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The best Steam Festival demos: management gamesIn which we discuss pirates, space missions, and lying about wine.
In which we discuss pirates, space missions, and lying about wine.
You know what takes a lot of managing? All the demos in theSteam Game Festival: Summer Edition. There are blimmin' 900 of them. And coincidentally, I have gone through and collected some of the best demos on that theme.
Rockets, monsters, pirates, wine and fish: what do all these things have in common? You’re in charge of their efficiency, that’s what. If someone wants to speak to their manager, that’s you, that is. Because these are management games, and they’re all about making things efficient. They range from the educational to the absurd, the clean-cut to the deeply weird, but they all managed to bathe my brain in the lovely feelgood chemicals that only come from making things workjust right. Or at the very least, the abrupt mirth that comes from things going horribly wrong. Let’s evaluate their performance:
Your advisor there is a large man. He gives the faint impression of being Gaston off of Beauty And The Beast’s more chilled-out dad.
Hundred Days
The puzzle aspects of Hundred Days aren’t that challenging, and if I’m honest your wines seem to end up pretty good no matter what decisions you make in their production process. But really, I don’t mind. I saw this as a relaxing, interactive way to learn about a subject that turned out to be way more interesting than I thought it was, and I’ll be well up fortaking the full courseplaying the full game in time. Plus you can design your own labels for your wines, and call them whatever you like, which is of course a superb vessel for comedy.
Get the free Hundred Days demo here
Just because the beasts are eldritch, doesn’t mean they have to be nasty. These gloopy rhino lads actually seemed quite friendly, in an unsettling way.
The Eldritch Zookeeper
The developer was describing the things you’d need to plop down to make your zoo function well, but they’d already burned to the ground. The camera would zoom to creatures that were already offscreen, eating burning visitors. It was a complete disaster, and I was roaring with laughter. Now, if this was deliberate, then whoever designed this demo is a stone cold genius. And if it was accidental, then this game has potential for some serious belly laughs. I’m not sure how much longevity it’d have, but it’s certainly worth a go.
Get the free The Eldritch Zookeeper demo here.
There’s a chimp in there, going into the void to die. And yet still we cheer.
Mars Horizon
The space race is a superb theme idea for a management game, andMars Horizonis a solid - if perhaps undercomplicated - treatment of it. This demo covers the early years of space exploration, from 1950s Sputnik stuff, through to just before the first moon landing, and lets you play as NASA, the Russians, or the ESA. Eventually, as the game’s name suggests, you’ll be able to play right through to the landing of humans on Mars.
You have a base of operations from which you launch missions, and a research programme, where you can invent new bits to make rockets out of, new buildings for your base, and new types of missions. Later in the demo, you can hire astronauts, too. The launches themselves are great fun. After spending ages, and fortunes, getting together all the bits for your rockets, there’s always a chance they’ll malfunction catastophically - and potentially fatally, if manned. And while you do everything you can to squeeze the possibility of failure as close to zero as you can, there’s no eliminating it entirely, which adds a huge degree of tension I’ve not often experienced in a management game. You end up glued to the short cinematic of the launch, teeth gritted for the horrific explosion, and when mission control erupts in cheers, you really feel the relief.
Once your rockets are in space, there’s a pleasant enough minigame that represents their missions, and which involves taking risks on processes that transform symbols into other symbols, in the hope of ending up with pre-specified quantities of symbols. If you think I’ve done a poor job of explaining that, you should see the game’s attempt. It barely explains it at all, and leaves you to figure it out for yourself, but that’s fine, as I figured (perhaps generously) that that was… part of the puzzle?
As I say, I’d have liked to have seen more complexity in such a massively intricate field of human endeavour, but then I suspect a lot of that will come in post-moon landing. It’s certainly a pleasant use of a couple of hours, even as it stands.
Get the free Mars Horizon demo here.
See, I’m just coming to terms with the idea that this is a really intense, deep simulation of pirate life, when it hits me with an orc playing a saxophone. A Pirate Quartermaster really shifts gears on you.
A Pirate Quartermaster
Well, this game was weird. And possibly quite brilliant, too. I’ve never played anything like it, to be honest. It’s at once an obsessively complex deep dive into maritime history, but set in a strange fantasy world, and a weirdo RPG about being a pirate. There’s worker placement activities. There’s dialogue segments. There are resource management elements. Ship-to-ship combat involves a (fuckingastonishing) typing game, and then a sort of side scrolling beat ‘em up bit? A huge element of the game revolves around managing your relationship with the ship’s captain, and choosing how often to contradict their orders. There’s eerie, awful, brilliant music. It occasionally reminded me ofDwarf Fortress.
What I’m saying is, there’s no way of summarising A Pirate Quartermaster in a couple of paragraphs. It was like a game made in a parallel universe with entirely different ideas about what a game should be like, and I’ve rarely encountered something with such a hit rate of entirely original mechanics. The demo only let me dip a toe into this odd and salt-stained world, so it’s hard to say whether the full game is likely to be entirely engrossing, or a barely-playable mess. Either way though, and I don’t say this lightly, it’s some kind of masterpiece. Don’t let this ship pass you in the night.
Get the free A Pirate Quartermaster demo here.
Relax… with fish.
Among Ripples: Shallow Waters
I’ve already covered this gameloads, but it’s back for the Game Fest after developers Eat Create Sleep found a publisher to take the game ahead following a failed Kickstarter, and so I’ll take another opportunity to urge you to give it a go. If you like calming ambience, freshwater wildlife, or the idea of a management game that manages to run contrary to depressing narratives of perpetual economic expansion at the expense of the natural world, you owe it to yourself.
Get the free Among Ripples: Shallow Waters demo here.
If you’re looking for RTS or city builders, action games, strategy games or management games, check out our otherbest of the Game Fest lists here.
Whatever you call it, hit ourE3 2020tag for more from this summer’s blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check outthe PC games at the PlayStation 5 show,everything at the PC Gaming Show, andall the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.
