TBF #13 – Steam Next Fest

Steam Next Fest

In case you live in a cave, last week was the Steam Next Fest, which had tons of demos available to play for free. I played a lot of them, and I thought it would be fun to list the games that provided me with the most fun. This way, we can share some good games to play, get excited about, and maybe discuss over on Discord.

I'd also like to detail some elements I saw in the demos that I liked less. Basically, the learnings I got about what we need to ensure we're not doing for Make A Pair. A little bit like a notebook of interesting game design tidbits to avoid.

These are mostly about deckbuilder games, with a few exceptions here and there. Without further ado, let's get started.

The Cool Kids

Order of the Sinking Star is the new game by the creator of Braid and The Witness, which I had the pleasure to play for over five hours. I loved it, and it came with a lot of interesting challenges. Probably a day-one buy for me! Tons of puzzle, a strange story and some very interesting gameplay twist. What's not to love?

The Devil's Due is a turn-based deckbuilder where you fight the devil's minions. You can cheat your way through runs. The goal is simple: make poker hands to beat the minions you face. The enemy will deal damage to you, which you can block with armor. The armor is counted by the number of each card in your hand. The art style is weird, funny, and sometimes plainly horrible (in a good way!).

Demon Bluff is a card game heavily inspired by Werewolf. You try to find the demon that got into your deck from the clues you receive by revealing cards. The issue is that some cards lie or get corrupted, and it's up to you to find the contradiction to kill the right cards. I got so confused multiple times, as the more you play, the more complex it gets. Love it.

Arcane Eats is a deckbuilder cooking game where you serve food to your customers through cards… You cook the cards (yes!), strengthen your mental fortitude to resist whiny customers, and serve delicious (or suspicious) food. The presentation looks good, and there's good fun to have in that game.

I just gave you a short list of games that were part of the Steam Next Fest that I found quite fun. If you're lucky, their demos might still be up! Go play them if you can.

The Less Cool Kids

I played over 20 demos across the week, mostly in the same genre. There were okay games, good games, and great games. I want to list here the elements that made some games just not fun to play. This section particularly applies to deckbuilders, but it might be interesting to look at for other genres of games as well in a future blog post. Maybe for the autumn Steam Next Fest?

Tutorials. They're just a pain in general. Some games assume that I want to read 10 to 20+ pages of text before playing. That's fundamentally wrong. If you've ever played a board game with friends, you know that the worst part is explaining the rules. Everybody at the table gets groggy and just doesn't want to try playing. Tutorials in games should be transparent. Explain the minimum required. Don't use text unless you absolutely have to. Every time a game would present me with tons of text, I'd lose my desire to play. We can do better in that space, I'm sure of it!

Screen catastrophe. I call these the moments where you start a game for the first time, and instead of just going into the action, the game shows a screen with tons of options. What's your loadout, which character will you use, what deck will you play… Look, I just started your game. I don't understand anything at that point, even less so loadouts or choices. Just start the damn game. This is an overload of information I don't need at that point in time. I can't, for the life of me, make any meaningful decision at that moment. Very often, it's worse because you can't even switch the loadout, since it's the start of the game!

Absence of goals. I got into the game. I understand how to play it now. Then I have a sudden realization: why am I doing all of this? Do I have to save a princess? Or maybe my character tries to be rich and powerful? There were a few games that thought just offering me gameplay was enough. That's wrong. You need a motivation, to make sense out of what you're doing. Otherwise, this is closer to a toy than a game. It works for some games with elite game design. For the others, just put in a goal. It doesn't have to be hard or complex. Maybe a score to beat? A line to cross? A cartoonish evil dude to roast? Anything simple, and clear, can do the job.

Set of actions. Any game will propose to you a set of actions to perform in order to beat the goal. These are truly important. The bigger the possibility space, the better it is for you as a player. This is especially true for adults playing. For example, if you apply a math problem to your game, how many valid ways do you offer your player to reach that goal? If you can kill an enemy, how many valid strategies are available to win against it? This is truly complicated, but some games just completely failed at it. I've been trying a bunch of dice games recently, which make me throw dices to do an action based (like deal damage) on the number I've rolled. My possibility space is quite low in terms of actions. I don't control anything. It's pure randomness. I'd argue that's a bad set of actions. If you're looking into something with a bigger set of actions with dice, check out Talystro.

Fantasy. I'm a weird player. I like to fantasize in my head about the action of a card game. I get immersed way more in these games than in triple-A games as they leave me more room for imaginations. As such, I don't like my immersion to get broken at any point (in fact, at any point at all!). I got to play a turn-based card game inspired by Slay the Spire. They had an awesome-looking card where a dragon's paw was crushing a minion beneath it. It cost a lot of resources to play. I spent precious turns to play that awesome card. I managed to get the resources. I'm ready to see that giant claw crushing my enemy… and I get nothing except the base attack animation that the character does every time I attack. My immersion? broken. My dreams? Gone. My reward for all that effort? Nil. Some designers will call that game juice. I just call it the fantasy. Big moments should be rewarded with a big payoff. As a personal note, Make A Pair is going to get better on that front. Yes, we read all your feedback. ;)

Incoherence. This last one is when something jumps out at your eyes or senses when it shouldn't. I was playing a typing game that forced me to use the mouse in between battles. I saw multiple games having a UI clashing with the world. In this world of AI-generated art, sound, and VFX, it's even more apparent than ever. This breaks you out of the immersion. Unless it's wanted by the designer, it's very often just bad to see something that should stay unnoticed. It's a bit less important than the rest of the list. Still, it's a bother.

That's the main key takeaway I got from all the demos I played this week. We'll try to make sure that Make A Pair stays away from these mistakes! If you are a hobbyist or game designer working on a deckbuilder, please think about those.

Next week we'll be back with more content about Make A Pair!