul A N64 feeling first person souls like. Lots of gore and horror. the pacing felt weird to me, but the game was interesting.
Bombun Mario 64 meets Bomberman Generations. the platforming mechanics were solid and the puzzles felt good.
Dinoblade Cringe-Kino spectacle fighter where you were a dinosaur with a sword in its mouth fighting other dinosaurs with swords in their mouths. I'll be honest the game was jank and the environments were full of stock assets, probably not worth a buy but I highly recommend the demo for 5 minutes of stupid fun.
Rollin' Rascal straight up 3D Sonic complete with character creator. if you liked the original Sonic Adventure, you'll like this game.
Wild Blue Skies it's straight up Star Fox 64. if you want a new Star Fox 64 game, I recommend this game.
I wish to cancel out OPs recommendation for Wild Blue Skies. The demo level is ugly, the enemies are damage sponges, it's way too furry and your teammates are constantly yammering in annoying voices - a flanderized star fox.
Bombun I thought was a good skeleton of a game but there's not quite enough there.
My recommendations:
Blood Vial - An arcade FPS where you can swim through blood like Splatoon. I'm a simple man, I like to click on heads.
Croak - Platformer with a tongue-grapple gimmick that actually works. Really good balance of difficulty.
Forehead Chip - A side scroller where you venture into the slums and tazer vagrants.
GUN.DOG.REVENGE - A take on the arcade classic arcade game Rolling Thunder. Bit of a niche interest but I enjoyed it.
Solar Voltage - Isometric platforming. Has kind of a late DOS game feel to it.
Blast Cats - Classic 3D platformer style with a bit of 'tude.
Deep Snow Delivery - You drive a tank around in the snowy post-apocalyse, collect scrap, upgrade your tank.
Cursed Words - Hybrid word finding puzzle game where you can get all kinds of modifiers and wild cards.
Unrelated, but I recently started playing Slay the Spire OG from my back catalog purely coincidentally after StS2 dropped.
I had played & enjoyed StS deck-building roguelike clones over the years and am now pretty obsessed with the original.
I'm pretty surprised how fucking hard the game is considering its popularity. And that it's widely known & has been played by most casuals.
It took me dozens of tries to finally beat the 3rd Act boss with the blind female monk Watcher character.
Was really surprised that such an old & popular genre-defining title only has 4 playable characters (and no DLC?). Other clones I'd played previously usually had a lot more variety.
These games sound promising, but why are the titles basically pre-LLM RNG outputs?
I played the hell out of Star Fox 64. I should keep an eye on the last one.
there are a lot of indie games out there, I imagine coming up with a unique title is difficult especially when a lot of them are iterations of classic formulas.
Does Megabonk count? It came out like 6 months ago but it’s awesome