Today kicked off the Steam Game Festival: Summer Edition, a huge digital conference that features tons of new game announcements, developer live streams, fun surprises, and much more. Being that it’s a Steam event it’s no surprise that it’s extremely PC-focused, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some fun news happening that’s relevant to the mobile world. Three games that have been previously announced for release on mobile received playable demos on Steam today. Well, that’s not entirely true. Two of the games–Undying and Say No! More– have been confirmed for mobile, but the new The Escapists spinoff game The Survivalists hasn’t been announced for mobile as of yet. But seeing as The Escapists games came to mobile and were quite well-received, I’m pretty confident we’ll end up seeing The Survivalists too at some point. Anyway, if you’ve got a Windows desktop and wanna check out some cool demos, here’s the info and links you need:
Undying
We first talked about Undying just over a month ago when we learned that it would be coming to mobile platforms in addition to PC and consoles. It’s a zombie survival game where you’ll need to scavenge supplies, craft items and weapons, and basically do your darndest to stay alive. The super interesting twist here is that you play as a mother with your young son in tow, and you’ve already been bitten and infected by a zombie. You’re a gonner for sure, so your real goal is to teach your son all the skills he’ll need to continue surviving in the zombie apocalypse once you’re no longer around. You’ll do this by teaching him, and he’ll also learn things on his own by just watching what you do. As his skills grow he becomes an even more helpful sidekick as you guys fight off zombie attacks and scavenge for resources together. It’s a super compelling premise, and you can check out the Steam page for Undying to download the demo and also be sure to catch the developer’s livestream Q&A that’s happening tomorrow.
Say No! More
This is a game we posted about in November of last year and back then I described it as a “Weird Power Fantasy Game about Standing Up for Yourself" and that’s basically what this is. In Say No! More you play as an intern who is mistreated and taken advantage of at every turn by their coworkers, and eventually you reach your limit and have had enough of their abuse. So you go on a Walkman-fueled rampage shouting “NO!" at each and every bozo that tries to get in your way. That sounds VERY satisfying and also the sort of thing I’m much more comfortable acting out digitally in a virtual world without consequences rather than, say, going off on all the people in my real life that drive me nuts on a daily basis. Say No! More is being developed by Studio FizBin and being published by Thunderful, and is set to release on PC, iOS, and Nintendo Switch sometime this year. In the meantime you can grab the new playable demo of the game over on the Steam page now.
The Survivalists
We’ve really enjoyed the two The Escapists games from Team17, both of which have received mobile ports over the years. The games were ultimately about breaking free from a prison and were praised for the wide variety of ways you could accomplish that goal. And while I loved that level of player freedom in how you went about escaping, I also loved the restrictions the game put on you by forcing you to adhere to the strict schedule of a prisoner. It almost felt like a survival game because if you didn’t follow through with your duties, stepped out of line in front of the guards, or crossed any of the other prisoners then you might not even last long enough to devise a plan for escape. So it kind of makes sense that the team responsible for The Escapists is now making a real deal survival game aptly called The Survivalists. You can expect the same stunning level of detail and interactivity as you get in The Escapists, only this time you’re trying to tame a wild island and you can bring up to 3 online friends along to help you do that. You can grab the online demo of The Survivalists from the game’s Steam page right now, but it’ll only be running until June 26th so check it out while you can. Also be sure to catch the developer’s Q&A livestream tomorrow morning.
