Who are the other blobs with legs in Mr Moon's employ? Doesn't matter. Katharine: One of this year's IGF nominees for Excellence in Design, Mr Sun's Hatbox is a game with an exceedingly daft premise - Mr Sun's hatbox gets stolen by the dastardly Mr Moon - that's executed to absolute perfection. But, after months of having superhero strength in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, that’s exactly what I need. These little troops barely stand a chance. that guy.īut, even after it threw me out of the frying pan, clobbered me with it, doused me in oil, and chucked me into the fire of a UFO crash site, I came out with a wide grin. My favourite death so far is a soldier whose name I didn’t even get a chance to learn, because they got shot on round one, went berserk, and blew themselves up with a grenade launcher. They might get got by their own teammate, who knew they’d miss a shot but decided to go whole hog and commit anyway.

They might shoot your troops through a slim line of sight that you could never have predicted. In fact, much of my time with the demo was spent getting slaughtered by them. It’s an overwhelming game, and one that offers little guidance in learning how to defend the world from aliens. Hayden: Xenonauts 2 is a tough-as-nails split between base management and turn-based tactics that, like its predecessor, harkens back to the X-COMs of old. Xenonauts 2 Developer: Goldhawk Interactive

For now, though, here's what we think you should download first in this latest February Next Fest.

We'll be playing and writing about more demos across the coming days, so watch out for further highlights later in the week. There are no doubt loads more great demos to play across the next week and a bit that we haven't covered here (as well as some like The Great War: Western Front whose demos we wrote about in more detail last week), so if you happen across something neat, be sure to shout about it in the comments. Like previous Next Fests, we've only had access to a small portion of the full February Next Fest slate ahead of time, and what you'll see below is a selection of games that stood out to us the most in that early slice.

Download eyes in the dark steam