Three times a year, Steam puts on an event called Steam Next Fest, a week-long event that features literally hundreds of game demos of upcoming steam games. It’s an awesome event, but going through all those demos and trying to get through to the really good stuff – stuff like Cult of the Lamb, Toem, and Sable – just to name a few previous Steam Next Fest games, is time consuming to say the last. Which is why we called upon some of IGN’s biggest indie fans to divvy up the work and come back with our picks for the 15 Under the Radar Games You Don’t Want to Miss from the October Steam Next Fest. Note that these picks are not in any particular order.
Metroidvanias are a very common genre among indie games, but few manage to capture the essence and vibe of Castlevania like Nine Years of Shadows, and even fewer that aren’t actually developed by Koji Igarashi himself. This demo features gorgeous pixel art, tight controls, great enemy design (even if much of their behaviors are lifted directly from Castlevania), and a promising tease at some fun gameplay mechanics involving your teddy bear partner that can double as a ranged blaster, an elemental alignment system, and more. 9 Years of Shadows will be available on Steam on Nov 14.
No pun intended here, but it’s fair to say that the success of Slay the Spire certainly inspired a lot of indie developers to take their own crack at the deck building roguelite genre, and one of the most promising examples of that is Wildfrost. It’s an adorable deck builder with simple and easy to understand rules, but don’t let that charming art style fool you, Wildfrost can be brutal. In a good way of course. You choose a randomly generated hero card at the start of every run and essentially must
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