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On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve
done. If [[link]] nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the you can play right now and a running list [[link]] of the that are launching this year.
Faceminer
Release: February 28
Developer: Wristwork
Management games usually have you building conventional companies like supermarkets, theme parks and game studios. All good, but what about a management game about running a company specializing in biometric data harvesting? Set entirely on the desktop of a fictional operating system, Faceminer is all about scaling up, so as a result it borrows from the incremental genre (see Cookie Clicker) while draping that compulsion-driven gameplay with a steely dystopian narrative. Taking place in the "pre-Y2K techno-optimism" of the '90s, it also taps into the ropey nostalgia of games like Hynospace Outlaw, albeit with a mood of ominous foreboding.
R.E.P.O.
Release: February 27
Developer: semiwork
Yet another cooperative horror outing [[link]] in the style of Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. kinda looks like a joke game at first: its playable characters are basically Minions after all. But it has some fun ideas. When infiltrating and plundering various creepy environments, you'll be at the mercy of an amusingly janky "physics-based grabbing tool" which lends R.E.P.O. a Human Fall Flat-style humor, while also amping up the tension. If you can imagine carting a giant piano out of a haunted house with two friends while a monster breaths down your neck, you can probably begin to see where the challenge lies here. R.E.P.O. is an early access game: it'll stay that way for six to 12 months while a bunch of extra stuff is added.
Desecrators
Release: March 1
Developers: Woodhound
After a stint in early access, this Descent-style "six-degrees-of-freedom" first-person shooter is now fully baked. I've played a bit and can confirm it feels like the '90s classics, with lots of winding steel labyrinths, switch hunts and enjoyably disorientating combat. The narrative cleverly justifies the implausible ships-in-tight-spaces situation: it's all about plundering "massive installations" in space, whether "deep space refineries" or "orbital temples". The levels are procedurally generated but this ain't no roguelike, and best of all it has support for four-player coop.
Omega 6 The Triangle Stars
Release: March 1
Developer: Takaya Imamura, Happymeal, Pleocene
Here's an odd one: Omega 6 is an adaptation of a manga written by Takaya Imamura, a former Nintendo artist who has worked on Star Fox, The Legend of Zelda and F-Zero, among other games. It's a 16-bit style adventure with light RPG trappings, following the travails of a duo searching for an inhabitable planet for humans to decamp to. On the way they'll visit other planets, meet lots of aliens, and face-off against adversaries in card battles. Sounds fun, but more importantly (to me at least) it looks beautiful: this is superlative 16-bit pixel art.
Street Cleaner 3
Release: March 1
Developer: Creaky Lantern Games
Somehow I missed Street Cleaner and Street Cleaner 2, but never mind, because here's Street Cleaner 3, a gritty 8-bit action platformer harkening back to a time when street punks were the ultimate evil. These games, it turns out, are based on the music of an artist known as Street Cleaner, who specializes in the nowadays ubiquitous synthwave style. Whether you like that music or not, this looks like a pretty fun platformer.