The Autumn Report: Five Sci-Fi Game Demos
Hark! Hear the klaxon bell in the distance! The Good Mayor of Games has descended from their lofty heights to deliver us the Steam Game Festival! Behold, a bounty of games, a smorgasbord of technical feats, indie adventures, aaaaaand okay, I can’t keep this bit going. Clean it up, take 2, here we go:
The Autumn Steam Game Festival is happening from now until the 13th (at 10AM PDT). It’s a follow-up to the Summer Game Festival, featuring developer livestreams of works-in-progress, a bunch of pre-orders, and a slew of downloadable demos. It’s a really cool idea, if only because the idea of “the demo” feels like it’s fallen by the wayside over the years. I decided to take the plunge and rustle up a handful of games that I’d either heard about in some capacity or watched enough of a trailer to say, “yeah, okay, let’s take a bite out of this one.”
Our criteria for this Autumn Report:
The game is science fiction in nature.
It has a demo.
Each of these demos will include a link to the Steam store page. I don’t have an affiliate link or anything, I just think they’re all worth checking out for yourselves as well.
That’s it! Let’s dig in!
Ghostrunner
Ghostrunner opens with a splash, as you take control of a robotic man with a katana and some impressive reflexes. You’re immediately wallrunning, dilating time to strafe away from bullets, and dashing in to get quick, bloody kills. The environments looked great, both in the “real world” surrounding the mysterious Dharma Tower, and the cyberspace that the demo’s last level took place in, as the narrative thrust is established by a giant, floating cyberface.
The combat itself feels clean and really bloody, crimson geysers spewing out from severed arms, legs, noodles, you name it. The main character’s fragility, however, makes that lightning-fast, frenetic nature of these arenas a bit annoying to repeatedly navigate. You’re flying through these giant, cyberpunk chambers, grappling across gaps, and as you approach a would-be thug…another bullet from across the room kills you. Restarts are very quick, which gives the game a bit of a Meat Boy-esque checkpoint loop, but…I dunno, something felt off about it. I hope you can eventually get an upgrade that gives you at least one more hit point to work with, but it’s a very promising start.
Per Aspera
Of the remaining games on this list, Per Aspera was one I’d never heard of and what I walked away from the most excited about. A Martian city-builder, it’s got A Look to it. The world has a sleek, topographical edge that I found gorgeous to look at, with plenty of overlays to study power consumption, worker traffic, and underlying geographical surveys. As you place a new building, adjacent buildings shoot out potential roads like lightning to find the cleanest path of connection. You can zoom out to see the whole of Mars, watching your highway network slowly expand across the surface, or dive deep in to focus on the individual buildings in that dense settlement. It’s just a hypnotic package to look at and watch unfold.
Managing your different resources didn’t feel too challenging in the early game, and information is all fairly clean in its presentation. As the nearly hour-long demo concluded and I established my first proper settler colony, I could start to see a devious web of complexity unfolding, and that was before I saw an asteroid plummet down in the distance.
Everspace 2
Everspace 2 is an extremely good-looking video game. The demo on Steam lists it as an “early prototype,” and that’s a pretty accurate descriptor. Having flown around in its singular little star system for about an hour or so, interrupted by a sudden Blaseball boss fight, I felt like I understood what this game wanted to be, but not the potential of what it could be. At first blush, it’s an open-world spaceship RPG, complete with procedural missions, inventory management, and some healthy doses of space combat. As Adam Roslin, the World’s Most Generic Protagonist, I flew from station to station, refilling my missiles and repairing my armor plating, while aiding some scientists and a couple station managers.
As an early prototype…Everspace 2 feels a little lifeless, overall. Dashing around ships feels fine, but there was also next to no danger being posed as I effortlessly skirted around every conceivable obstacle. The small handful of missions I found out in the wild weren’t particularly involved, and my character felt like he was annoyed to be called on at all. With no real narrative thrust, it also felt like I was just sort of dropped in and told to dink around for a bit until I had my fill. It’s a majestic piece of space tourism, though, even if the photo mode feels entirely inverted control-wise. I can see the potential here, and I hope that further versions of it give me more reason to come back.
Haven
The intro video to Haven is arresting, with a flurry of watercolor spectacle set to a Danger soundscape. Seriously, go watch that, and then come back here.
Set on a remote planet full of islets, you control a couple - quite literally, as the game wastes no time in showing they’re in a relationship, with you bouncing back and forth between the two making dialogue decisions and helping (or hurting) their opinions of each other. These choices felt nuanced, to the point where I never quite felt like I had the right choice for a situation.
Eventually, the two have to leave their tiny ship to search for fuel and food, which leads to some semi-open-world gameplay as you glide around the islets, following energy trails, discovering food and strange animals, and attempting to subdue the latter. Haven’s combat feels fresh and clever: controlling both characters, you queue up their actions with the left analog stick and the face buttons. Have them perform the same action, and they’ll team up for a stronger effect. There are a lot of cool ideas on offer here, and I’m interested to see where the story goes.
Exo One
In what is perhaps the strangest conceptual pitch of the five games I looked at, Exo One’s demo is all style and feel. After a crew of astronauts goes missing on the mysterious planet Sagan IV, you are put in control of…a ball. This ball, of course, can manipulate its own gravity to become super-heavy or weightless, letting you pick up wild amounts of speed as you soar through dunes and hills only to compress yourself into a saucer and glide through the air.
The rhythmic feel of increasing and decreasing gravity to move across the landscape feels great, and the environment is unsettlingly vast. As you fly up into the clouds, moisture condensates onto the camera, and starts to slide away as you careen back down. In terms of plot, there’s not much to speak of in this brief little demo, but on a mechanical level, there’s definitely something here. If it ends up being a mix of Race the Sky style free flying and some more intricate platforming sections that really utilize the back-and-forth nature of the Space Orb, it could be great.
Exo One does not have a listed release date. It’s “coming soon.”
That’s five sci-fi games, five demos, and five garbled messes of words about them. If we see a Winter Game Festival come down the line, we’ll have to take another dive into the Demo Pile.
In the meantime, I think all of these demos are worth checking out! The Festival runs through Tuesday, and if you happen to give ‘em a spin, let me know what you thought. Comments have been turned on for this post, which is a Beside the Dunes first.
I’m sure that won’t backfire magnificently.
