This is a compilation of some of our Steam Curator profile’s latest reviews, featuring both available and upcoming games. Make sure you don’t miss any of our lists and highlights by following us on Steam today! And if you haven’t checked it yet, we’ve recently published a SAGE 2024 digest as well.
Available Now
Parking Garage Rally Circuit
Curator Review Status: Recommended
Outrun’s and Daytona’s signature contagious cheerfulness is quite hard to spot on popular modern racing titles. The same goes for arcade gameplay that feels great and easy to learn, although hard to master. But fortunately, the indie scene doesn’t disappoint when it comes to making sure these things live on.
Created by Walaber Entertainment, Parking Garage Rally Circuit has a rather self-explanatory title. In this game, you need to drive through checkpoints inside crowded parking garages full of slopes and turns as fast as possible in order to take the prize. Both the art style and soundtrack pay homage to SEGA racing games and you can use graphical presets to toggle between Dreamcast, Saturn and more whenever you want. If you don’t like the scanlines filter, for example, all you have to do is change to the PC Port preset.
Drifting builds up turbos, which in turn builds up your car’s speed. The more turbos you can perform to speed up your car while driving through garages without losing control, the better. Now, in common racing games, the idea of driving through narrow spaces with sharp turns is daunting to say the least. But PGRC’s controls are as simple as Mario Kart’s, the cars are super responsive and boosting through its creative circuits becomes a fun and fulfilling task — especially with player ghosts and a realtime multiplayer mode to keep you going once you’re done collecting gold trophies.
Super Daryl Deluxe
Curator Review Status: Recommended
Debutting in 2018, Super Daryl Deluxe isn’t a recent release, but it sure is one that went under people’s radars. Standing out with a notebook art style and hyper exaggerated animations in a slapstick comedy high school setting, this is a sidescrolling metroidvania with a bunch of RPG elements, which is why the game often calls itself an RPGvania.
The gameplay is open world and there are new maps hidden in every corner, many of them being accessible even before you’re asked to go there. As a result, the world feels big right off the bat and you have to be careful not to delve into dangerous zones you aren’t leveled enough to take on.
As Daryl levels up, over 40 skills become available to unlock and upgrade, which can be stitched in all sorts of crazy combos that will come to hand in equally crazy fights.
Hohokum
Curator Review Status: Recommended
Hohokum is a highly artistic game where you control a living kite through stylized vibrant non-linear worlds with hidden objectives and side objectives to complete. There’s no text telling you what to do, so careful observation and listening are the best tools at your disposal.
And speaking of listening, Hohokum’s soundtrack is doubtlessly one of its main features. Songs grow louder and more instruments are added as the player figures out what needs to be done, giving life to a relaxing yet fun gameplay loop.
Upcoming
Glaciered
Curator Review Status: Informative
Glaciered is humbly set sixty five million years in the future, with the Earth’s surface taken by a gigantic sheet of ice that breathed a new golden age of life under the sea. The Tuai — an species descended from birds and successors of the dinosaurs — is one of the species that benefitted the most from the changes brought in by the cold, thanks to the “superior intellect” and “unique metabolism” they have evolved over millions of years.
However, the Everwinter is threatened to end and it’s up to you, the player, to control a fierce Tuai named Gray and keep things as they are. Produced by Kei Shibuya’s (Project Nimbus: Complete Edition and Sumire) Studio Snowblind, Glaciered aims to deliver an underwater spectacle-fighter brimming with dangerous never-before-seen creatures and gorgeous scenery.
FANTASIAN Neo Dimension
Curator Review Status: Informative
If you have played Lost Odyssey or The Last Story, you know FINAL FANTASY creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s games always have something special to look out for. In FANTASIAN Neo Dimension, an enhanced new version of the former Apple Arcade exclusive, classic JRPG combat gameplay takes a bit of a twist with the introduction of an aiming and ricochet mechanic reminding casual puzzle games.
Other honourable mentions are the backgrounds built with real life handmade dioramas, the Dimengeon mechanic that lets you send overworld monsters to a pocket dimension so you can beat them all at once later, and an intimate soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu.
Metropolis 1998
Curator Review Status: Informative
The city builder genre has greatly benefitted from the hardware advancements of the last decade. Almost every single element is now individually simulated, which leads to more convincing results, more often than not combined with a realistic art style.
However, overly realistic art styles are technically demanding and end up holding back other innovations, not to mention they are not everyone’s cup of tea. Metropolis 1998 keeps many of the advancements introduced by other city builders and even improves some of them, but goes for a retro pixel art style similar to the one seen on RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 instead.
The indoors are richly detailed and can be freely customized so that houses can be modified on the go or set up in advance through the creation of blueprints. You can check out the game by yourself by downloading its demo available on Steam — but do note it is but a pre-alpha version and chances are it’s still going to take some time until we see a proper release.
