What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Other than 8000 Next Fest demos, anyway
By Graham Smith
A worm tunnels towards a glowing ball, possibly the centre of the earth.

Steam Next Fest is underway, so this weekend you should be playing demos. If you looked at the event's landing page at the start of the week you might have been dismayed by the quality of the submissions, but that was when the page showed a random selection of the reported 8000 demos included this year. The same page now defaults to showing personalised recommendations, and I'd wager you'll see very little of low quality or of slop if you look again now.

We may have specific recommendations for demos to play in the coming days. For now, here are some suggestions for other games you could be playing, if you're committed to spending money this weekend.

Final Fantasy Resonance

A battle screen showing a spread of pixel art humans facing off against some fishy ghouls.

Square Enix finally apply their "2D-HD" art style from the likes of Octopath Traveller to the Final Fantasy series, aiming to deliver what traditional fans of the JRPG series crave without taking ten years or needing three existential crises to do it. As if to underscore this commitment to feeding you what you want, this is set in a world that mashes up elements and characters from previous games. Airships, crystals, ingénue boys with spiky hair, you know the stuff.

Woim

A worm, cut in half, in a grid of dirt. There's a rock, a golden apple and two buttons.

A block-pushing puzzle game in which you steer a worm to press buttons, to eat apples which make you grow longer, and to be cut in half to create two wriggling puzzle solvers instead of one. The art looks cute but the trailer suggests the complexity escalates towards some real head scratchers.

Dreadline Express

A man holds his head in his hands. "The scenery leaps, the window pane rattles, all to the rhythm of the agony inside my head. Help me!" he says.

A first-person narrative mystery set aboard "the last human train", in which you talk to fellow passengers and collect cards to unlock new story options. Honestly, I'm a little unclear on how it works from the Steam page alone, but this seems like one for the virtual detectives amongst you, or for those who can read the word "metroidbrainia" without doing a small sick in their mouth.

What we're playing

Graham: I've installed around 20 demos, so by rights I should be playing those across the weekend. I'm also heading into a half-term school holiday, so suspect my kid and I will be putting some time into the new Switch Sports Resort.

Jonty: I might mourn Bioware by going back to Mass Effect, a franchise I dabbled in but never entirely completed. A clean start on PC might be a nice project to whittle away at for the winter.

Brendan: My videogamesing nephew and niece are visiting and I am secretly hoping they bring their Nintendo Switch so I can download local multiplayer brawlers and wreck them.

This is merely what we are playing, and we are but three lowly servants. Masters, tell us what you'll be enjoying this weekend down below, in the internet's best and only comment section.

Tagged with:
What We're Playing
Graham Smith

Graham Smith

Graham is a former editorial director of Rock Paper Shotgun and editor-in-chief of PC Gamer. He has now been a games journalist for over twenty years, and retains a bottomless appetite for playing new games and tinkering with old ones.