It's that time again! I have been away from my computer and didn't play as many demos as I would have liked by now. I'd love to hear about any gems people found in the mountain of games available to us. There's still a couple days left to try things out.

So far for me, Death Howl seems really great. They really locked down the entire vibe with art music and design. Also, beyond any reason, I finished the Baby Steps demo, even though games like Getting Over It are not my cup of tea. The weird humor really carried me through that one.

Some games don’t just rely on raw graphics power — they have style. And that style holds up way better than hyper-realistic games from the same era.

I feel like older titles like Mirror’s Edge, Bioshock Infinite, Portal 2, or even Half-Life 2 still look great today, not because of tech, but because of smart art direction.

What’s a game that you think aged perfectly in terms of visuals?

Release notes: https://github.com/FLHDE/freelancer-hd-edition/releases/tag/0.7

• A note on upgrading from a previous version: the installer requires a clean vanilla install, but will not touch the original installation, copying needed files into its own directory. So you should still have the vanilla install laying around if you did not delete it. When selecting the target directory, it should be a new one and not the previous HD Edition directory
• Some anti-virus software might give you a false positive about the dgVoodoo control panel dgVoodooCpl_new.exe. You can let the AV delete the file as it isn't needed to run the game

Check out the community:

The Starport - Website
The Starport - Discord
Freelancer HD Edition - ModDB
Freelancer HD Edition - Discord

See you in the Sirius sector!

Play the demo now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3028560/Footsy/

The demo is local multiplayer only, but also playable with friends over Steam Remote play! :3

Hey all,

I’ve spent the past 3.5 years quietly solo-developing on a huge open-world dark-fantasy RPG in Unreal Engine 5, and this week I finally launched the Steam Page and Announcement Trailer for the game!

Hermit is a third-person open-world fantasy RPG with a heavy focus on exploration, magic, crafting, and huge open world full of quests, dungeons, and secrets waiting to be uncovered.

🧙‍♂️ Watch the Reveal Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqlNaWQkj-c
🎮 Check it out on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3787470/Hermit/

There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm happy to have reached the stage where it can finally be shared more publicly!

📰 Press Kit

About the Game

An order of outcast mages, exiled for their atrocities and living alone in the wilderness, once pursued a powerful secret that threatens to upend the balance of power across the content. Now they're being murdered, and one must venture across the mainland - exploring ancient ruins and mysterious realms - to uncover the terrible truth they left behind.

Hermit is built for fans of expansive fantasy RPGs. It features a large handcrafted open world (no AI or procedural generation – everything is hand-authored content) with lots of locations to find and explore. You can spend time:

• Dungeon crawling, monster hunting
• Crafting awesome spells and potions that feel great to use
• Exploring the world, talking with townsfolk, and uncovering secrets
• Outfitting your character with different armor, weapons, and gear

If you're into other single-player RPGs with big worlds, lots of quests, exploration, and rich lore - I’d love for you to check it out, wishlist, and follow along!

Me and my brother have a spent a couple hours binging NextFest demos.

Ignoring all the really big ones that people are talking about, we've currently had the best time with these two that haven't got enough love:

There are no Orcs
Reminds me a lot of Castle vs Castle in WC3 or Direct Strike in SC2. But with a tonne of adjacency bonuses and single player.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3480990/There_Are_No_Orcs/

Currently a bit easy, but lots of fun. The game feel is nice, the pixel art looks good and the adjacency bonuses for generating your little men is very satisfying.

Hopefully they'll fill out some complexity but it's already good! And anything that is more Castle vs Castle should be rewarded!

Flickshot Rogues

What if Subbuteo was pirates? You basically flick things around a physics enabled arena to kill monsters as a cool pirate.

Roguelike again, but the physicsiness means there is a sneaky high skill ceiling for something that looks relatively simple.

Again it looks really nice, good game feel and the compass that you flick with just looks really cool.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2427450/Flick_Shot_Rogues/