The Xbox Summer Event lets you play 40 demos of upcoming games

Last week, Xbox and Geoff Keighley’s Definitely Non-E3 Summer Game Festival announced the return of the Demo event for the summer game festival, now in its sophomore year that it’s a total sip while also allowing you to play a number of unreleased indie games. Until June 21st, you can download and play demos of 40 independent developer games.

At this point in time, there’s a little catch: it’s not immediately clear where to find all of these demos. Last year Microsoft filed

all of these games under a “Game Fest Demos” banner in the Xbox Store. I don’t see anyone this morning, although that could of course change. In the meantime, if you go to the Microsoft Store on your Xbox, scroll down to the Demos tab and click the X to see the full list of demos available on Xbox. The entire Summer Game Fest demo appears to be mixed in with the full batch.

Alternatively, you can open the search bar and enter “SGDemo” (or another variant) to bring up a list. This method works, but it is by no means comprehensive.

A handful of them went live a little earlier, late last night. Of course I played a few. tunic– essentially a lo-fi isometry Zelda with a baby fox in the lead role – the chord “Man, that could be something special” immediately caught the eye. ConnectTank scared me off with its goofy name, but ended up playing an intriguing procedural tactical puzzle game with excellent combat music. Definitely worth a visit for fans of the genre.

Anyway, here is the full developer list in parentheses:

• The story of a juggler (kaleidoscube)
• Antipol DX (Saturnine games)
• Arietta the Ghosts (Third mind games)
• BattleCakes (Volcanic bean)
• Black book (Mortischka)
• City button (Subliminal)
• Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four (Older Games)
• Catlateral Damage: Remeowstered (Manekoware)
• Clone drone in the danger zone (Doborog)
• Stupid! (Tinymoon)
• ConnectTank (YummyYummyBelly)
• Dead waste (Making legends)
• Death Trap Dungeon: The Golden Room (Good gate media)
• dreamer (PlaySys)
• Echo generation (Coco cucumber)
• Faraday Protocol (Red Koi Box)
• Fractal space (Haze games)
• Pack it up: Fully loaded (Coating)
• Stroke of god (Overwhelmed)
• Justice sucks: Charged (Samurai punk)
• lake (Happy)
• Lawn mower simulator (Skyhook games)
• Crazy streets (Craft shop)
• Chaos brawlers (Hero concept)
• Paint the town red (Southeast Games)
• Princess Bauer (Samobee games)
• sable (Shed)
• Sailing forward (David Evans games)
• String theory (Beautiful bee)
• Tanknarok (Polyblock studio)
• Teacup (Smarto Club)
• The eternal cylinder (ACE team)
• The riftbreaker (EXOR studios)
• The Strange Story of Brian Fisher: Chapter 2 (Synthetic)
• The story of Bistun (Black cube games)
• Trigger witch (Rainbite)
• tunic (Isometry)
• Wreck off (Four5Six)