“The mid-summer dry spell”? My friend, your naivete is exceeded only by your boorishness. You should be ashamed of yourself! This week is anything but dry. It’s the week of another Steam Next Fest – a period of carefully abbreviated, wishlist-baiting bounty, in which we cram the Maw’s many jaws with demos and playtests.

There are also a few actual new games out this week, including a posh Square Enix RPG, a robot bathing simulator, and a shooter that combines the disagreeableness of the US presidency with the disagreeableness of goblins. Behold.

Monday 15th June

• Stellaris: Nomads adds a bunch of migrant civs with planet-scale spaceships to the seasoned 4X strategy game.
• Day Trade Coach is a stock market trading simulator with a live news feed and an accurate-seeming terminal UI. Any day traders reading this? Care to comment?
• Mole is about piloting a terrible drill as you follow the voices of the dead deep beneath the Slavic soil. A realm of analog controls and white rabbits.
• I think I’ve exhausted all desire to play self-styled “boomer shooters”, but Alaric does have lamplit libraries, horrible barn owls, and open-ended metroidvania level design.

Tuesday 16th June

• A foot-the-ball management game in the year 2026, as I live and breathe! Copa City seems relevant to current events, somehow. It’s actually about what happens outside the ball-footing experience – you’re trying to prepare cities for armies of invading fans.

Wednesday 17th June

• Play every US president on a mission to stop Bedlam and fix history in goblinAmerica (pictured), a “squirmy, bouncy” early access FPS, “filled with lovely sights and horrible places”. This is the kind of aesthetic that has me hyperventilating as I strain to think of cleverer words than “rad”.
• You do not need Halo, for you have The Last Salvage Squad, in which 12 metre tall anime robots blow up red-on-black UFOs. It looks rad as… as… ghwghwjefgjhbwefw.
• What if chess, but four dimensional?

Thursday 18th June

• R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is a collected, souped-up remaking of the turn-based PSP reimagining of the R-Type shmups. I thought the original R-Type Tactics was fun, back in the noughties – the sequel never made it to our shores.
• The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a new action-RPG from a few of the people behind Octopath Traveller and Bravely Default. It’s got the usual “2D-HD” graphics, but unlike those other games, it’s a real-time affair.
• Mech Spa gets a nod simply for the premise of being nice to mechs, for a change.
• Mythic Love: Iberian Legends is an otome visual novel about dating and possibly being eaten by creatures from Iberian folklore.
• The Quiet Things is an autobiographical investigation of childhood abuse and assault that aims “to tackle the shame and open conversations”.

Friday 19th June

• Moon River is a short, gloomy, pixelly RPG in which you are a mariner trying to reach the end of a river that only appears in moonlight. This is the “full”, “2.0” release, based on an older free demo.

As for what we of the Treehouse are doing this week: Mark is going on a big city adventure, possibly involving a major sci-fi universe of some kind. Julian is busy divvying up portions of insight about fungal brains. James is opening another Pandora’s Box, while hoping it won’t cost too much. Callum and Jeremy have blocky gardens and painterly expeditions on their minds. I am thinking about how the trillionaires will manage, once the rest of us are gone. How about you, any plans? And are there any cool games I’ve missed?