House Flipper 2 and Lies of P top list of this year's most popular Steam Next Fest demos

rockpapershotgun.com:

These days, weeks often feel like years, so if you told me Steam Next Fest happened back at the start of the year, I’d believe you. And yet, it was little under a month ago that Valve kicked off its annual demo-filled celebration of upcoming PC games. Now, it’s checking back in with a ranking of the most popular demos that people played - and it’s a doozy of a list.

Coming in at number one was a perhaps surprising winner: renovation-and-chill sequel House Flipper 2. Maybe it’s not that surprising when you consider that the original House Flipper is still one of the best PC games that don’t involve turning your fellow humans into squelchy gibs, and we’ve been looking forward to its even prettier, even flippier follow-up for a while now.

Hot on its tail was maybe the game that many would’ve suspected to place top, given the internet buzz around its Soulsborne take on Pinocchio. (Which I’m now dubbing “Pinocch-emo”.) Yes, Lies Of P was the second-most popular Next Fest demo, winning plenty of folks over - us included - with its very Bloodborney spin on the puppet that wants to be a real boy (and will murder a load of mechanical monsters to get there, apparently). A cynic might put at least some of that popularity down to the fact (crime?) that Bloodborne still isn’t on PC, but Lies of P still seems very promising in its own right.

Filling out the five most popular Next Fest demons were the incredibly impressive photograph-manipulating puzzle game Viewfinder - in which carefully placing polaroids can create whole new bits of level as you walk into the photos - free-to-play multiplayer medieval slugfest Warhaven and Wizard With a Gun, the Devolver-published Don’t Starve-a-like-but-with-guns co-op survival sandbox that