It is mid-June. We are now deep into what would have been E3 season, if E3 existed on another planet that wasn’t plunging deeper and deeper into turmoil with every passing second. But hey, digital events are fun. On that note, the Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition, which Valve rescheduled from last week while remaining conspicuously silent about Black Lives Matter, kicks off today.
Steam has hosted a couple game festivals now, and they all function similarly: For a limited duration—this time, until June 22—the platform shines a spotlight on a selection of upcoming games through demos, a series of live developer talks, and AMAs. This particular batch of games is set to release within the next year.
Highlights this time include Pendragon, the new narrative strategy game from the makers of the excellent 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, Say No! More, a game about saying no to jerks who want you to do things, Haven, a sci-fi RPG about being in a long-term relationship, Destroy All Humans!, the remake of the cult-classic alien havoc simulator, Iron Harvest, a post-WWI real-time strategy game with mechs, Fights In Tight Spaces, a deck-builder that looks like Superhot, Spiritfarer, a game about being ferrymaster to the deceased, Raji, a slick-looking action-adventure set in ancient India, and Genesis Noir, a noir adventure in which the big bang is a gunshot fired by a jealous god stuck in a love triangle. And that’s just the tip of an iceberg that, true to both E3 and Steam, is more than a little overwhelming.
Not every game has a playable demo, but over 900 do. Each day also features a jam-packed schedule of developer livestreams and demo playthroughs, if you’d like your hands-on preview experience to be a little more hands-off. Basically, though, if you’re on the hunt for new PC games, this is as good of a place to start as any. Well, aside from maybe your own backlog, or that bundle of over 1,500 games you probably just bought.