stuff from my Steam personalized calendar for the rest of August

What the report says

I don’t really write about new releases that much. A large reason why is that I never know what to focus on. What deserves attention, and what doesn’t? Thankfully, Steam stepped up a bit ago with a personal calendar on its front page, which highlights upcoming new games to the tastes of the user. So, I thought it’d be fun to share the stuff on my calendar, because I think they’d align with the interests of this blog.So, here’s my month of recommended games for the rest of August. I omitted games that plainly aren’t indie (sorry Steins Gate) and games that use AI (not sorry), and well, some days were just empty.

I’m sure something released on those days, but Steam refused to share with me.Horse Magnifier is by sketbordcat, and it’s a game coming out on the 10th about magnifying pictures of horses with various lenses. Horse pictures become weird grotesqueries as you magnify parts of them, making for goofy images and fondly reminding people that you can make funny images without slop engines. It’s somewhat of a puzzle game where you’re presented a mangled (affectionate) horse, and you have to figure out how to make a normal horse look the same.It looks like a casual, relaxing time.

Not entirely my thing, but I get why people would like it. It promises to let people create custom levels with steam workshop support, and I just know that it’s going to get loaded with Umamusume stuff. It’s only a matter of time.Coming out on the same day is Color Fear, a horror game by West View dealing with a children’s show. The Color Fun Coloring Show is an educational experience like any show for young children! It happens to be educating you on colors! And home invaders. The show’s host Peach wants you to present a color for the show, so go about looking for a color to present before an intruder decides to present the color of your blood.

Key details

It generally seems to be a fusion of mascot horror and analog horror.Personally isn’t my thing at all, but I know there’s an audience for games like this with stuff like Garten of Banban and Superliminal being big games and analog horror being a hot thing; not big in my circles, but they definitely have circles.Royalty Free-for-All is an party brawler game coming out on the 11th by AAAA Games LLC, where public domain characters are thrown into a hand-drawn cartoony world to square down. The game has veterans of the party brawler genre in mind, whilst working to make mechanics such as wavedashing understandable for newcomers.

The steam page advertises itself with an endorsement by well-known Super Smash Bros Melee pro Hungrybox, who considers Royalty Free-for-All to be better than Ultimate.I personally think the game looks nice, though I’m not knowledgeable enough about the party brawler scene to make a proper guess on how the game would be received. I’d honestly get the game for myself, but I really don’t have the coordination and reaction time for fighting games like I used to. But honestly, if you like party brawlers like Super Smash Bros, I recommend looking at this!James Bond is hot shit this year with Silver Light and discussions on who the next James Bond actor will be.

But how about we step back in the past with something else coming out on the 11th? Agent 64: Spies Never Die is a first-person shooter by Replicant D6 designed in the vein of console shooters of the 90s like the Goldeneye game. You are secret agent John Walter, going on a pulpy spy thriller adventure to fight the machinations of the appropriately named Dominic Pulp. You can also be John Walter’s co-worker I guess, since the campaign offers co-op.Agent 64 offers a whole bunch, like a bunch of modifiers you can add to the campaign and remixed missions.

More from the announcement

Just wanna fight it out? There’s an arena mode where you can fight other players online, and a local splitscreen mode to truly emulate old FPSes.Honestly, Agent 64 looks really fucking cool. It really does look like a love letter to the past while refining bits of it to be more palatable to modern audiences (the parts of it that don’t jack off to realistic graphics, anyhow). I think it’s a solid pick for the shooter fans out there.On the 13th, Rusty Lake delivers the next installment of its point-and-click adventure series with Servant of the Lake.

The series that the developer names itself after has been running since 2015, building off the studio’s Cube Escape series.