Steam Game Festival offers plenty of entertainment for the next week

The Steam Game Festival has launched offering hundreds of free demos of upcoming games along with livestreams and chats with devs throughout the week.

This is the third time that the Steam Game Festival has been a thing but this time round, it's bigger than ever thanks to the lack of E3 and other major gaming events this summer. From now until 22nd June, the Steam Game Festival aims to showcase the latest games across every genre including developers from 65 different countries. The hope is that first-time devs will get some attention alongside more established names too. Impressively, over 900 titles are featured in this showcase so you're not going to run out of things to view. 

Expect a mixture of developer livestreams, original interviews, and some playthroughs with the devs themselves, alongside hands-on demos too. It's a curious mix of content with some big names and some very small ones too. 

It's a toss-up between Desperados III and Grounded as to which is the biggest game here. The former is a much-anticipated sequel set in a Wild West scenario offering plenty of tactical battles. It launched yesterday but thanks to the Steam Game Festival, there's a demo to try out. Grounded is the next game from Obsidian and is rather intriguing. Think Honey, I Shrunk The Kids in survival game format as you attempt to survive the backyard. 

Elsewhere, there are indie titles like Inkle's latest story-driven adventure, Pendragon, Backbone that has you playing a raccoon private eye called Howard Lotor, and Ghostrunner, a first-person based slasher set in a grim cyberpunk setting. Believe us when we say there's something for everyone here and it's genuinely quite fascinating poking around the options. 

Fortunately then, the Steam Game Festival offers a landing page of recommendations, as well as a timetable of when timed events occur such as dev chats and livestreams. 

It might not be the same as watching a full-on games conference like E3, but it's quite the spectacle of just how varied gaming can be. Best of all, it means if you're stuck at home, there's no shortage of new content to dive into for the next week or so. Some games are set for release in the next month or so while others are far more distant, so there should be something here for you to look forward to in the future. 

The Steam Game Festival runs until 22nd June 10am PDT. That's 6pm UK time.