Carrion and a dozen other games have demos for The Game Awards
You have 48 hours
The Game Awards may be a pointless set of trophies thrown like bath bombs into a big tub of adverts, but one nice thing to come from them is a big blast of demos for upcoming games. For the next 48 hours, The Game Festival on Steam will offer demos of thirteen games including System Shock remake, gutsy platformer Carrion, and the self-explanatory Skatebird. This is meant to be some sort of equivalent to a games show, a brief coming-together then a parting, so these are only temporary. If your connection is decent enough, you can get a good few plays in.
Head on over to Steam to check out demos for Acid Knife, Carrion, Chicory: A Colourful Tale, Eastward, Haven, Heavenly Bodies, Skatebird, Moving Out, Roki, Spiritfarer, System Shock, The Drifter, and Wooden Nickel.
That's a wide range of experiences, everything from caring for people as an underworld ferrymaster to devouring scientists as a horrible escaped ball of writhing guts and tentacles.. You've only got 48 hours to play them, so hop to.
"Six years ago I bet everything I had to create The Game Awards as a way to celebrate our passion for gaming," creator Geoff Keighley said in the announcement. "Now feels like the right time to take the next step with The Game Festival, a completely digital approach to the consumer event space. Let's face it: Not everyone can attend a physical trade show or consumer event. The Game Festival is designed from the ground-up as an event without barriers, extending the benefits of a physical event to the global gaming community that watches The Game Awards."
Games already can release time-limited demos (and Carrion has done this before) but if the big brandblast of The Game Awards gives more developers the incentive to actually do it, hey, I'm game.
You can watch The Game Awards here, starting at 5:30pm Pacific. That's 1:30am on Friday for us here in the UK. Normally I'd gripe about having to be awake to cover that for RPS, but the general election means no one here is sleeping tonight anyway so I guess we're all in hell.