I tried a couple of demos from Steam Next fest. Without writing up an essay:

• Aden: Quirky game with reasonably difficult combat (when played in hard), cool music, and a story I ended up being surprisingly interested in. I was in it for the unique aesthetics and vibes and ended up being invested in whatever was happening.
• Until Then: Lovely little visual novel set in the Phillipines (which I love, as most games centered around Asian culture tend to be Japanese or Chinese focused). The dialogue is fun, the pixel art presentation is incredibly good and even has some beautiful animated scenes, and there’s enough intrigue and curiosity that really piques my interest in terms of the setting. It’s modern day, set about a decade ago, but with a twist of paranormal worldwide happenings in an otherwise normal world.

For what it’s worth, captchas have been used for training image recognition “AI” well before AI became such a hot topic buzzword. Especially in the automotive industries - it’s why a lot of captchas are like “please select images that have a street light” or “bicycles”.

This is neat and really enjoying it! Though admittedly stuck at level 14 and not sure if I am missing a fundamental mechanic to solve this one or if I’m just really dumb.

[Edit] I figured it out and it was because I was fundamentally misunderstanding some throwing physics.

Also still playing Armored Core 6. I am really enjoying the game, and even spent a couple hours last night trying 3v3 PvP and had a lot of fun with that. Part of me wishes they did a proper support for PvP with queueing and some sort of map rotation, or that someone basically makes Armored Core 6 PvP as a separate game but functionally the same, because it honestly is a lot of fun.

Actually super excited for this! I just recently finished the last game I was playing (Ys IX), which is perfectly timed for this release

You do also kind of put all your eggs in one basket so to speak though. I don’t have anything against Proton and the pricing makes sense if you value all their services and pay for Ultimate (though by my estimate, less sense if you are only looking for a smaller handful of services). However, if you go fully into Proton for everything, you’re placing your trust into an entire stack of services and it can end up a single point of failure.

I finished Omori a few months ago and it was a standout experience, really enjoyed every moment and could sing a lot of praise on its sound design and usage of gameplay mechanics to tell a story!

I agree. A lot of it for me is the quality of the time spent. I’d rather pay $10 for high quality six hours of gameplay, then play $40 for 60 hours of gameplay but like 30 of those hours are very low quality.

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