Steam releases roughly a dozen new games every single day. Most of them vanish without a trace. But buried in this week's flood are five releases that actually deserve a second look, ranging from a two-hour Scottish horror point-and-click to an FPS that looks like it crawled out of a cursed demo CD from 1998.
A blood cult, a janitor, and a very bad night in Scotland
Cult Vacui, developed by LBRTY games and released April 9, is the kind of point-and-click that makes the genre look good. You play as a janitor shipped to a remote Scottish island in the 19th century to work on a wealthy family's estate. Bad timing: a blood ritual is underway, and everyone on the island needs to die to complete it. Including you. The whole thing runs about two hours, which is exactly the right length for this kind of tightly wound horror adventure. No padding, no filler, just atmosphere and dread.
Brazilian military horror that owes a debt to Signalis
Subversive Memories, from Southward Studio, launched April 8 and immediately draws comparisons to Signalis in its visual approach: fully 3D character models navigating fixed-perspective areas layered with pixelated grime. Protagonist Renata stumbles into an abandoned military research base hiding secrets tied to Brazil's real military dictatorship period, which ran from 1964 to 1985. The game works through the usual survival horror toolkit, puzzles, inventory management, and combat that feels deliberately uncomfortable, and clocks in at two to three hours. The historical grounding gives it weight that most horror games skip entirely.
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Both Cult Vacui and Subversive Memories sit in the two-to-three hour range, making them strong candidates for a single evening session if you want something contained and atmospheric.
The cozy noodle sim with overwhelmingly positive reviews
Not everything this week wants to scare you. KuloNiku: Bowl Up! from Gambir Studio dropped April 7 and has already picked up "overwhelmingly positive" Steam user reviews, which is harder to earn than it sounds. The setup is a food prep and life sim wrapped in an anime art style: run your noodle restaurant, engage in cooking battles against rival shopkeepers, and spend downtime decorating your joint and chatting with an eccentric cast of characters. It hits the same notes as the cozy retail sim wave that has been building on Steam for the past couple of years, but the community response suggests it executes on those notes better than most.
For more on what's worth playing right now, browse the latest reviews on our website.
KuloNiku restaurant setup
ChainStaff wants to hurt your eyes (in a good way)
ChainStaff, from Mommy's Best Games, released April 8. The art style is the headline: it sits somewhere between genuinely ugly and weirdly beautiful, the kind of visual approach that is impossible to describe and has to be seen in motion. Beneath the eye-assault is a sidescrolling shooter where the protagonist carries a grappling hook and progresses through a morally interesting upgrade system built around choosing whether to sacrifice or spare fellow soldiers. It draws comparisons to Spinch in terms of sheer visual commitment to being difficult to look at. Here's the thing: that kind of deliberate aesthetic risk almost always signals a developer who knows exactly what they are doing.
The late-90s cursed demo CD FPS that nobody asked for but everyone needs
Agony Increment, from Parish Softworks, arrived April 9. The post-Cruelty Squad FPS subgenre has been quietly growing, and Agony Increment fits squarely in that lineage: deliberately disorienting art, garish color choices, and an imsim-adjacent combat system that lets you slide, dash, and kick your way through whatever is happening. The Steam page gives almost nothing away about the setting or story, which is either a red flag or the most interesting thing about it depending on your tolerance for mystery. The dreamy drum and bass soundtrack leans toward the latter. Browse more guides and coverage as impressions come in from players who take the plunge first.
