Xbox Summer Event Lets You Play 40 Demos Of Upcoming Games

Last week, Xbox and Geoff Keighley’s Definitely Not-E3 Summer Game Fest announced the return of the Summer Game Fest Demo Event, now in its second year of being a total mouthful while also letting you play a bunch of unreleased indie games. Through June 21, you can download and play demos of 40 games from independent developers.

As of this writing, there’s a minor catch: It’s not immediately clear where to find all these demos. Last year, Microsoft filed all of these games under a “Game Fest Demos” banner on the Xbox store. This morning, I’m not seeing one, though that of course could change. In the meantime, if you head to the Microsoft store on your Xbox, scroll down to the “demos” tab, and click “X” to show the whole list of available demos on Xbox, that should do the trick. All of the Summer Game Fest demo appear to be mixed in with the full batch.

Alternatively, you could also open up the search bar and punch in “SGDemo” (or some variation) to pull up a list. This method works, but it’s by no means comprehensive.

A handful of these went live a bit early, late yesterday evening. Obviously, I played a few. Tunic—essentially a lo-fi isometric Zelda starring a baby fox—immediately struck that “Man, this might be something special” chord. ConnecTank threw me off with its silly name, but I ended up playing an intriguing procedural tactical puzzle game with some stellar battle music. Definitely worth checking out for fans of the genre.

Anyway, here’s the full list, devs in the parenthetical:

A Juggler’s Tale (kaleidoscube)

Antipole DX (Saturnine Games)

Arietta of Spirits (Third Spirit Games)

BattleCakes (Volcano Bean)

Black Book (Morteshka)

Button City (Subliminal)

Cardaclysm: Shards of the Four (Elder Games)

Catlateral Damage: Remeowstered (Manekoware)

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone (Doborog)

Clouzy! (Tinymoon)

ConnecTank (YummyYummyTummy)