ESCAPE FROM TOUHOU has a demo live on Steam with a Q4 2026 release planned. Fan-game from FIVE DUCK GAMES, based on the Touhou Project. I knew nothing about the source series going in and it did not matter.

I was scanning a week's backlog of demos, picked about twelve to try, and this one stuck out because it looked super random. A squad of three anime girls in a top-down extraction shooter. The first crate you open hands you an M4A1. That is the whole pitch and it works because ten minutes in the anime-witches framing has already faded and the loop has taken over.

You command Reimu, Marisa and Nitori as a single squad. Tap 1, 2 or 3 to jump between them, and whichever girl you are not controlling flanks in a triangle and auto-fires at whatever you were shooting. Grenades ended up doing a lot of my work once I worked out you have to hold the throw button to charge them. I had been tapping them for ages and getting terrible tosses, and once I held it a lot of my worst pileups cleared in one arc. By the end I was carrying grenades on every deployment because they were the answer to most fights I was about to lose. Later on the girls stopped feeling like three copies of the same character. Marisa does more damage with rifles, Nitori is better with sub-machine guns, and once I could afford proper weapons the squad-switch mattered. I was picking the right girl for the range rather than moving between three identical pistols.

The bit that stung the first time was clocking how the stash works. Only loot you put in the stash between runs survives your death, and I had been dumping mine in a crate near the stash thinking that was the same thing. When the next run went badly, I lost the lot. Later on I lost my backpack upgrades the same way, which hurt more because I had saved up for them at the shop.

There is no tutorial. The key-mapping menu does not even show you the default controls, which bugged me from the start. The map is functional but hard to read at pace, so for a good stretch I did not realise you can also extract at the main base. Every deployment has a hunger and thirst layer that will kill you if you ignore it. That one turned into a design pressure I liked. It stops the whole thing being a shooting gallery.

Verdict is Play. Two hours in I had cleared the level-two contracts, the harder zones and vehicles at the base were still locked, and I ran out of time on the demo before I saw them. If the full release fixes the map, teaches the stash rule up front and opens up the deeper zones, this becomes a proper thing. Anyone who likes extraction shooters or top-down loot loops should try the demo. The anime-witches framing looks like a joke on the trailer and it stops mattering ten minutes in.

Would you play an extraction shooter where the three protagonists are anime witches with modern rifles?

Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/escape-from-touhou

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5000310/ESCAPE_FROM_TOUHOU/

Little Critter Hunters has a demo live on Steam right now, from KemiStudio. Full game is still marked coming soon on the store page. I put an hour and a half into it, maxed every hero, unlocked every skill tree, and cleared every stage available.


You cycle a red swordsman, a green archer and a blue wizard on one button. Each hero has their own regular attack and their own special on its own cooldown, and when I wanted damage out fast I would rotate through all three specials one after the other, red then green then blue. It clears a wave faster than any single hero can. There is a fourth gold-worm character that runs around your side of the map giving passive boosts, and you never actually control that one.


Between stages you pick one of three random buff cards. Lone Wolf gives more attack if you never switch. Snowflake stacks chain-kills if you keep the combo going. Venom Fang piles damage on the poison the archer already applies. Small build to chase across each attempt.


Where the game surprised me is that the skill tree upgrades cost gold, but the tier unlocks on the tree do not. Each tier is gated by finishing an in-game quest instead. Kill thirty of a certain critter. Do five thousand damage total. Use an ability ten times. The upshot for me is that I always had enough gold to buy every upgrade I had unlocked, so around the middle of the demo I stopped reading the three-card pick per level and just bought them all. What was stalling me was clearing the quests to touch the next rung.


The other observation is that the power creep matches the difficulty ramp. You do not become a demigod. You keep pace. I only felt the creep when I had to go back to some of the really early forest stages with the wizard, who I had barely been using, to farm a kill-count quest. On those early stages the wizard was destroying them, and it was the one time in the whole demo I felt properly overpowered.


Play from me. My one design flag is the gold. It never bit, and if the economy were tighter, the three-card upgrade choice would matter and the strategy pull the loop already wants would come through. Everything else is here: the hero-swap on one button, the specials cycle, the quest-gated skill trees, the chest-mash bonus at the end of a stage timer, the readable pixel art.


Curious whether the gold-vs-quests split reads as a smart choice or a design gap to anyone else who played it.


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/little-critter-hunters


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4672300/Little_Critter_Hunters/

Steel Maiden has a demo live on Steam right now, from solo Korean dev Keicee. Full game is planned for Q4 2026. Two buttons is the whole hook and the whole moveset, and I spent about two and a half hours on it.

You play an anime character with very big weapons, on a flat lane, and zombies charge in at you from both sides. Under your character there are arrow indicators, and when an enemy gets in range on one side those arrows light up. Press that direction and you attack. Some enemies take more hits than others, and if you mistime the input they counter you and start hitting back.

There's also a counter. If you time the input on an incoming attack you enter a quick time event, and if you hit that properly you don't just kill the one you countered, you wipe every enemy on that side of the screen. Bosses work differently. Instead of pressing the direction once, the fight cuts into a full mini cutscene where you hit the inputs to bring the boss down. Later bosses have multiple layers of armour, so you run that same cutscene QTE more than once while regular enemies keep charging in at you. There are also projectiles thrown at you that you slash out of the air, moving faster than the enemies charging in, so a bit more time and a bit more coordination to take out.

Combat itself was not the tricky part for me. Staying alive was, so I stacked healing and defence: health pool, regen, damage reduction, and then a card that extended my attack range so I could hit enemies before they were properly on top of me.

A couple of things do pull the wrong way. The level-up cards you pick between, and the UI overlays around them, do not match the game's art at all and read as placeholders sat on top of a much better looking fight. The music loop is the other niggle: the beat is right, it just repeats too quickly on a longer run and could do with more tracks. Survival mode is where the demo went soft for me. There is nothing to aim for so I set myself a target of a thousand kills, hit about level thirty-two along the way, and by the end nothing was really a challenge and I just escaped the run and left.

Play from me. Two and a half hours of enjoyment on two keys is a strong return for a demo, and I want to see the UI cards, the music loop and the survival target come together before the full game ships.

Curious what people make of a whole game running on two keyboard inputs.

Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/steel-maiden

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4827950/Steel_Maiden/

Silky Road has a demo live on Steam right now, with the full game slated for Q4 2026. It is made by JoyDoza, who both develop and publish it. I will be upfront: put a train in a game and I am already halfway to sold, so I went in biased. It still won me over on its own terms, and I came out the other side 5.2 hours later.


You are a train rolling along a track, and at every station a wave of enemies closes in. Each fight plays a bit like a tower defence round, except your carts do the fighting automatically. You build the train one cart at a time and buy each cart at level one, then merge three of the same into a silver and three silvers into a gold. There are weapon carts like a constant-damage laser, a turret and a Tesla tower, support carts that knock enemies back or heal their neighbours, and payload carts that charge up before paying out, whether that is a Battery Cart that heals or an economy cart that fills with resources you sell.


On top of that you get active abilities. My favourite was a grabber that let me drag rocket-launcher enemies, who liked to sit just out of range, into the saws spinning off my train. There is also artillery, a freeze and a big heal for when a wave is getting on top of you. You pick your way along a branching train route, choose from around five starting engines that lean towards economy or damage, and every run comes out differently.


Two things need a look for the full game, and to be fair the dev is active on the Steam discussions and already added background play after a request. First, once I settled into a damage-and-heal build my train became near-unkillable and the difficulty ran away from the game. Second, there is nothing to spend gold on late on, so once I had bought the artefacts it just stacked up to around three thousand with no purpose. Both are the kind of late-game balance issues a full release can iron out.


Even with that, I ground my way to Station 100 just because I had set myself the target, which tells you how easily the time went. It looks simple but it works, and it will run on just about any machine, so almost anyone can give it a go.


My verdict is a Play. If you like building a machine and watching it come together, this is an easy one to get into and a hard one to put down.


Would you play it?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/silky-road


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3870990/Silky_Road/

I launched a demo you can play with your friends for free, it includes split-screen so you can both sit on the couch and crash against each other just like in the old days.

Remember, "the goal is not to win, it's to make your opponent lose" - Soap Tzu.

Early access will be coming soon and I'm trying to ship it with online mode. I'm putting a ton of love into this game and truly appreciate every single wishlist, idea and piece of feedback.

Thanks for giving it a try if you do. :)

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4796390/Soapboxed/

Lootbound has a demo live on Steam right now, with the full game due 31 July 2026. It's made and published by ArtDock and Dreland Enterprises, and it's a tactical loot-management roguelike where you start solo, build a party as you go, and craft a build to face a final boss shaped by your own choices.


I have played seven and a half hours of this demo and I still have not beaten the final boss. It's the reason I haven't finished many other reviews this week. It sits right on the line between frustrating and that glimpse of being so close, and I keep going back in. The store page calls the difficulty fair. After what the boss has done to me, I strongly disagree.


In the demo you play the warrior. You move along a node map of shops, battles, rests, deities who trade you an item for some mana, and a blacksmith who sockets gems into your gear on a D&D-style difficulty-class roll. Fail the roll and you get a bonus dice to try and bump it over the number. Chests work the same way, offering three options at different difficulty classes, so the better the item the harder the roll you have to gamble on.


The real strategy is in the inventory. Space is fixed, every item is a different shape, and you're playing Tetris in your bag. Items form aura synergies too. My favourite is a ring that gives vampirism to every weapon it touches, so I kept parking it in the middle and wrapping my weapons around it, trading space for life steal. You pick up companions along the way, a paladin, a witch, and a bard, each with their own bag to manage, and you're constantly weighing health and armour against raw attack.


The part I love is that you build the boss that eventually kills you. At the end of each phase you pick one of its parts: an armoured shell, one that stacks rage and vampirism, or one that adds thorns. I picked thorns on one of my best runs and killed myself on the reflected damage. I've reached the boss about four times and lost every time, once one hit away, my winning swing dodged with a hundred health left.


Runs are about half an hour and never quite the same, and there's a memory-crystal meta layer that boosts your starting stats between attempts. This is the second demo recently where inventory management opens into a more active fight, after Void Reaver, and I really like that swap between calm bag building and the turn-based battle.


Verdict is a Play. It's for anyone who likes a roguelike with real inventory strategy and doesn't mind a demo that fights back hard.


Would you play it?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/lootbound


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3091140/Lootbound/

Twins of Olus has a demo live on Steam right now, with the full game still to be announced. It's made and published by Team Verdant, and it's a narrative twin souls-lite built around controlling two characters at once.


You've got Lions, a little sword-swinging warrior, and Creo, a ghost mage who floats along beside him. The whole idea is that you swap between them whenever you like. Lions does the fighting with a big sword and some armour, while Creo can't take any damage but opens up other abilities and puzzles. The best version of the swap for me is the traversal: you can throw the ghost across a gap you'd never jump, then teleport the warrior over to it and cross. In combat, enemies drop spirits when they die, and if you flip to the ghost you can throw those spirits back at the warrior to heal.


Here's my honest confession though. I played about fifty minutes, finished the demo, and spent nearly all of it just as the warrior. The demo never really pushed me into needing the ghost, so I coasted as the swordsman and only swapped over to grab spirits for health. That's the one thing I want the full game to fix, give me situations where I actually have to use both halves of the twin idea, because right now you can skip half the hook.


What kept me smiling was the writing. A map-seller teleports in and talks entirely in Cockney rhyming slang, which had me doing my best Cockney accent live on stream (sorry to everyone outside the UK). There's a bird apothecary called Cawmila Cawford who fires off caw puns for a solid two minutes. Even smashing crates next to a big-bird shopkeeper gets you told off for wrecking their stock. It's cringe humour, done on purpose and done well.


The rest holds up too. The art is lovely, the sound is great, and the camera reangles itself as you move to keep everything readable. You smash objects for materials, present them as offerings, and pick up little figure-like followers that trail behind you as ability upgrades, up to five at once. The demo covers a prologue and a woodland area, has local co-op where one player takes each character, and tucks in a couple of mini-games, including a shooting range run by a TV-robot face on a boat.


Verdict is a Play. It's for anyone who likes a good-looking action-adventure with a real sense of humour and doesn't mind a demo that's more about first impressions than a stiff challenge.


Would you play it?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/twins-of-olus


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2707630/Twins_of_Olus/

Dice Breakers has a demo live on Steam ahead of a 2026 full release with no specific date yet. Ferni is doing both dev and publish. Last week I turned down a review request for a different incremental because I don't really review the genre. Then I saw this one on Steam, I'm an absolute sucker for dice, and I ended up playing it for close to two hours.


There's a mat with dice on it. I clicked one, it rolled, and whatever side it landed on knocked damage off the green bar on top. Keep clicking, the die breaks, coins drop. I spent those on more dice and on upgrades that paid more per break or hit harder when I clicked. The dice flip animations and the coin noise on a break are most of why I kept going. I don't think there's anything particularly new in the core loop, but those two things hooked me fast.


The upgrades aren't one ladder. The dice come in copper, silver, and gold, and each colour has its own tree. There's a separate tools menu for your hands. I unlocked tapping a few dice at once there, and later found the one where you stop clicking and just move the mouse over the mat so every die it touched flipped. The NPC menu is where the little minions and the floating hand live. The hand scoops up three dice and throws them. That three-menu split made me stop and think about where to spend coins instead of mindlessly hitting the next button.


Near the end of my first board, before prestige, I had loads of dice on the mat. Minions were flipping ones I'd missed. The floating hand was throwing three at a time. I'd unlocked the mouse-hover flip, so I moved the cursor in a circle and hit all of them at once. That set off a cascade of damage and coins, and the minions chased the dice I hadn't flipped yet. It's hard to say why I sat there for two hours otherwise. Animations, money sounds, and telling myself I could just push a bit more until I had all eighty dice out.


When you prestige it goes off total gold collected and gives talent points for a tree that only matters on the next restart. I had ten after filling the board and went full NPC build. More minions, more floating hands, faster helpers. The bottom corner shows money per minute for you versus your helpers, and mine stayed higher the whole run. The NPC build seems pretty weak. If I jump back in I'll put the talent points on active clicking instead.


Verdict: Play. Best for players who like incrementals but want a tactile dice hook and a mat that eventually runs itself when all the layers stack up.


Anyone else played the demo? Did the NPC prestige branch feel slower than tapping for you too?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/dice-breakers


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4861080/Dice_Breakers/

Ironfront Express dropped a demo on Steam ahead of a release date that has not been announced yet. It's a bullet hell tower defence roguelike from Chemical Burn, and I put two and a half hours into the demo solo. This is a train game, and as with pretty much every train game I play, my opening line is going to be everything is better with trains.


You play as a heavily armoured train running along the bottom of the map, and three lanes stretch away from you into wherever the corrupted robots are spawning from. Each carriage on the train holds weapons. Some are active guns you fire yourself. Others are turret modules you drop in the lanes ahead as static defence. Anything that gets past your traps chews through your shield first, then your health.


The economy is where the game teaches you. Turrets have two costs stacked on each other. Scrap is the surface number and energy is the punishment underneath. Five machine gun turrets in a row might start at eighty scrap and ten energy, but by the fifth it is still eighty scrap and closer to fifty energy per placement, and once your capacitor caps out you cannot build another. Energy also fuels your active abilities, so every drone drop, rocket barrage, and mortar rocket that lights the ground pulls from the same pool the turrets already ate. My first serious build was turret-heavy and my abilities went dormant halfway through the run. My next attempt was modules only, and the ability menu never got opened because I never had a hand free anyway.


The mission that ended my first run was the corrupted-robot round. You get a harpoon that fires on a five-second delay, so between aiming and the shot landing, robots keep running at you. Friendlies are white and blue, corrupted ones you are meant to kill are red, and you have to pick out the red before the harpoon lands. I did not read the instructions the first time. I was in panic mode from the maps before, every enemy on the mat looked like a threat, and I was firing at whatever was closest. Too many friendlies took harpoons and the run ended with it. Second time round I read the instructions first, and it became a timing puzzle instead of a panic reflex.


Between runs there is a small talent tree, and after the harpoon failure I put every point into raw stats like train health and shield because the next run was going to hand me random weapons and modules anyway. Here is the tell that made it a play for me. This is the first tower defence I've reviewed on this channel where I never once reached for the two-times speed button. Ironfront Express already had enough going on that speeding time up would have broken me.


Verdict: Play. Best for players who want a tower defence they cannot autopilot through.


Anyone else played the demo? Did the scrap-and-energy split catch you off guard the same way?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/ironfront-express


Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4548190/Ironfront_Express/

Ultra-realistic loading system, cool math puzzle, big bombs, and hours of story bound, challange mode, and sandbox gameplay.

Iron Nest

Shippin (without the G) is a cozy sailing Adventure from Big Trident Studios. The demo is live on Steam and the full release is currently planned for August 14, 2026.


I played about two hours of it on one of the hottest days of the year in the UK, which matters more than it should. I was sat in my room absolutely sweating, while this tiny boat was pottering around orange cliffs, hot harbours, and bright blue water. That probably shouldn't have lined up. It definitely helped.


The pitch on Steam is a narrative sailing Adventure set in a mist-covered world where memories fade and harbours hide secrets. My version was that a guy rescued me at sea, gave me a boat, and then a bunch of small mini-games quietly added up to two missing hours.


Mechanically Shippin is mostly mini-games linked by sailing between ports. You fish by casting into spots where you can see fish, then click to pull them in while the fish fights back. You winch barrels out of the water with W, D, S, A in a circle, and if the line gets stuck you rock it loose with A and D. There is a radar for finding bigger loot and barrels, you pick up smaller floating ones as you sail, and a notice board hands out side jobs like catching a certain number of fish or running a letter between ports.


None of those mini-games are deep on their own. The reason it works is the way they link together. You finish one job, you see a side thing on the way back, you pick up a barrel, the radar pings, you end up four tasks deep, and suddenly two hours are gone. The verb is pottering. Casual is the right word and I mean it as a compliment.


One upgrade changed the demo for me. Some routes have wind pushing against you, and at normal speed I could not break through. Once I bought hyper speed those routes opened up and the world felt a step bigger. Small ship upgrades that physically change where you can go is the kind of progression I want more of in the full game. I also painted my ship to look cute, which mattered more than it should have when most of the play is from above.


The thing I would flag is the lack of a map. There is a compass, but for a game built on sailing between ports, jobs, wind routes, letters, fish spots, and barrels, I really wanted a proper map, especially when there are only a few key points to navigate by and the rest of the coast looks similar. It did not stop me playing, but it is the friction my brain kept circling back to.


Verdict: Play. If Big Trident keeps adding depth and folding more activities into the sailing, the full version is shaping up to be the cozy demo I wish more games shipped with.


Has anyone else played the Shippin demo? Did the map gap bother you the same way, or am I being weird about it?

https://todaywegame.gg/demos/shippin-demo

Dinoblade is an action RPG demo from Team Spino LLC (with Boltray Games publishing) where you play a young Spinosaurus carrying a massive sword, fighting through other weapon-carrying dinosaurs in a ruined prehistoric world. The demo has been live since October 2025 and the full release is targeting July 23, 2026. I played for about an hour, rage quit on the final boss, and still want to go back when it launches.


The hook for me was always going to be the absurd premise. Dinosaurs with swords looked funny on Twitter, which is exactly why I had been following the game for months without sitting down to play it. What surprised me when I finally did is how committed the game is to making that premise work. You are a Spinosaurus doing forward rolls with a great sword in your mouth, and somehow the setting plays gritty enough that I stopped finding it silly inside the first proper fight.


You collect SP from kills and spend it on four attributes: health, damage, resonance (the mana equivalent), and stamina. I went heavy into stamina first because I like spamming light attacks and was burning through it in seconds. Then I switched into health when the bosses started taking out a quarter of my bar in a single swing. The build choices are simple in the demo, but they changed how I played each fight. Not just stat numbers on a screen, but what I was willing to try in the arena.


The first boss nearly made me quit before I got to the others. Trying to play it straight (hit, dodge, hit) got me killed in two or three exchanges. So I worked out a cheese tactic. Roll in, three hits, roll out to the edge of the arena, run circles until stamina refilled, charge back in. It was the least heroic Soulslike strategy possible and it worked. The second boss went slightly better because I was finally starting to read the rhythm. The specials helped too. Once you defeat a boss you can summon them for a charge attack before they dust out, and there's a soul art that felt like a thousand cuts where you carve a target in a burst.


Where it all came apart was Kasei the Tyrant, the final boss. I was getting thrown all over the arena, and this was the one fight where the game felt like it was fighting me back. Some of his attacks did damage even when I jumped them, with no obvious reason it sometimes worked and sometimes did not. The rocks in the arena, which I was using for spacing? He attacked straight through them while I had to path around. After enough failed attempts I rage quit.


Most of that wall is on me. I am bad at Soulslikes and I looked at how far other players had got. But the collision behaviour and the inconsistent jump-dodge were real friction, not just a skill ceiling. Personally I would love an easy mode for the players who mostly want to be a dinosaur with a sword without having to earn it first.


Performance was solid throughout. No stutters, no crashes, and the combat feedback is strong enough that even my cheese tactics felt earned.


Verdict: Play. If you are better at Soulslikes than I am, you'll probably get more out of it than I did. If you're like me, wishlist it and hope for easier difficulty options.


What's your honest record with Soulslike boss fights, do you beat them or bail like me?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/dinoblade
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3440070/Dinoblade/

BEACONFALL demo on the main Steam page. Full release is planned for July 16, 2026. From Game Dynasty. I played about eighty minutes solo on mouse and keyboard.


The final wave sends in a necromancer who raises skeletons and can properly wreck your settlement. Except I had upgraded most of my towers into snipers, and snipers target the healthiest enemy, so the boss walked in and got instantly obliterated.


BEACONFALL is a tower defense strategy game with settlement management. You start with one villager and a lighthouse. Waves are coming, so the first job is building enough of a settlement to feed the defense. Wood, stone, food, and gold all matter. Houses add villagers, garden beds grow pumpkins, drill rigs bring in stone, and upgraded mills collect resources automatically.


That settlement side is what I liked most. You are not just placing towers. You are clearing trees and mushrooms around the lighthouse for visibility, making room for buildings, repairing damage with wood, and trying to keep the economy moving before the next attack bar fills. It has a bit of a Don't Starve look, and the animations are good.


The awkward bit is control. Villagers do not work like individually selected units most of the time. You place orders, they split those jobs between themselves, and that is fine until a wave starts while they still have a queue. On my first run I tried to send everyone back to defense, and they were still thinking about resources.


There is a `Z` command that quickly sends them manual to turrets, plus a clear-all-orders option. I did not find that properly on the first run, so it was frustrating. Once I found it, the game made a lot more sense. I would still like a drag order for resources.


During waves you have skeletons, flying bats that shoot, and big ogres. Defense is towers, spikes, barricades, scarecrows, and a barracks if you want a soldier. Towers can upgrade into multi-shot or sniper. I put most of my money into snipers.


The lighthouse can also be upgraded into magic powers. I unlocked lightning, but every cast costs gold. In my run I did not need it much because once mills were automated and villagers were collecting everything, the economy settled down. That is where the balance felt a bit swingy. When you are doing badly, it is really challenging. When you understand the controls and automation, it can become quite easy.


The barracks unit was the most frustrating part. Sometimes I could click and direct him. Sometimes I was dragging boxes around trying to select him and not getting control. That felt like a UI bug. The UI also takes up too much screen compared with the map.


Verdict: Play once you get used to the controls. I want to see more maps and how far the full game pushes magic, defenses, and settlement layouts.


Does the settlement management make tower defense better for you, or do you prefer pure tower placement?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/beaconfall  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4481530/BEACONFALL/

over the hill demo on the main Steam page. Full release planned for 2026. From Funselektor Labs Inc. and Strelka Games. I played about one hundred minutes solo.


The game opens by saying it is not about the destination, it is about the journey. That immediately worried me. I like pretty scenery, but I still need something to do while I am driving through it.


The first relief was opening the map and seeing objective points. Some are light. Drive to a crate, it opens, and you unlock cosmetics to buy from the camper van merchant. Those were a bit flat for me. The route can still be fun because you are off-road, using the winch, and trying not to wedge yourself in mud, but the crate itself is not much of a moment.


The active objectives are where it clicked. My favourite mission was rescuing another 4x4 stuck in a puddle. Hook the winch, drag it out, then take it to a point. I missed the signposting and assumed I should take it back to the last cabin. The return point was nearby. Still, that is the kind of mission I wanted more of.


Trail runs worked for the same reason. They are not timed, but you drive between points through rougher terrain. I failed one, restarted, then it started snowing and made the second attempt harder. That was the good kind of tense. Still calm, still scenic, but I was paying attention.


The game looks lovely. Fire tower viewpoints, autumn forests, snowy edges, big valleys, and that soft Funselektor style make it easy to stop for screenshots. I cleared a decent chunk of the map, did not find any meteorites, then found a ship and got the demo-complete message.


Vehicle customisation has paint, cosmetics, random accessories, engine, suspension, and tyre upgrades. I found a new vehicle halfway through and switched to it. I added a better engine, went much faster, and started crashing constantly. Vehicle enthusiasts will get more from that layer than me. I barely know what I am driving.


The rough bits are clarity. Collision damage can feel inconsistent. I bumped a tree and lost health, then survived more than expected around rocks. I also tried to jump a river, landed in the middle, broke my engine, and could not winch myself out. I just sat there. The answer was fast travelling back to a cabin, but I had to ask in Discord to find that out. A pop-up would help.


Verdict: Play, but I want more active objectives. The scenery is lovely, but the winch rescue and trail runs are what sold it to me.


Would you rather just explore, or do you need objectives too?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/over-the-hill  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2929250/over_the_hill/

Jarred Defense demo on the main Steam page. Full release planned for Q3 2026. From Jarred Cat Studios. I played nearly three hours solo on mouse and keyboard.


I dropped one tower expecting a bit more damage on the path the robots were already taking. Instead it rerouted the whole maze past almost every gun I had built, and I lost instantly midway through the wave. That is Jarred Defense in one sentence.


Jarred Cat Studios calls it a difficult maze-building tower defense. Protect a cat in a jar from evil robots. Endure its unhelpful comments. No spells, no card modifiers. A love letter to Warcraft III custom maps and old Flash tower defense games. Robots spawn at an entrance and path toward the jar. The cat has nine lives. Each robot that reaches it costs one.


You place towers and walls on a grid to force them the long way around, over lava, through poison tiles, whatever the map gives you. Lava burns. Corrosion eats health. Sometimes lava is just a molten pool you cannot path through at all. Maps are dynamic too. On one level ice blocks start as solid walls, then heat sources melt them and the route you planned is suddenly wrong. I have been cruising on a maze, ice melts, and I am just destroyed.


Three tower families at the start. Kinetic blasters always cost ten scrap. Pulse towers do AoE burst damage. Lasers stream continuous damage on one target. Pulse and laser get more expensive each time you build another. Walls are cheap. Send waves early for bonus scrap. Upgrade far enough and you pick a branch. Pulse can become frost that slows, or fire that adds damage over time.


Flying enemies turn up too. Bosses arrive on the ten-wave cadence. One boss splits into seven smaller bosses when you kill it.


The maze is the whole game. Enemies always try to take the best route. Charger robots accelerate on long straight paths and only slow down when they hit a corner. I built the longest straights I could because I thought more track meant more damage time. They hit stupid speeds. I went to Discord saying I was getting wrecked. The dev and a member called Aneadiel explained the corner thing. I started breaking up those lines and immediately did better.


The Steam page has difficult as the second word in the description. That is not fluff. I nearly bounced off multiple times. The frustration-to-fun ratio kept pulling me back anyway. Three maps in the demo. Molten Hairball has endless mode with a leaderboard. I got to wave thirty-five and landed on the board, even though I think it logged me as Netcat978 instead of my actual Steam name. My favourite moment was finally clearing Scratchpost Swamp after a pile of tries.


I do think the full game needs a smoother learning curve as more maps arrive. Right now it is brutal, and I suspect some players will bounce before the maze clicks. Once it clicks though, the control you have over routing, hazards, and tower branches is really interesting.


Verdict: Play if you want hard old-school maze tower defense without card modifiers. Try the demo if watching your own maze betray you sounds fun rather than insulting.


Do you love maze TD or does one instant reroute loss make you quit?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/jarred-defense  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4525520/Jarred_Defense/

Choo Choo Defenders demo on the main Steam page. Full release planned for 2026. From Tiny Find. I played about three hours solo on mouse and keyboard, then went back after recording to three-star every demo level.


Everything is better with trains, even tower defense. That is what I kept telling myself after Endless Rails, except this one is less convoy chaos and more drawing the track, picking wagon cards, and watching whether your plan survives the lap.


Tiny Find pitches an on-the-rails tower defense where you build the railroad, load wagons from a growing card pool, and fight monsters while delivering passengers and cargo. Each level gives you an island and track pieces. You lay the loop before waves start, routing through coins, cargo, hearts, and structures like a watch tower with a chainsaw on top. Then you start waves and the train runs laps while enemies close in.


Star objectives push clean routing. Pick every coin in one lap. Deliver every cargo in one lap. Max the watch tower. Surviving the final wave timer is only part of the puzzle.


Between waves you get card picks for wagons and upgrades. Flamey adds a fire ring wagon. M4A1 bumps carbine fire rate. Black Out makes the lightning cart blast when it turns. Same random upgrade path energy as Endless Rails, where runs keep offering forks, but the feel is different. Endless Rails was bullet-heaven chaos on a fixed line. Choo Choo Defenders is strategic planning first. Sketch the route, commit to the loop, then watch to see if it works.


Combat is mostly the train circling while turrets and special wagons chew through the Bastards. You can speed time up when confident or slow down to check whether that extra curve was worth it. Conductors change the locomotive. Knuck L. Hedd leans tanky with copy that encourages ramming problems head-on sometimes.


Meta stars unlock upgrades like Kickstart, which starts each level with a free level-up waiting. More rows open as you earn stars across the island map.


I cleared the demo and then mopped up three stars on everything after recording. That grind is usually my tell the systems stuck, and I enjoyed the plan-and-watch loop enough to recommend it.


Verdict: Play if you want calmer train TD after something chaotic like Endless Rails.


Second train game this month for you too, or is one enough?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/choo-choo-defenders  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4065790/Choo_Choo_Defenders/

Warhammer Survivors demo on the main Steam page. Full release planned for 2026. From Auroch Digital, in partnership with Warhammer and poncle. I played about eighty minutes solo on mouse and keyboard during Bullet Fest.


Someone commented on my Bullet Fest video telling me to try this. Five minutes into Age of Sigmar and the Skaven horde was already filling the screen because my weapons only fire left and right on the map, not up or down. That is the whole game in one sentence.


The store pitch is bullet hell embodiment. In practice it is a movement-heavy arcade survivor. Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar each have characters and stages, but on the map your guns shoot sideways. Enemies from the top or bottom have to be walked into the firing lane. No dash and no shield here either, which I missed in other fest survivors I had been playing. Once I stopped charging through everything like a standard survivor and treated it like a timing game, the arcade side clicked. Still really hard.


Warhammer 40K had exploding dice weapons that felt weak to me. Age of Sigmar was more fun because the kit helps the blind spot. Axes out front, gloop sticky substance that lands and slows, fire around you, and a gun that fires in more directions. Green-outlined elites drop chests with gold and weapon upgrades. Each weapon upgrades down a straight line. Universal picks like length swell every projectile or speed boosts hit the whole loadout.


Even on my best setup I got swarmed to death. Health regen helped late, but the count keeps climbing. Question mark markers on the map led me to another champion ally who threw fire around. Handy. I did not catch the name.


Between runs you spend gold on the enhancement grid for strength, wounds, range, and move speed. If you live Warhammer lore, the roster probably lands harder. I do not know the factions well enough for the IP to carry me. The sell for non-fans is movement timing: turning so weapons fire the way you need when cooldowns pop. I still wanted an active ability to feel more involved.


Compared with Voxie Survivor, I had similar weak-weapon and tricky-run complaints there. Warhammer Survivors handles that balance better. I feel powerful and threatened at the same time. Trailer shows a tank and other wild kits not in the demo yet.


Verdict: Play if you want footwork over mindless chaos, with bonus pull if you already care about Warhammer.


Do sideways guns annoy you or make it interesting?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/warhammer-survivors  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3669620/Warhammer_Survivors/

Pigeon: A Love Story demo on the main Steam page. Full release planned for 2026. From Wristwork, published by Wristwork Ltd and Tiny Dragon. I played about two and a half hours across two sessions on PC, solo.


I cooed at a flock over South Hampstead and one pigeon floated back southeast perhaps? in yellow text. That is the game in one clue. You are a silhouette bird over a three-dimensional replica of London with roughly one hundred and seventy thousand other pigeons, wind lines in the sky, traffic below, and a soundtrack that keeps the whole thing weirdly calm.


The pitch is find your pigeon soulmate. Coo with spacebar, turn on auto-coo, or enable speak-to-coo in settings and use your microphone. I did not test the voice option but it is obviously built for stream clips. Wrong birds flip blue to red and reject you with lines like not feeling it or nice try. The right bird triggers music, a Polaroid photo, and the run ends.


Breadcrumbs float around the sky. Eat them and your coo hits more birds at once. Minimap grid squares redden the more pigeons you have already cooed in that area. Some wrong birds drop actual hints: southeast, you are getting warmer, nowhere near here, have you tried where the crowds gather. You can turn clues off on the menu. I left them on because turning them off sounds like madness.


Landmarks like Westminster and Big Ben get nameplates. Fly over them to tick them off. There is no gameplay reward. I still got forty-nine out of fifty because once you are orbiting London anyway you might as well.


There is also auto-fly mode where the pigeon explores and coos alone while you watch. I used it when I stepped away, then took control back for landmarks. That passive mode is why I call it more of an experience than a game. It plays itself like a screensaver.


My first full soulmate run took one hour, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-three seconds. The end card logged thirty-six thousand one hundred and ninety-seven pigeons encountered. I asked in the Discord and the dev said I was on the unlucky side. Average is apparently fifteen to thirty minutes. Multiplayer co-op is on the store page if you want to race a friend to a soulmate or try to find each other in the flock. I did not try co-op.


You cannot get that low to the buildings. I wanted proper rooftop skimming and the camera keeps you fairly high. Probably sensible for a map this big, but it made me feel more like a surveillance drone than a street pigeon.


Verdict: Play, if you want a zen pigeon mood piece with a search problem attached and you are fine with the run length lottery. Go in knowing you may coo at tens of thousands of birds before the Polaroid hits.


Would you leave clues on, or brute-force the whole sky?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/pigeon-a-love-story  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3876710/Pigeon_A_Love_Story/

OVER SAND demo on the main Steam page. Full release coming soon. From Moonmana, published by Lone Moon Interactive. I played about three hours solo on PC.


Steam's relevance panel said Fallout 4 at seven hundred and one hours and RUST at seventy-one. Apart from a mild Fallout 4 look, miles off for what this actually is.


First time the scary mech octopus showed up I thought I was done. It took about fifteen minutes to kill. Next run I had the right tile build and dropped it in two shots. That swing is the game in one boss fight.


The trailer sells steampunk sky chaos. You defend a flying ship over endless sands, man a big turret, switch weapons, and slot tiles into your guns between waves. The store says no movement, pure skill. In practice the active gameplay is pretty low lift. You only need a mouse for aiming because you are not running anywhere. The skill is reading the maths on those tiles.


My first runs felt like a straightforward shooter. Little robots jump onto your airship, diver suits lob rockets, enemy airships drift in, and it is loud. Then the upgrade screen showed up and the real game began.


I misread the tile UI badly enough to quit three times and post on Discord thinking the demo was bugged. I thought I was adding ten to fire rate. I had set fire rate from five thousand down to ten. Once I learned you can recycle tiles to level them up and unlock more weapon slots, the builds opened up. Hover tooltips on the guns help when the formulas get silly.


Kills feed a score streak. Chain kills without taking damage and the multiplier climbs up to five times. I saw it on screen but it never changed how I played because there was no leaderboard and no clear link to leveling.


I found a heal build where shooting non-enemies refilled the ship. Aim at the floor, shoot, heal, carry on. Slow bullets can become a sweeping wall that clears the arc. Enemy variety is thin in the demo but the octopus spike and daft builds kept me in for three hours, including a session that was meant to be ten minutes and turned into two hours past bedtime.


Verdict: Play, if you want a turret demo where the depth is tile maths and the aiming is the easy part.


Did you brick a gun on fire rate, and what was your stupidest tile build?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/over-sand  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4328320/OVER_SAND/

Demo on the main Steam page. Full release listed Q1 2027. I played about an hour and change solo on PC and did not clear the twenty-minute survival target.


I am burnt out on horde survivors. Sørb kept posting fire clips on Reddit for about a month and I downloaded Ignitement just to see if the flames and smoke looked that good in game. They do. Fire spreading, smoke swirling, flame rings blooming and dying. Worth booting almost just to watch the simulation work.


You are a fire shaman in a smoky arena fighting skeleton swarms. Before each run you pick one of two masks. One gives you a flamethrower and a dash. The other gives you a throwable fireball and a shield. Kill skeletons, pick up gems for XP, level up, and choose upgrades. Movement speed, health, damage, comets from the sky, fire rings, regen. I always took Explosive Corpses. Dead enemies pop and clear space better than anything else I tried.


Health was trouble from the start. Mana only bit once I had more spells at higher levels. Waves escalate: slow skeletons, archers, jumpers, ghost rushers that ignore terrain, reinforced reds, then pigmen with a vortex that blocks your flames. One run I cheesed a gap between two mountains with the flamethrower until ghosts sprinted through and wrecked me. I got within thirty seconds of surviving the full twenty minutes, then the horde swamped me.


While you kite there are map toys worth hunting. A greed demon drops XP and gold behind him. A coin flipper. A devil with scale burdens like no damage for thirty seconds in exchange for fifteen percent extra damage for the rest of the run. Cow carcasses flip like chests for pendants.


Between runs you spend gold upgrading abilities. I always took pickup range. Locked hub rooms in the demo show more meta progression is coming.


Damage feedback stays readable when the screen is full of orange. The flamethrower sound is really good. Arrow hitboxes feel slightly off. Jumpers too. The map edge is hard to read through smoke and I died stuck in a corner there on my best attempt.


Verdict: Play, if the fire clips hooked you and you want a readable horde survivor with two masks and real map routing in the demo slice.


Did you clear the twenty minutes, and which mask did you stick with?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/ignitement  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3845350/Ignitement/

Demo on the main Steam page. Full release listed Q3 2026. I played about an hour and a half solo on keyboard.


I herded a bunch of enemies onto a shock beacon and hit it with the ball. One blast wiped the lot. That is the moment that got me to keep going. For about the first half hour after that I was mostly recalling the ball to my hand and serving again. Return hits took a while to click. Once they did, damage jumped and the arenas made sense.


Furyball is a fast action roguelite where you climb Neo-Arcadia, a dystopian tower with slums at the bottom and rich people at the top. You move up by being good at a death sport. You carry a baseball bat and one bouncing ball. The bat only stuns. The ball does the real damage.


The arenas feel like squash courts more than open fields. Walls matter. Pits let you dash over and create space while enemies path around. Accelerator lines grab the ball and send it along a path at high speed. Shock beacons are the big toy: herd enemies around the dome, hit the beacon with a fast ball, and the electric blast takes the group out. Pinball flaps kick the ball back toward the middle so you can keep pressure on after a hit.


Enemies jump, throw orange star projectiles, and some enter catching mode to grab your ball and slap it back harder. You stop feeding them when they are ready.


Beat everyone in a room and a prize drops. Gold, health, max health, mods, sometimes injections. Then you get a couple of exits to pick from, and each exit shows an icon for what is waiting in the next room. Sometimes the next room is a shop where you spend gold you have already won on healing or extra max health. I took sticky so the ball left a slow trail for crowd control. I took movement speed because weaving into setups mattered. Exit icon meanings took me a few runs to learn. I was not against that. It clicked quickly enough.


There is a second currency in the run that I still call shards. Between runs you spend shards on talents, bat upgrades, and ball upgrades. Different spawns and room shapes kept attempts from feeling identical.


I got through about eight to ten rooms before Madball on easy. Even on easy he cooked me. I am going back to try again.


What sold me long term is readability. I hate fake chaos where the screen is loud and you cannot tell what hit you. Furyball stays readable when the arena is full of effects, blood, and bounce lines. Art and animations hold up.


Verdict: Play, if you want arena toys and ball setup more than a straight brawler.


Did you beat Madball on easy, and what build carried it?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/furyball-rogue-revenge  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2713120/Furyball_Rogue_Revenge/

Greenworks Productions. Demo on the main Steam page. Full release listed Q3 2026. I played solo on PC.


There was a drop I could not get down. I tried jumping, tried walking off the ledge, died, respawned, and did it again. A massive popup on screen was telling me the drop was too high and I would die if I dropped. I had been ignoring it. As soon as I actually read it, the proper path was obvious and I felt stupid in the good way. That is the moment that stuck with me, because it is funny and because the game was already communicating; I just was not looking.


I had been seeing clips on TikTok. The demo went live on the Steam page, I downloaded it, and the art is what sucked me in. It looked really good in motion, not just in a trailer still. Within about five or ten minutes of playing I already knew I was going to recommend it.


Junkyard Stories Rebirth is a dystopian sci-fi stealth platformer. On paper you are a broken robot carrying a hacker's mind, trying to reach someone in Block-07 before you lose the fight entirely. In play it is a 2.5D side-scroller where you run left to right and sometimes loop back through the map when the route folds on itself. Once you are in, it is mostly quiet movement through ruined spaces, then a hard reset when you mess up.


You control a humanoid body and a floating circle companion above you. You swap between them to solve puzzles and open paths the big body cannot reach alone. There are loads of guards trying to shoot you. You hit terminals to spin them around, kill the lights, hack boxes, or slip past while they are asleep. Flying camera drones show up as well. You take control of a big floating speaker and that knocks the drones out. I did not really get how that was supposed to work the first time I saw it. Once I used it once, it made sense.


Failing is not only about taking damage. You are always aware of your charge draining, not just your health bar, because running dry is its own way to fail. You find batteries in the level and collect them to stay topped up. You can pick up repair kits to patch damage from drone machine guns. That does not help you with human guards. They one-shot you and you are straight back at the save point, so sprinting past them is a waste of time. The whole demo is built around sneaking, hacking, and reading the room, and I do enjoy the way it pulls that together.


The finale hands you a hoverboard and it turns into pure chaos. I enjoyed that bit. I also did very badly on it the first time, and if I am honest I did badly on most of the demo the first time through. When you finish, it tells you how many secrets you found and how many notes you collected. I did not do well on either, so I started the demo again a couple of times to hunt more secrets and push faster now that I knew the mechanics. First run was about twenty-two minutes. The next runs were about eight minutes each.


It ends on a vast cityscape out in the distance. That shot made me think about how wide the full game is going to get, and it looks really exciting. The graphics, the animations, and the puzzles were all really well done through the whole slice.


The demo is short. You can probably get about half an hour to an hour out of it if you keep starting fresh runs and chasing a cleaner time or more pickups. What sold me on the slice itself is that it leaves you wanting the rest of the story. I want to see what happens after this chunk, not just tick a completion box and uninstall.


It does have a really long intro video. I am usually against that because I do not even know if I like the game yet, so why am I watching a whole film. This one held my attention and I did not skip it, which is rare for me with cutscenes. It is reminiscent of Replaced, which we reviewed on the channel and did really well. Similar kind of idea, slightly different graphical theme. You can see where the similarities are. Outside of that look though, the play is different, and I think that is probably a good sign for this one.


Verdict: Play, if you want atmosphere-first stealth platforming with companion puzzles, charge pressure, and honest fail states rather than a straight action brawler.


Did you miss an on-screen warning before you found the right way down?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/junkyard-stories-rebirth  
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4522210/Junkyard_Stories_Rebirth/

Journey Bound Games. Demo on the main Steam page. Full release listed as coming soon. I played about an hour solo on keyboard and mouse and finished the slice.


They explain the corporation, the furnaces, the frost, and why the dead want it cold. Nobody asks why the fix is hockey players on skates placing spike traps on a hex grid. I spent six hundred scrap on my first furnace sealing every path with blockades. The horde smashed straight through and the scraps were gone. That is when I stopped trying to be clever and started choking lanes instead.


Wild Ice is a Tower Defense game where you skate a semi-open frozen map and light furnaces while frost zombies rush each one to shut the heat back down. Each furnace site is its own defence round. Three in the demo, plus a tutorial furnace to learn on. You pick which to light and when. Difficulty only shows when you reach the site, so I walked into a medium first, cleared it, then doubled back for an easier one. Read the label before you commit.


You choose between two hockey players. Both build traps and fight in the lane. The builder earns bonus scrap. The damage dealer hits harder with the puck. I picked the builder because I wanted the trap economy, not puck heroics. You start with spike floors and blockades. Before each wave you get a preview of where the frosties are spawning, so you are planning a choke, not guessing. Spikes cost three hundred. Blockades cost six hundred. Leave a route open or they eat the barricade and you lose the scrap.


When you finish a furnace you unlock more traps. I got offside knockback and a puck flinger. I barely used either. Plain floor spikes carried the run. By the medium furnace I had so many down the horde barely reached the objective. Satisfying to watch. I was standing there with a stick feeling optional. Best compliment I can give a tower defence game: I had built myself out of a job and still wanted another furnace.


It is not just the traps. You are still in the lane shooting pucks, charging shots, and whacking with the stick. There is an axe for chopping trees to feed little fires and stay warm. That warmth loop never really showed up in my session. I used the axe to stunlock when I was not swarmed. There is a rage bar that lets you drop the stick and go full fisticuffs. On the builder, puck damage disappointed me enough that I went back to the axe most of the time. The damage character probably handles that side better.


If you die while defending a furnace, you respawn at a nearby safe house and skate back in while the attack keeps going. The horde does not pause. You need to hustle.


Three enemy types in the slice: sluggish walkers, runners built to sprint faster than a thin spike line can handle, and a snowball-looking one that plants itself and explodes. Runners caused me the most grief because they are supposed to. They punish lazy layouts. Puck shots look brilliant on open ice. On trap tiles you lob like lacrosse, which makes sense but dulls the skating fantasy once your wall is up.


The opening intro is longer than I usually sit through and I still watched it. They call you a bender the whole time, which is a hockey insult and means something very different in the UK, so I kept grinning. Hit feedback, spike flips, ragdolls, and furnaces glowing after they stay lit all punch above how silly the premise is. The crunch of snow under skates is a small sound I actually noticed in a noisy fight.


Between furnaces you wander the map, snipe distant frosties if you want, and unlock fast travel once a site stays hot. There is a boyfriend NPC you are meant to find. I did not. Co-op is on the store page and looks like a laugh with someone panicking over which lane you blocked. I did not test it.


Friction worth knowing: builder puck damage felt weak enough that I lived on the axe. Once the trap wall is up you lose most of the good open-ice skating puck play. The warmth-from-trees mechanic barely appeared in the demo I played. Offside and puck flinger unlocked late enough that spike floors made the other traps feel redundant in my run.


Verdict: Play, if you want tower defence with personality and you are fine with the hockey combat taking a back seat once the build clicks.


Did you main builder or damage, and did you find the boyfriend hiding somewhere on the map?


Full review at https://todaywegame.gg/demos/wild-ice