There have been a few roguelikes trying to play with real cards lately, but I think Balatro is for sure the most successful one at that. The way it brilliantly corrupts poker rules from so many different approaches, making your deck at the end of a run have 55~60 cards, 20 of them of the same suit, and 8 of them being queen cards, while you hold 14 cards in your hand per turn, makes any run enjoyable regardless if you win or not.

As a Cartoon Network kid, I loved this one so much. Please let the final product be good as the demo was...

Zelda Like a Cat.

This is a point-and-click adventure with the comedic pulse of an Adult Swim show, while also looking like moving Renaissance paintings. Apparently the dev's been making games like it since 2017 but this is the first I hear of it, and while this mixture sounds strange at first once I started playing the demo things immediately clicked and I kept smiling at the silliness of it all.

The new game from the devs that made The Rewinder, another game I enjoyed, this is a non-linear investigative visual novel where you control two different characters, solving the disappearance of a magician in their own ways. You have limited time to do it, so I imagine it will have multiple endings as well.

An adorable game where you endlessly fly on top of your bird pal, and then meet other creamtures and invite them to fly with you, while cataloguing them on your aunt's journal as she works to learn more about the diverse fauna.

I'll confess I stopped the demo before seeing it through. This is a platformer as uneventful as the first minutes in LIMBO (and like LIMBO all you can do is slowly walk, jump, and push boxes), except that here it's not doing that to catch you off-guard later, as this is the whole game. Even in theoretically tense scenes where you try to run away from the rising water threatening to drown you it feels very slow, and the long cutscenes only exacerbate the issue.

In my mind, the footage shown in the trailers for this game was much sharper, but when playing it myself there's this fuzziness to the image quality that makes it look like a recording from an old stop-motion show, and it's fascinating how they developed their tech to create these visuals.

Also this demo was ~45GB??? Damn, at this rite I'm gonna need a new hard drive to play the full release.

A cute and beautiful adventure game and a little bit of a twin-stick shooter one, made by people who liked Super Mario Odyssey. I want it.

Well, the demo kept crashing upon starting it so I couldn't get to play it, but I went to watch others playing it at least and it seems to be a very cool roguelite by way of THPS.

Like THPS, you move around a 3D world with your skate and can grind/flip/grab/manual everywhere, making combos and increasing your score. But there also enemies that keep spawning, and the greater your combo is while skating the stronger is the damage you deal to them when attacking.

As you level up, you start gaining perks that offer you different playstyles, and you also find new weapons and gear over the course of the run with varied effects.

I was misled on this one, as the actual game is nothing like the released trailers and screenshots implied, an art house, A24-ass haunting adventure game.

Upon entering the main menu you're met with a pixel font as if it's an 8-bit game, and even if you turn it off in the settings part of the UI and visual effects in-game still use pixel fonts and follow that aesthetic, which clashes with the rest of the game. As you interact with certain objects you get "faith points" and level up, choosing perks that let you in turn gain even more faith points.

A little later you start talking with the Devil, and the game starts playing some techno music under his VA which made things even more dissonant. I think with all of this combined I can see this game has a satirical element to it and that is fine in its own way, but I was more interested in playing the idea of the game delivered by the pre-release footage.

As of this writing, I'm the third luckiest player to have played this demo, finishing it in only 45 attempts.

This is a narrative clicker game about math, probability, and luck, and because I studied those subjects for years I'm happy it exists, and I'm happy I happened to be lucky at it.

Not since Brothers I've had this much fun playing a co-op game with myself.

Was very excited to play this demo as I've been following the game for a while, a King's Field-like more on the immersive sim side.

But when I reached the character creation screen and saw the only portraits available were of white cis dudes I became way less interested to keep playing it, and just played with it for a few minutes before closing the demo. It's a simple thing, but I hope they let me choose to be someone other than that.

A queer adventure/horror game in a dark fantasy setting, about a knight coming back from the dead as a skeleton to avenge their dead lover.

I obviously was drawn to it by its dithering graphics, and I'm curious how much of it will be a third-person King's Field, and how much will be just a """"walking simulator"""" (complimentary).

What if Bomberman were an endless runner?

In this game you push blocks around, and bomb them when you can't, to open paths and keep running upwards as a monster at the bottom of the screen tries to get you.

There's a very arcade-y vibe to this game, and I'm sure a good enough player will be able to clear paths extremely fast, in a way making it similar to Catherine.

I've been following this one for a while now, and was happy to finally play a demo of it.

It is truly the spiritual successor to Drill Dozer and to the yellow Wisp from Sonic Colors that I've always dreamed of.

A sinister... tower? defense? Base defense. Where you're a warlock summoning demons in your fortress, drawing attention from the villagers nearby that come to kill you.

The core mechanic makes you literally draw runes with your mouse cursor, and gaining arcane energy with every rune completed. This energy can be used to upgrade your fortress to withstand attacks, learn to summon new familiars that aid you, or learn stronger runes that give you more energy in turn.

You can also choose to gain a different energy from your runes, that when collected lets you cast one-off skills to temporarily get you out of a bad situation. But in choosing to do so you stop gaining the regular currency, meaning you won't be able to upgrade your base further as you do so.

It's an inventive gimmick, but beyond the variety in the rune designs themselves there doesn't seem a lot of different things you can do as you defend your base, making it a little repetitive already in the demo.

Roman Sands is very intriguing. It's a first-person adventure game that begins by throwing you onto the beach of a vaporwave-looking island. It's silent at first, and as you start climbing the steps up to this courtyard some instruments start playing. As you get close to the front door of this sort of resort the music gets a little louder, and when you get inside and meet the guests who rudely treat you like their servant it suddently turns into a frenetic Dreamcast game (complimentary), and it makes you complete missions for each of the guests as a timer starts ticking.

Every time you enter a new area, that timer skips to 0 and a new day period begins (morning, afternoon, etc.). Once it's night, the guests and any semblance of life magically disappear, and you're forced to go back to the beach on which you started and let the increasingly bigger sun (at night, yes) take you... and then you restart that same day. Your guests go back to their original state, but any change you cause around the island persists, which helps you complete those same requests faster in a future loop.

Eventually, you manage to fix the lobby elevator so they can go up to their rooms which is what they wanted the most... and then the game cuts to black, and an entirely new game begins, one with strikingly different vibes, interface, and objectives.

I'd have already played this game if it were only about the island resort part, but seeing how there's another layer on top of it makes me very, very curious.

A gorgeous platformer inspired by myths from Bantu cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, and with VA so well performed and touching that it moved me to tears in the small amount of time I played this demo until it was over.
We could really use more games like this.

An incredibly weird game where you explore a psychedelic illusion and try to escape. A metroidvania, every enemy you defeat drops a body part which you can eat at any time to restore your health, and get nutrients from it. There are 4 types of nutrients you can find in all food items, and at save spots you can evolve your brain consuming such nutrients to learn new skills. Movement felt very stiff and simple early on, but I imagine as you upgrade your skill tree you become more agile.

The game wants you to kill enemies using varied attacks, as if you keep spamming the same one it will drop a poor quality meat, while you can get prime cuts (literally called "prime") if you use everything at your disposal. You can also juggle enemies in the air and when they're in a stunned state you can send them flying across the map, I don't know why this is useful but it is funny.

Seeds collected everywhere can be planted in special spots to create gardens that produce fruits with their own nutrients. I imagine that, like berry trees in Pokémon, you can eventually go back to the gardens and get more fruit.

Unfortunately you can't rebind keys or see the key mapping and I wish there was a screen telling me all that i can do with my buttons, but everything else was pretty sweet.

A Slay the Spire-like set in deep space where you control the commander of a crew of assholes, running from a monster trying to destroy you while you kill anyone in your way, or... colonize foreign planets by literally shooting people at it until there's enough people there to claim it. Hm.

The card mechanics are nice but there's a fusion element where only certain cards can fuse with each other, which makes the value of a new card hard to gauge as you don't know if it could be fused into something better or not until you try it.
The UI design is a little simple, there are very visible big square boxes everywhere, which contrast with the great art style. I was also surprised to learn it's a Brazilian game, but unfortunately when playing it in Brazilian some of the UI is still in English, something I'm sure they'll fix later though.