While Strategy and Wargaming is almost exclusively focused on strategy and historical games, I also have a penchant for all kinds of other genres. In fact, I fancy myself a player who enjoys most genres, so I took advantage of the Steam Next Fest and gave several titles that aren’t exclusively strategy a go, and was pleasantly surprised at the high quality of some of the games in here. From first-person shooters, action-adventure, and soulslikes, there are a lot of great games coming soon. My only requirement to give the demo a go is that it looks interesting to me, and I didn’t even read over the game’s Steam pages before playing it. The fun, at least for me, is in uncovering the best gems by yourself.
Before we dive into it, if you also want to know about the best strategy games of the Steam Next Fest, I have done an article on that too, and you can check it out! If you want to read other lists like this one, make sure to check them as well!
7 – Echoes of Mystralia
The first game I gave a go was Echoes of Mystralia. An unsuspectingly competent action-roguelike very obviously inspired by Supergiant Games’ all-time classic Hades. It has all the hallmarks of an excellent action game, with fluid and fast-paced combat, varied enemies with telegraphed acts that feel fair, and challenging boss battles. The game sets itself apart with its complex spell system, which allows players to add several modifiers to their attacks, as well as enhancements to those modifiers, leading to some crazy builds, and there seem to be very few safeguards on what you can do, so that’s great. My only problem with Echoes was the performance, with the game having a very inconsistent frame rate. Great art style as well. Definitely give this one a try.
6 – RetroSpace
I was never one to be a great enjoyer of immersive sims, and aside from Dishonored, I never really dabbled all that much in the genre to even know a lot about it. In fact, I installed RetroSpace because I thought it was a first-person shooter. The disco-punk art style is top-notch, and the dystopian premise of the game as well as its exploration should, in theory, be enough to keep me entertained for hours. However, I would like to see some work being done before I finally commit to it, and at the moment my main problem is with the combat itself, which feels very floaty, and not precise at all, and I’m not sure why the game doesn’t have a basic melee weapon from the get go, and you can only pick one later on after you first encounter your first enemy, so if you’re out of ammo (because you will want to try and shoot things up to see what they do in this sort of game), you’re out of luck.
5 – Prison of Husks
So, in this list, we are covering all the basics! We have an FPS from the PS2 era, an action game that feels straight out of the PlayStation 3, and now we also have a PS1-inspired soulslike. I came across Prison of Husks in the last few weeks and was kind of intrigued by its “charming” aesthetics, and, being on a binge of old platformers and shooters, this piqued my interest. Now, the game making a show here isn’t to say this is the greatest thing since sliced bread; it just means I enjoyed it, and I might end up picking it up later. My standout points are the combat, of course, the aesthetic, and the mysterious world-building, and the combat, which is as stiff and ruthless as you expect. I just wish that I could up the resolution a bit more, because playing it on a massive screen at a limited resolution really does hamper the experience.
