Steam Survival Fest Demos

I enjoy the Steam “fests” mostly because they’ve brought playable demos back. I like being able to try out a game with zero commitment. So each time one comes up, I give a handful of games a spin to see if there’s anything coming up that I’m interested in. Here are a few I’ve played over the past week.

Stardeus

Essentially Rimworld in space. You play as a ship’s AI that has been awoken due to a catastrophic accident on your ship, which is carrying a population of humans in stasis to another world. The game starts with your ship in pieces, and you have to start rebuilding and reconnecting the parts of your ship to ensure the survival of the humans on board.

I didn’t play out the entire demo, but long enough to get a feel for the game. It’s definitely one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Exogate Initiative

I’m a fan of Stargate, and Exogate Initiative lets me play out my fantasy of running Stargate Command. The base building draws a lot of inspiration from Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius (other games I love), and when you send teams to explore other planets, a kind of “choose-your-own-adventure” style dialog plays out. You attempt to gather samples of plants and animals from alien worlds, research them, and use what you discover to earn income for the Initiative via patents.

Pretty easy to play, though they purposely left out a tutorial (there’s a message when you start saying they think players are smart enough to figure things out on their own); I think a short tutorial would have been handy to instruct me to set up certain things before I started hiring scientists, since one quit before I could get a mess hall and barracks built.

Regardless, this was probably my favorite demo from the event. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while already, and it’s likely going to be an Early Access purchase when it’s available.

Adapt

It’s the creature phase of Spore, but an entire game. The creature creation is great and provides a lot of ways to customize things. I had a little dragon-like creature with a shell and clubbed tail. He was adorable.

Patron

A Banished-like game. I played for a bit just to get a feel for it. I was frustrated by the building footprints, which appear to have a “road” space in front of them, but don’t when built, so I had houses basically had connecting front doors with no space for a road between them. It annoyed me, but it’s not bad. I’d probably just play Banished, though.

XO

Start with a ship and slowly acquire/recruit a fleet to flee or fight the “Harvesters”. It’s got an interesting wireframe aesthetic. I was having a good time until I got to a point where my ships stopped responding to my orders and just sat around doing nothing…

Songs of Syx

A bit like Dwarf Fortress, I think. Huge maps, complex structures (you can design your own building layouts and place items inside), low-detail graphics. The tutorial in the demo is pretty straight-forward, but it’s difficult to know how large I should build something (what’s a good-sized warehouse?).

[I] doesn’t exist – a modern text adventure

An easy-to-play text adventure game with an interesting twist at the end. The puzzles were never too obscure – I always knew what I needed to do, though not always exactly how I was going to do it. I enjoyed it and might pick it up cheap at some point.

Cosmoteer

Interesting ship-building that can get decently complex. Combat was a little slow at the start (though that’s probably a good thing).

Just a Flu

Kind of an educational game about how viruses work. Pretty simple (too much for my tastes), but if COVID has taught us anything, it’s that people just don’t understand public health.

Mr. Prepper

I enjoy the anthill-style building (like XCOM), but some of the adventure-gamey portions are a little boring. I wish I could queue up actions instead of having to walk my character everywhere and do so much clicking.

ILL Space

I want to love this game, but the demo is confusing and nigh-unplayable. After several restarts, I figured out some basics, but never survived more than about 10-15 minutes before the enemies were blasting me while I was practically defenseless. Desperately needs a tutorial or something. Gorgeous, though.