Over 500 free, downloadable demos are now live at Steam Summer Festival
Enlarge / E3 would probably be nicer in a forest full of trees that grow computer mice. (credit: Steam)
This week, Steam is hosting its largest free-demo event yet: the Steam Summer Festival, which includes over 500 limited-time trials of mostly unreleased games. Like prior Steam "festival" events, this week's demo showcase essentially works by shifting the usual E3 expo show floor experience from crowded, line-filled halls to the comfort of your favorite PC playing space. Try a time-limited game, "wishlist" it if it grabbed your attention, then move on to the next.
Since we're well into the span of time that would normally constitute a traditional E3, the Steam Summer Festival is also leaning into that expo's vacuum by offering its own E3-like content, which is presented in what appears to be a new "Steam Labs" experiment: the "news hub." This link will take you to a full schedule of gameplay streams, developer interviews, and links to game-specific hubs. Even as we speak, that news hub is filled to the brim with ongoing, developer-hosted sessions, and each feed includes a nifty chat slider so that you can ask devs questions while they're hosting their brand-new games (or easily hide the chat if that's not your thing).
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A handy new Steam Labs experiment for sorting a slew of live, archived, and upcoming video streams. [credit: Steam ]
Unsurprisingly, most of the games you'll find at the SSF fall into the "indie" spectrum, though that qualifier doesn't mean the demos on offer are slouches. Some of the biggest names in the free-demo collection include former Epic Games Store exclusives like Superliminal and the Quantic Dream library (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Detroit: Become Human). Most others are intriguing indies such as the classic-arcade revival of Windjammers 2, the satantic-Atari throwback adventure of Faith: The Unholy Trinity, the wall-running hack-and-slasher Ghostrunner, and the quirky "puppeteer side-scroller" concept of A Juggler's Tale.
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