If you're only going to play one Steam Next Fest demo make it...

Steam Next Fest is easily one of my favourite parts of the videogames calendar. Loads of demos for forthcoming games suddenly appear on Steam and you can just download as many as you like and try them out. As much as I love it, I've never really found a way to cover it adequately. Over time, though, a sort of process has emerged. I go in with a few of my own targets, and then I ask people I work with for recommendations, hunt around online a bit, and eventually give way to just clicking on stuff. The end result is as close to random as I can willingly make it, I think. It suits me pretty well.

What I love about Steam Next Fest, when approached in this chaotic manner, is that for one week of the year I feel like the hero in Quantum Leap, the old TV series (I know there's a new version and I'm intrigued) about an amiable genius who travelled through time, abruptly leaping into other people's bodies for a few days. It's a lovely old show, and also the reason why certain forty-somethings, when handed a calculator, will always assume an exasperated expression and start talking about "Ziggy". You had to be there. Anyway, instead of offering order or any kind of meaningful structure to what follows, earlier this week I fired up the PC... and leapt.

Thronefall is a game I've had my eye on for a while, so it was a conscious choice. It's made by the team who created Islanders, which is one of the most intriguing and spatially-oriented city-builders I've ever encountered, a proper classic I still play almost every week. The team's next game initially seems rather more traditional, but with loads of polish and plenty of room to become really compulsive.

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