The Game Awards Is Putting on Another Limited-Time Demo Festival

The Game Awards 2020 airs tomorrow evening, and for the second year in a row, it will be accompanied by a festival of game demos. The Game Awards Festival will offer hands-on demos with a number of games on PC, Xbox, and through cloud streaming.

Much like last year, these demos will be downloadable and playable for a limited time on PC via Steam. These demos will also be on Xbox and through cloud streaming, via Nvidia’s GeForce NOW streaming program. The current crop of games, as of this writing, are:

• Little Nightmares 2
• Graven
• Echo Generation
• Song of Iron
• Disc Room
• Guinea Pig Parkour
• Anno: Mutationem
• Ami
• Selfloss
• A Juggler’s Tale

There will be more playable games announced in the coming days, including at tomorrow’s Game Awards. These short experiences will be available from now until Dec. 14, 2020, and you can keep up with the up-to-date list on the Game Awards Festival Steam page.

Events like these have been taking place throughout the year, filling the void left by E3 and PAX due to the outbreak of COVID-19. And as a balm to the usual crop of showfloor demos, it’s actually been a pretty good solution; I’ve enjoyed leisurely waking on a Saturday morning, making some coffee, and sitting down to a Steam page full of demos to flip through. It’s a nice break from the hubbub of a show floor, and it means more people can get hands-on with new games.

This crop of games looks good—Anno: Mutationem in particular has been on my radar—and I’m excited to see what new games get added to the list. The year might be winding down, but this is a neat way to get a sampling of what the new year holds.