Once again it’s Steam’s Next Fest, the regularly occurring event that highlights demos for upcoming games. It’s always a favourite of mine and I try to always participate by playing through several interesting looking titles. Today I tried three that were all extremely relaxed with no real time pressures involved.
Seclusa
Windows, releasing Q1 2025
In Seclusa, you are a wildlife photographer on safari in East Africa. You can spend time either at the lodge where you’re based or in one of the locations where you wait for animals to pass by, and you gain experience through taking photos of them and fulfilling daily quests. At the lodge you also have plants to water, a cat to pet, and jigsaws to complete. Time passes slowly so you can take photos of animals at different times of the day, and presumably in the full release some animals will only come out at certain times – the demo only contains elephants and zebras. When you go into your photo gallery there also seems to be slots for photos taken in different weather conditions.
I’m not sure how this plays on keyboard and mouse since I tried it on my Steam Deck, but the only thing I found difficult for taking photos using a controller was that the right-hand joystick seemed a little too sensitive. Otherwise it was pretty self-explanatory, though I didn’t try out all the features of the camera because I would have had to map quite a few keys – obviously since it’s a demo with no Steam Deck support the default key bindings for Steam Deck aren’t suited to the game’s controls. If I had the full version I’d definitely take the time to do that. There aren’t so many controls that I think I’d have any problems. As you earn experience and money you can unlock extra features on your camera too, like saturation settings.
At the lodge I also tried out the jigsaw puzzles, and this is actually one thing that could do with a slight improvement – it seems like you can’t snap pieces together independently of placing them on the board, so even if you know a few pieces go together you can’t group them and then wait to place them once you’ve filled in more of the puzzle. This is a feature that’s common to dedicated puzzle apps and probably matches how most people do them in real life. It also automatically rotates a piece to the correct alignment when you pick it up, which is a feature that you may or may not like. I didn’t mind, the puzzles aren’t tremendously difficult so I wasn’t aiming for a challenge.
This one could be good for people who like collecting games and completing goals, especially if they have a decent variety of animals and implement rarity features to keep you coming back to search for something.
Birds Organised Neatly
Windows, releasing Q4 2024
A puzzle game in which you need to, well, organise birds. Neatly. Each bird takes up a certain block of grid squares, some quite simple such as 2×2 or 3×1, others more complex like the zig-zag block in Tetris. As the levels progress you get larger and more complex birds to fit in, with the first six levels being fairly simple and increasing in difficulty from level 7 onwards. The demo contains the first ten levels and I found the last one quite tough, with a solid block right in the middle that restricts you to only two different placements for the largest bird and several other chunky birds that require a lot of space.
I really like this one, it has some cute graphics with a good ramping up of the difficulty. There’s no specific release date yet but it should be in the next couple of months.
Jellies of the Deep
Windows & Mac, releasing 11 November 2024
The store page for this game claims it runs only on Windows, but on my wishlist it shows both Windows and Mac and I tried it on my MacBook Air, so I think it’s fair to say that’s an error. This is a spot the difference game where on each level you have to find the unique jellyfish, and the differences can be fairly subtle, as you can see in the screenshot. The two jellies on the left are the unique ones for this level and both are very similar to others in the tank. Later levels consist of multiple screens and features like some jellyfish being locked in ice that you have to click on to release them, while the number of unique jellies also increases to make the game grow in complexity without becoming a case of finding a needle in a haystack.
I’m waiting to see the price of this one before I commit to buying it, but as long as there’s enough of a levels-per-dollar value it was enjoyable enough to get for when I just want to zone out with some cute jellies.