Happy Steam Next Fest, Helmet-heads! I hope you’ve all been having a lovely time discovering exciting new games, both VR in flat!
To celebrate this season of Steam-y goodness, I decided to try out ten Steam Next Fest demos of upcoming VR games to see what the future holds for PC VR. I was fairly random with my picks but I tried to include a few different genres in there so it wasn’t all zombie shooting – but did I find anything worth getting majorly excited about?
Find out in this week’s VR Corner (below) where you can watch me dip my toes into a gaggle of games that range from kayaking through some stunning scenery to cacking yourself in a pitch black living room!
As a quick aside, all the demos I picked were for today’s video were from offical VR games but, thanks to Praydog’s recent UEVR mod, there’s a fair few flat Unreal Engine demos out now that can also be played in VR. A great example of this is the demo for Pacific Drive, which I tested out in VR during a recent Eurogamer live stream.
And for those of you who hate video, and/or are secretly checking out this article at work, here’s a quick rundown of each game that I played in the video.
Sushi Ben
Sushi Ben has a beautifully simple Manga inspired art style that works really well with the premise – you’re a visitor to a small seaside town in Japan who needs to help the local Sushi bar owner, Ben, sort out his business. By doing lots of weird stuff…
The gameplay seems to be a mixture of Visual Novel and fishing game mechanics, plus an assortment of other mini-game style goings-ons, like table tennis, ghost hunting and bug catching.
Unfortunately I only really got to experience a bit of the fishing mini-game as a real-life bug got me stuck in the scenery and limited time meant that I had to move on to the next demo. Still, Sushi Ben shows promise, it has a lot of personality and comfort wise it seems like a game that would be great for all experience levels.
Oh and it’s also set to release on PSVR2 as well, which is nice.
Z.O.N.A: Origin
As one of the most visually impressive demos that I tried, Z.O.N.A: Origin will push your PC to the limits – but it’s worth it!
The tiny sandbox that you’re given to explore is more of tech demo than anything, intended to show off the visuals and gameplay mechanics rather than to showcase a slice of the actual finished game, but it does show a lot of promise.
There’s a heavy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. vibe here and this should appeal to those of you who enjoy survival games that focus on ammo conservation and stealth over chopping down trees and crafting axes out of sticks and stones.
The guns are nice to fire, the scenery looks properly realistic at times despite a weird grittiness to the graphics but, to be fair, this is probably intentional as it does add to the creepy, radioactive wasteland vibe.
Brazen Blaze
One of the characters in Brazen Blaze has an extremely pronounced Geordie accent and, for the first few times I heard her speak, it made my brain collapse in on itself. No offence to Geordies but it sounded so out of place in an anime-inspired brawler that I couldn’t take the dialogue seriously.
Brazen Blaze is a 3v3, PvP action game that combines close-range melee combat with gunplay and super-speedy movement across a destructible battleground and it’s currently in open-beta thanks to Steam Next Fest.
Sadly an open-beta doesn’t guarantee players and I struggled to find a match and, when I finally did get one, I was in a team of three against a team of one. And that singular person understandably quit shortly after getting utterly owned.