Until October 13, Steam hosts more than 100 featured demos, divided into categories and with release dates in the next six months
Although Steam permanently hosts a section with more than a thousand playable demos of all kinds of titles, asking the player to navigate through this maze until they find something that they like or interest is a very complicated task. In order to promote the always complicated task of visibility within Steam, Valve has implemented what it calls “festivals”, seasonal periods in which special emphasis is placed on projects in development with playable demos, also presenting all kinds of initiatives easily accessible such as developer talks, streams, interviews, and community events. Until October 13 we will have the Fall Festival, with hundreds of featured demos and events to put hundreds of projects in the eyes of players.
It is a good opportunity to test projects that may be of interest. The page that hosts the festival has a permanent streaming and a schedule of events, to immediately propose more than a hundred outstanding demos. There is also a subdivision of genres if you want to go more direct and not keep an eye on all the ones out there. In any case, the proposal is very attractive and heterogeneous. There are independent titles such as Everspace 2, The Falconeer, or GhostRunner or Haven, more modest but interesting games like the horror game with 8-bit graphics Faith, or crazy multiplayer games like Just Die Already, among many others.
Ghostrunner is one of the most promising game
Indie festival
There are really attractive projects like Chinatown Detective Agency, a pixelart graphic adventure that we recently wrote about and which has released its free prologue, an excellent cover letter to keep an eye on its development. There is also a wide range of attractive titles, with groundbreaking aesthetics and of all kinds. Quite a feast for those looking for different titles.
As a final note, if you find a game that you find interesting, feel free to put it on your wish list. The number of users who “want” a game is a key metric in the Steam algorithm and the more a project has, the more visibility it will achieve on the page, which is why it is very important for any independent studio, especially the smallest ones.