Demos News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom already has a descriptive name, but its new trailer omits it in favour of a better encapsulation of its pitch: "You're a N64 taxi and there's no jump button?". The video itself is sixty seconds of pure, colourful joy, and it ends on a release date: April 9th.

Adventure game Europa will launch for Switch alongside its previously announced PC (Steam) version later in 2024, publisher Future Friends Games and developer Helder Pinto announced. A demo is available now for Switch via Nintendo eShop.

Total downloads for the Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road Worldwide Beta Test Demo have surpassed 500,000 worldwide, developer LEVEL-5 announced.

You know me and Soulslikes. We're not particularly best buddies most of the time. We've had a couple of successful outings over the years with the likes of Death's Door and Hollow Knight and company, but anything with pure FromSoft blood running through its veins has always left me cold. Void Sols, however, is an upcoming Soulslike that feels like it might be able to satisfy both sides of the 'git gud' camp, appealing to nervous dodge-rollers like myself while also giving hardened Elden Ringers a run for their money. It's all down to its plentiful supply of approachable customisation options, allowing you to ratchet up the difficulty if you're finding things a bit easy, or knock it down, reapply your stat points, and even create whole new loadouts - each with their own individual stat combinations - to win the day. It's all wonderfully considerate, and having played the free demo that's just launched on Steam, I'd strongly recommend giving it a go if you're feeling in need of a little training ahead of Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree coming out.

Developers G-MODE and Plus81 have delayed visual novel SHINJUKU SOUMEI from its previously planned April 12 release date to May 24. It will be available for PC via Steam and DLsite for 3,990 yen, with support for English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese language options. A demo will launch in late April, though it will not have transferrable save data.

Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer SHIFT UP will release a demo for action adventure game Stellar Blade via PlayStation Store on March 29 at 7:00 a.m. PT / 10:00 a.m. ET, the companies announced.

If you're keen to try out Sand Land, an upcoming action RPG from the developers of One Piece Odyssey and the creator of Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama, then I have some great news. There's a demo out right now that lets you explore a portion of the sandy map, try out a handful of the characters, and ride some rusty vehicles ahead of its release next month on April 25th.

What do you reach for when you're waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting in a shop doorway for the rain to stop, or even while you're waiting for a game to finish downloading? I don't mean to assume, but let's face it, it's probably your phone, where some idle doomscrolling likely awaits you, or some other, time-wasting distraction that will help fill the dead air between one task and the next. Well, While Waiting is a game that delves into precisely this fundamental human question: what is the best thing to do while waiting for something else to happen? It's from the makers of the very good puzzle game Moncage, and its newly released Steam demo is a pure, fidgety brilliance.

A free demo for Princess Peach: Showtime! for Switch via Nintendo eShop, Nintendo announced. It features the Swordfighter Peach and Patissiere Peach transformations.

Turbo Kid is a 2015 movie set in a post-apocalypse in which a comic book fan battles a local tyrant, with gory, comedic, '80s-pastiching results. It was not a film I expected to get a metroidvania sequel, but here it is with a new demo and an April release date.

I've entered a stage in my life during which I have enormous nostalgia for the PlayStation era, and most of that nostalgia is focused on racing games and drum and bass. Enter Night-Runners, a racing game set between 1990 and 2009, scored by drum and bass, smeared with VHS filters, and just for good measure, set on and around the expressways of Tokyo.

One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That's one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it's a helmet). He's like if Hand Of Fate's dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.

Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems - which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away - or rather, a sheep that's been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves' hot pursuit - not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them - and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.

When I first saw Never Grave: The Witch And The Curse rising up the Steam Next Fest charts at the end of last week, I thought, "Oh! That's a neat Hollow Knight-looking Metroivanida roguelike, I'll definitely give that a go." And having played its demo over the weekend, I can confirm: it's certainly an intriguing little thing that I'll be keen to keep an eye on when it launches into early access, possibly sometime next month.

Ah sure I've enjoyed the nostalgic resurgence of Quake/PlayStation-grade 3D art in video games, but I am fully blown away by indie game Fragrance Point looking like the truest classic 3D computer graphics: the shiny pre-rendered CGI from TV show transition cards, adverts for double-disc dance music compilations, and Windows Media Player skins. My eyes are still reeling from the gloss and glitz and pulsating lights of the Steam Next Fest demo, and I welcome this pain. Grab the demo now and set out to explore a space station as a bopping security bot with snazzy boots and endless projectile lipstick.

Take your protein pill and put your headphones on for the free demo of Asterism, an "interactive music album" exploring a solar system one song at a time. Each visit to a planet lasts as long as the song, whisking us through scenes reflecting the lyrics and mood, rendered with a mix of 3D computer art and a range of handmade physical mediums. I was delighted from the first twang. And impressively, it's mostly the work of one developer, Claire Morwood. Do have a look!

First spotted when James and Liam (RPS in peace) covered the PC Gaming Show 2023, Mullet Mad Jack is a roguelike FPS with a Steam Next Fest demo out right now. And my goodness me, it rules. The retro anime aesthetic is cool, sure, but I particularly love its setup, which forces you to blast through corridors as fast as you possibly can. Yeah, this is extremely a bit of Edders, and it's gone straight on the wishlist.

If you played and liked last year's excellent slice-of-life adventure A Space For The Unbound, stop what you're doing and go and download the Steam Next Fest demo for Until Then. Go on, I'll wait. Right, sorted? Let's continue. Like A Space For The Unbound, Until Then is a coming of age story where the ups and downs of everyday high school life start intermingling with strange, supernatural occurences.

Aldi and Lidl are two all time greats of the supermarket genre. I love their legally distinct take on many of the biggest brands, like the "Racer", which is basically a Snickers bar. Except I actually prefer the Racer! I can't remember if it's Aldi or Lidl that do them, but the "Mini Delight" chocolate sticks are also exceptional. Anyway, Armored Core. Or should I say, Exterminator? Yes, there's an Aldi Armored Core that's just opened up in town and it's actually not half bad. It's definitely not Racer good, but I applaud the effort.

When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I'm just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I've had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro's demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you're into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who's never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let's face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that's turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it's coming out in full real soon, too.

Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.

A demo for dungeon exploration and bakery management RPG Aeruta is now available for PC via Steam, publisher Gravity Game Arise and developer FromDawn announced.

As much as I love looking at and admiring sandbox citybuilders like Townscaper, I am terrible at actually playing them. I get the same kind of blank canvas choice paralysis I do in games like Minecraft, or anything where there's no real clear objective for what I'm meant to be building. I sit there with a big toybox of lovely things to stick together, but always end up deflated and disappointed with my own lack of imagination. But Summerhouse, the sandbox citybuilder (or townbuilder, more like) from solo developer Friedemann is just teeny-tiny enough to give me a sense of creative satisfaction. I've been playing its gorgeous little demo this week in between Palworld sessions, and yes, more of this please, this is utterly delightful. Happily, we don't have to wait too long for the final game now either, as it's coming to Steam on March 8th.

Basically the only sort of strategy games I like are city builders, so I was interested in the playtest for El Dorado: The Golden City Builder, which casts you as the leader of an ancient Mayan-ish city. The playtest is only the prologue, but the eventual goal is to take over the Yucatán peninsula, and if nothing else it's refreshing to see a city-builder that doesn't feel overwhelmingly European. It also has a complicated system of religion. Whereas in a similarly polytheistic game like Zeus, the gods would turn up to stomp on buildings and/or bless them, at fairly large intervals, in El Dorado I was getting a home immolated every few days. Building shrines that have an area of effect, and that require resources to run and protect your town, is its own supply chain in El Dorado. This is a very interesting idea that I liked.

When Edwin popped the reveal trailer for new Metroidvania Deviator into The Maw this morning, he really wasn't kidding about it looking a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight. You've got a small, diminutive hero with a nasty little blade up his sleeve, a haunting and melancholy piano score, a beautiful hand-drawn animation style, and lots of mean-looking creatures to fight. Then again, the trailer also makes it clear there are lots and lots of spikes and traps to navigate here, which puts me more in the mind of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Either way, I'm well up for another platforming-Metroidy hybrid, and developers Gami Studio have announced that there's Steam demo coming in February.

Given the sheer quantity of games releasing on Steam these days, having a neat little elevator pitch for your game can be vital in helping it stand out. For example, if I get an email saying a game is like "Obra Dinn meets such and such" or "Into The Breach but a deckbuilder", that's like personal catnip to me, and can be a handy indicator of whether I should investigate further - maybe watch a gameplay trailer for it, say, or see if it's got a demo. Case in point: this is exactly how I stumbled upon the upcoming Donkey Kong Country-esque platformer Windswept last week, although instead of an email, I saw it on the growing "Your game is too much like..." thread over on Xwitter - which is definitely worth a browse if you have very niche interests in need of a good scratch.

A demo for roguelike deckbuilder Yohane the Parhelion: NUMAZU in the MIRAGE is now available for PlayStation 5 via PlayStation Store and PC via Steam, developer BeXide announced.

A second limited-time demo for roguelike deckbuilder strategy RPG C.A.R.D.S. RPG: The Misty Battlefield is now available for PC via Steam, developer ACQUIRE announced. It is playable until January 21 at 6:59 a.m. PT / 9:59 a.m. ET.

Good-Feel has released a demo for Otogi Katsugeki Mameda no Bakeru: Oracle Saitarou no Sainan!! via Nintendo eShop in Japan.

Nintendo has released a demo and overview trailer for point-and-click adventure remake collection Another Code: Recollection for Switch via Nintendo eShop.

A limited-time demo for roguelike deckbuilder strategy RPG C.A.R.D.S. RPG: The Misty Battlefield is now available for PC via Steam, developer ACQUIRE announced. It is playable until December 16 at 6:59 a.m. PT / 9:59 a.m. ET.

Publisher Secret Mode and developer Billy Goat Entertainment have released a limited-time demo for “extreme bike courier simulator” Parcel Corps for Xbox Series via Microsoft Store. It will be available until December 31.

A demo for psychological horror game Luto is now available for PlayStation 5 via PlayStation Store, publisher Selecta Play and developer Broken Bird Games announced.

Publisher Serenity Forge and developer Arbitrary Metric have released a demo for first-person narrative adventure game Roman Sands RE:Build for PC via Steam.

A demo for side-scrolling action platformer Ghost Knight: A Dark Tale is now available for PC via Steam, developer Grimware Games announced.

D3 Publisher has released a free “Prototype Ver.” demo for mecha third-person shooter Custom Mech Wars for PlayStation 5 via PlayStation Store.

Visual novel Murder Mystery Paradox: Fifteen Years of Summer will launch for PC via Steam on December 2, publisher Aniplex and developer Fahrenheit 213 announced. It will only support Japanese as a language option. A demo will be available starting today.

World War II real-time strategy game Last Train Home will launch for PC via Steam on November 28, publisher THQ Nordic and developer Ashborne Games announced. A demo will be available starting today at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET as part of Steam Next Fest: Fall 2023.

A demo for road movie-inspired first-person shooter Phantom Fury is now available for PC via Steam, publisher 3D Realms and developer Slipgate Ironworks announced.

The first-ever worldwide playable demo of Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley is now available for PC via Steam until October 16, publisher Raw Fury and developer Hyper Games announced.

Publisher Bushiroad Games and developer HAKAMA will release a demo for action RPG Rear Sekai on September 25 at 0:00 JST in Japan, the companies announced during a Tokyo Game Show 2023 stage event. It will allow you to play the beginning of the story.

The Switch version of DAVE THE DIVER will launch via Nintendo eShop on October 26 for $19.99, developer MINTROCKET announced. Pre-orders and a free demo are available now.

Physics-based platformer Super Adventure Hand! for Switch and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store on September 21, developer DevM Games announced. A demo is available now across all platforms.

Publisher Future Friends Games and developer Helder Pinto have delayed open-world adventure game Europa from its previously planned 2023 release window to 2024. It will be available for PC via Steam, followed by consoles at a later date. A demo is now available.

A demo for Samba de Amigo: Party Central is now available for Switch via Nintendo eShop in North America and Japan, SEGA announced. It will launch in Europe later in August.