The SuperDQP Weekly - June 16, 2025

The Steam Next Fest for June 2025 ends not too long after I send out this newsletter, so heck with it! This newsletter is all wishlist recommendations! Here’s a customary newsletter highlighting some upcoming indies that you may or may not have heard of.

But first, a different kind of recommendation

June is prime time for upcoming video game announcements. Geoff Keighley breaks out his annual Summer Games Fest video game commercial extravaganza, first-party publishers release streaming directs detailing their plans for the next year or two, Shaun makes his customary tweets/Bluesky posts about Silksong, and generally, life goes on.

Except… it hasn’t this year, not really. Not in Los Angeles, where Summer Games Fest is held.

My recommendation this week is to check out Janet Garcia’s feature on Pen To Pixels regarding the intersection between SGF and the recent ICE protests. It’s a potent exploration of life under militarization, outsider privilege, and the value of continuing to write about the things you love while dire things are happening in the background.

It’s been, frankly, too easy for me to doomscroll about the recent police and military escalation in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen too many frightening videos of protesters and reporters getting hurt by non-lethal rounds fired by police personnel.

Garcia tries to thread the needle between all of this harrowing news and the (relatively) more frivolous announcements coming from Geoff Keighley, Sony, and others, and how they all intersect and coalesce into one weeklong mix of emotional confusion, excitement, and fear.

This is what life in the Cool Zone is like, and it’s important to know what’s going on, but equally important to find things in life to remain positive and upbeat about. So, to that end…

Some games that Crystal really liked in the Steam Next Fest

(I really wish I could have come up with a better segue.)

It’s all well and good to sit and watch a livestream with a bunch of trailers and game announcements, but it’s another entirely to sit at one’s desk, download an irresponsible amount of demos for upcoming days, and discover for one’s self in real time what’s exciting and what’s not.

Steam Next Fest started as a collaboration with Geoff Keighley to bring demos to peoples’ homes through Steam, and grew in popularity as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down events like PAX or GDC, where developers would otherwise go to show off demos and secure business deals.

Steam has a lot of video games on its service, and separating the wheat from the proverbial chaff has been one of Steam’s biggest challenges over the years. That goes for Next Fest as well; for every new lush offering from Yacht Club Games or The Game Kitchen, there’s five or ten Unity asset flips, copyright violations, or straight up, unambiguous pornography that would fail the Miller test at a first glance.

But even among the most promising projects, the Next Fest can be a sobering reality check. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a project, gotten excited, and downloaded the demo only to painfully find that it just doesn’t sit well with me, somehow.

And so, with the indirect help of Bluesky accounts like Dominic Tarason, Casey Explosion, and Chris Franklin from Errant Signal, I amassed a collection of demos over the past three weeks or so in order to start gauging what, aside from AAA safe bets like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach or Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, to look forward to in the months and years to come.

(And if you want to know a secret, those Bluesky accounts are how I start looking into my wishlist recs for that part of the newsletter. I owe more than I’d care to admit to them. Go give them a follow! They have good taste.)

Alright. Let’s start with something predictably good.

Mina the Hollower is the next effort from Shovel Knight developers Yacht Club Games. It’s not exactly a low-profile release – Shovel Knight was enough of a huge success for Yacht Club to land a spot in Geoff Keighley’s main show a week and change ago – but to the surprise of no one, Mina is likely going to be another winner.

Like Shovel Knight, Mina borrows liberally from multiple retro titles at once; notably The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Castlevania, and a dash of the infamous Dark Souls “death run” mechanic for good measure. And also like Shovel Knight, it’s challenging, but not in an overwhelming way like other Souls-y indies like Blasphemous or Hollow Knight. It’s approachable, and is not short on cute puns like Shovel Knight was.

Mina the Hollower releases on October 30 on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and Windows PC via Steam and GOG.

Moving onto something decidedly less prolific, Hypogea is a platformer that reminds me of third-party PS2/GameCube era games in the best way.

Specifically, it calls to mind the slower, deliberate platforming of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, combined with a quiet tone evocative of Team Ico’s work.

It all centers around a staff, which you can use to pole-vault, gain height, or hook onto ledges or chains. It doesn’t take long for the game’s cold, lonely world to turn into a playground of clever movement.

I do worry that Hypogea will be on the shorter side, and that the full game may not expand much on what the demo had to offer, mechanically speaking. But nonetheless, it’s a joy to move through.

Hypogea is currently listed for a 2025 release on Windows PC via Steam.

Yo-yo-ing back to a different tone, Consume Me is a lot of fun! But it also fills me with dread.

The game is a disarmingly humorous minigame collection about disordered eating and body dysmorphia. You play as a teenager who is only one year younger than I was in the year the game takes place in who struggles with her body image, calorie restriction, and heteronormative pressures from the culture around her and the boy she likes.

It’s like a tactical orbital laser pointed directly at me. As you might know from my newsletter on the Class of ‘09 trilogy, I grew up in a culture that shunned femininity and excessively shoved toxic masculinity in my face, all while pushing the idea that a fat slob like me was never going to “get the girl.”

I also struggled with disordered eating back then; it was a coping mechanism comorbid with intense depression and high stress at school and at home. I was too distracted by that stress to even consider gender dysphoria (though that was, without a doubt, a factor in my teenage depression).

So yeah. Consume Me is going to be intense. But it has a sense of humor about it all, so with any luck, it’ll help players navigate those feelings without pushing them over the edge into despair. It’s already won acclaim and accolades at the Independent Games Festival, so I have some confidence that it’ll succeed.

Consume Me comes out September 25 on Windows PC and macOS via Steam.

Let’s wrap up on some undiluted action game goodness.

TEXNOPLAZM is a first-person Hotline Miami-esque spectacle fighter with just the right amount of 90s/00s cyberpunk camp.

That sentence contains a lot of weird gamer words! I’ll break it down.

It uses a shooter’s control scheme, but while there are guns, the focus is on scrappy melee combat, like the recent Indiana Jones game, but with a much faster pace. Each enemy has their own strengths and weaknesses that render encounters into this panicked improvisational ballet that has you kicking, parrying, throwing pistols, and parkouring over obstacles in a mad dash to subdue everyone on screen.

It is great fun. It’s far from the first game to try and gamify the kind of action that movies like John Wick or Monkey Man have popularized in the last decade, but it finds novel and intense ways to do so, and the end result is a joy to play.

And the narrative is just the exact right amount of incomprehensible cheese for me to enjoy. Just look at this paragraph from the game’s intro. It’s gold.

TEXNOPLAZM is currently slated for release in early access somewhere in Q3 2025 (somewhere between July and September) on Windows PC via Steam. It’s a small indie project, so have patience if it gets delayed.

There are so, so many other demos out there that I played and didn’t mention, and vastly more that I didn’t get to touch. Some of these games have been featured in wishlist recs already, and don’t be surprised if more show up as recs in the future.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to look for demos for upcoming games on Steam in the off-season, too! While many demos are only playable during the Next Fest itself, plenty more are available in perpetuity. If you see a cool-looking indie game here or on social media, don’t be afraid to hit up the Steam page and check out the demo if one is available!

There’s a lot of doomsaying about the state of the video game industry, but it’s my belief that video games are still doing well. The hobby may split off into different subcultures, budgets may decrease, and big studios may become less reliable as layoffs continue unabated. But as long as there are people to play them, great games will continue to get made. There is a vibrant cornucopia of impressive games coming out that doesn’t get the spotlight hogged by AAA releases. Go and check ‘em out!