Steam Next Fest is like a pick ‘n mix of assorted indie games. You scroll down the aisle and grab demos at your leisure, dropping them into the little plastic cup that is your library. Maybe you gravitate towards the familiar visual novel gummies, or perhaps some platformer fudge.
My colleague Ben Sledge has already sampled some of the most interesting demos this year, from an immersive sim about an insurance worker herding cats on a spaceship to a survival horror football sim. But today, why not throw in a few delectable boomer shooter sherbert lemons?
Repose
First person shooters used to be incredibly restrictive. You waddled around like a tank crammed into the body of Michael Shannon, and you couldn’t even look up or down. Instead, you had to flail around left to right, spinning with a pixel-y gun wedged into the middle of your torso. Repose makes movement in the original Doom look like Titanfall 2 by comparison, and I love it.
With its ASCII-like art, Repose plays more like an old-school text adventure (there are even save codes instead of save files). You move on a grid — either north, south, west, or east — and kill enemies by preparing an attack before lunging to the next space. You also have a limited number of steps, but shortcuts remain open if you fail or die, transforming the boomer shooter bones of the ‘90s into a bizarre puzzle that feels more board game than Wolfenstein.
Gruel
Speaking of the FPS that started it all, we have Gruel, which feels like Wolfenstein through the lens of an Among Us-addled zoomer. It’s a classic blocky dungeon crawler with guns in a classic web game art style.
It looks like all the sprites were drawn in MS Paint, which might sound like a jab, but it’s incredibly nostalgic to anyone who grew up playing Fancy Pants on one of those dodgy Unblocked School Games websites back in the ‘00s.
Broken Time
I’m stretching the definition of ‘boomer shooter’ a little here, admittedly, but Broken Time is easily one of my favourite games to come out of Steam Next Fest. It’s like Superhot spliced with Mad Max.
Time only moves when you do, and you jump from level to level, killing every single enemy to progress. All with a low-poly style that sees your opponents explode like crashing ceramic plates when killed.
Honourable Mention: Twisted Tower
This isn’t just a stretch, it simply isn’t a boomer shooter. But I’d be remiss not to mention Twisted Tower, a BioShock-like imsim where you explore a gothic citadel in the centre of a funfair, while also fighting back against evil mascots.
Imperium
Imperium is a round-based horde survival game where you buy weapons off walls, repair barricades, collect points, and even open up mystery boxes for better loot… It’s COD Zombies.
Only here, you have fuzzy PSX graphics and medieval fantasy weapons to slaughter hordes of undead with, Heretic style. It’s pure, simple, arcade-y fun, and I had to consciously pull myself away from Imperium to make room for all the other great shooters on this list.
Sinned Arena
It feels like multiplayer shooters have completely moved away from the arena deathmatch mode that laid the foundation for the genre as we know it today, which is a crying shame, because the simplicity of leaping around a giant, open colosseum while gunning down opponents mid-air is the purest FPS experience there is.
Sinned Arena brings back that classic Quake and Unreal Tournament vibe, set to the backdrop of a fiery crimson Hell with futuristic weapons ripped right out of the original Half-Life. I can’t wait to get stuck in and try this against real opponents, because the demo alone scratched an itch I forgot I even had.
Into The Void
There’s a new genre of FPS forming in the indie scene that I like to call ‘zoomer shooter’. The two pioneers, Mullet MadJack and Cruel, are all about moving forward as fast as you can. Stop for even a second and you risk death.
Into The Void captures that spirit perfectly. The motto is literally “Don’t stop – keep running”, and you feel that adrenaline rush in every fiber of its being as you slide past the white silhouette of enemies, kicking open doors, and blasting open their neon black skulls.
Chambers
What if Red Dead Redemption was a boomer shooter where you could catch bullets and fingerblast (…sorry) them back at enemies. Chambers. You’d get Chambers.
It’s the most absurd game on this entire list. When you first die, you meet a being who appears to be a revolver god, and they immediately resurrect you within a lavish velvet coffin. Which, of course, you kick wide open.
The main menu is even the barrel of a revolver.
The combat is unbelievably slapstick, with enemies regularly leaping into the air and flipping around, but if you somehow land a headshot with your ungainly boomstick, you can cook them for dinner and become a cannibal. Like I said, abusrd. If you try one game on this list, make it Chambers.
Steam Next Fest ends on March 3 at 10am PT, so you have the entire weekend to get stuck in and try some of these delicious boomer shooters.
Steam
- Brand
-
Valve
- Original Release Date
-
September 12, 2003
- Original MSRP (USD)
-
N/A