GoKawiilFar Far West is off to a strong start after it hit Steam in early access this week. The co-op shooter from Evil Raptor and publisher Fireshine Games sold more than 250,000 copies in its first 48 hours. It typically costs $20, but there's a 10 percent launch discount until May 5.
As a robot cowboy, you can play solo or form a squad with up to three friends and go bounty hunting. You'll hunt down elusive, dangerous targets in order to take them out and scoop up the rewards.
You'll encounter undead enemies such as skeletons and vultures, as well as haunted mines and ghost trains. There's an extraction element to this (you can try to complete extra objectives for better rewards), though it seems more along the lines of Helldivers 2 than a more survival-oriented experience like Arc Raiders. You can use your loot to upgrade your loadout with new guns, abilities and spells. You can customize your cowboy and steed too.
I really dig the pixel-art look of 2D hack-and-slash adventure SoulQuest. The animations (which are said to be frame-perfect) in the trailer are super slick, which makes sense given that combat is built around combos of light and heavy attacks. You'll have magic powers and ultimates at your disposal too.
You play as Alys, a recently widowed warrior who refuses to accept her husband's fate and sets out to reclaim his soul. A soul quest, if you will. It took the small team at SoulBlade Studio seven years to bring the game to fruition and seven seconds for me to add it to my wishlist.
SoulQuest is available on Steam (usually $20, though there's a 20 percent discount until May 15). You can get a taste of what it has to offer by checking out the demo.
Gambonanza is a chess-based, Balatro-esque roguelite. It has some solid momentum, given that more than 170,000 people downloaded it during a recent Steam Next Fest event.
The aim in each round is to capture all of the opponent's pieces on a small-scale chessboard. You'll probably need to break the traditional rules of chess to do that. Helpfully, Gambonanza has more than 150 powerful "gambits" that modify your runs. These might make your pieces more powerful or force the enemy to skip a turn. Tiles on the board can also be modified (to, for instance, lock an enemy piece in place) and you can deploy extra pieces to turn rounds in your favor.
Along the way, you'll face bosses. It seems like one of those is a machine named M2ch4gnus C4rls3n, obviously after real-life grandmaster and five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. That alone has sold me on checking out this game.
Gambonanza — from solo developer Blukulélé and publishers Sidekick Publishing and Stray Fawn Studio — is out now. The Steam version runs on PC, macOS and Linux. It usually costs $15, but there's a whopping 35 percent discount until May 15. You can also snap up the game on iOS and Android for $7.
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