As I Began To Dream’s quickfire tile-flipping gives its puzzles a satisfying snap - Related to blazingly-fast, hopping, free, its, is

As I Began To Dream’s quickfire tile-flipping gives its puzzles a satisfying snap

This week, we're highlighting the best demos you can play during Steam Next Fest, which runs from February 24th until March 3rd. We call this Wishlisted.

You are Lily, a vaguely Princess Kaguya-lookin' young girl with the power to flip, rotate, and swap square chunks of scenery. At first this is more of a build-your-own-platforms exercise than a basis for actual puzzles, but soon you’ll be umming and ahhing over which tile goes where, in which orientation, and whether you should be teleporting yourself along with it. Especially when shadowy enemies and laser emitters start showing up, and your panel flips become weaponised as much as they are about traversal.

Still, these puzzles never demand that you juggle more than two or three tiles at once. I don’t know if the full game will expand them in scope, but I actually appreciated how compact each individual challenge felt: I was never stuck on a tricky arrangement for long, and even when I’d ham-handedly spun the components into an unwinnable situation, resetting (which can be done at any time) meant I barely lost any time or progress.

I suspect the fact that Lily is stationary during all this – all that flipping and reversing is performed with the power of her unknowably Gen Alpha mind – means that this won’t necessarily gel with those who like their puzzle-platformers to more closely meld the thinking and hopping parts. In a way, though, this worked just fine for me. One issue I consistently have with these kinds of games is the sluggishness, where even when I can see the solution to a puzzle, I need to endure the labours of tedious crate-shoving and rope-pulling to put it into effect.

Planet Of Lana livens up this process by giving you a cute yet competent monkeycat partner to share the work, while As I Began To Dream simply doesn’t bother with it, allowing you to manipulate the tiles with instant taps. The result? With the exception of some later puzzles, where you’ll need to watch some little monster baddies walk into the doom you’ve crafted for them, there’s almost never a delay between that precious "Eureka" moment of solving a puzzle and the moment of its execution.

The full game’s challenge will be maintaining this immediacy and snappiness over what will, logically, be a series of more difficult and intricate puzzles. But given how well the demo does at making its tile swap games feel good, I’ll happily give it the chance.

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It’s you versus yourself in the demo for roguelite clone-hunter DoubleWe

This week, we're highlighting the best demos you can play during Steam Next Fest, which runs from February 24th until March 3rd. We call this Wishlisted.

I adore the premise of DoubleWe: you’re given a randomised appearance, dumped in a cramped sci-fi shithole full of dodgy-looking NPCs, and forced to find kill your identical clone before he can emerge from the crowd and shank you first. There’s a demo for Steam Next Fest, and it’s provoked in me some of the most pulse-quickening paranoia since the days of DayZ.

ID’ing the clone is, despite the ruffian density, usually the easy part. You have a mirror on you at all times, and the Evil You typically prefers to bide their time and blend in instead of rushing straight for the kill, so you have a few moments to memorise your doppelganger. Still, that window is improved spent scrounging up a flimsy knife or one-shot pistol from weapon stashes. Rather than wrapping you in a comfort blanket of justifiable self-defence violence, however, arming yourself only serves to up the tension further.

Opening the stashes is agonisingly slow – my very first death came when the clone took advantage of my apparent difficulties with operating a briefcase – and the weapons themselves force you into close-range, all-or-nothing confrontations with an opponent who’s far less likely to miss their swing. Add in the general unease of how readily the clustered NPCs will stop to stare at you, plus the knowledge that DoubleWe’s roguelite structure means failure will send you back to the start of a chapter, and each round becomes a deliciously mistrustful slice of shortform suspense. Even taking the time to stalk your own stalker at the beginning doesn’t help much, as stopping to grab a weapon is more than enough time for them to melt back into the throng, or to lurk behind the corners of a chokepoint. I ain’t walking though that doorway, man. The other me might be in there.

That’s just the earliest encounters, too. After a few successful slayings, any hopes of settling down into more relaxed clone deathmatches are dashed by devious raisings of the stakes. First, officers are introduced to baton you senseless if they see you gearing up an attack, forcing you to either strike more swiftly or coax your pursuer into a quieter corner. Then, an anonymous assassin is dispatched to actively hunt you from the start, laying on even more pressure (and, if you decide to fight back, depleting your weapon uses) while forcing you to scan every single one of these blockheaded creeps for a telltale blade. I remain both intrigued and perturbed by the more overtly horror-flavoured antagonist variants that the final game will feature, including clones that explode into raging, Resident Evil 4-style meat yuccas, though such monstrosities would be in keeping with DoubleWe’s taste for escalating threats.

I only rarely enjoy being scared in games, but I do crave a more sustained, eerie flavour of tension – it’s what made creeping through Chernogorsk, praying its snipers were watching elsewhere, such an electric thrill. DoubleWe manages to recreate and intensify that feeling in compact, minute-and-a-half bursts, and I’d dearly like to string myself out on more of them.

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The Local is a free and blazingly-fast tribute to surf maps and bunny hopping

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Sometimes, you just gotta go fast; feel that virtual wind in your hair as you launch yourself at the speed of sound through an abstract playground. The Local—a (mostly) free multiplayer speedster sandbox from Aussie solo dev JINC—understands the joy of moving absurdly quick in bizarre, physics-defying ways, and pairs it with the constant, sphincter-clenching fear that one tiny mistake will reduce you to a greasy smear on a mountain-side. You should probably give it a try.

It's a loving tribute to the wacky, kinda-sorta-busted movement systems of early FPS games. Back when you could inexplicably move faster by strafing and turning in the same direction in mid-air, defy friction by hopping across the ground, or slide effortlessly uphill across 70-degree inclines. Most of your going fast will be grinding on rails, Jet Set Radio-style, boosting on downhills, defying gravity the rest of the time and ramping through the air off every tempting ledge.

I found out the hard way that fall damage will kill you very easily unless you land on a bounce pad or rail. The faster you go, the easier it is to screw up, but going improbably fast is just such a joy that chaining grinds, jumps, hops and slides to maintain that speed is deeply compelling. That'd honestly be enough for me, but there's a surprising amount of meat on The Local's bones, including multiple modes, solo or online.

While there's only one large-ish map (set in a weird cartoon sci-fi Australia), there's checkpoint and target-shooting races (you have finger-guns) with the option to challenge your own or other player's ghost replays. There's full online multiplayer with players scrambling to reach locations before their rivals.

The main Orders mode is even more involved, sending you running high velocity gig economy delivery jobs, picking up packages from warehouses and yeeting them (and yourself) to their intended homes. And then you get to spend your earnings on upgrades or special resources that can be even more lucrative to deliver.

It's weirdly stressful but fun, trying to manage all of these systems while avoiding getting splattered by gravity. Worse, the game gets angrier the longer you stay alive, initially shooting homing missiles at you from scattered emplacements around the map, and later sending hovertanks after you. Both can be shot, but that's just one more thing to juggle. Needless to say, the online leaderboards are hotly contested.

It's out now, and is mostly free, aside from the optional 'supporter package' adding one more mode (Inferno, an endurance checkpoint race) and some cosmetic customization options. The developer informed me that if the game does well, he'd like to add Steam Workshop support for sharing custom levels, but he's waiting to see if there's enough players to justify the extra work. Go give it a spin and let him know it'll be worth it.

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