Delightful pixel art tower defense game Bean Beasts is celebrating its recent success on Shark Tank-style indie game show Pixel Pitch with the launch of a new demo. If you’re a sucker for tower-based strategy games such as Dungeon Defenders, Orcs Must Die, and Bloons TD, you can now try the Bean Beasts demo for free on Steam, and its gorgeous art direction makes it well worth a look.
Bean Beasts drew a lot of attention when solo developer Josh Bailey of Anxious Noob took the game onto Pixel Pitch, a new show hosted by Twitch streamer and YouTuber Zack ‘Asmongold’ that offers funding to promising new indie games. Winning over the judges with its fantastic pixel art designs and throwback tower defense gameplay, Bean Beasts not only earned funding from the panel of judges but also picked up more than 6,000 Steam wishlists overnight – a very impressive result for the one-man team.
It features ten of the titular Bean Beasts to collect, each featuring three stages of evolution, alongside 12 traps that can each follow two branching upgrade paths and 21 player abilities, including five summons. That means you won’t be short on ways to experiment and try out different strategies to take on the game’s wealth of enemies and boss fights.
If you want to overcome every challenge in your way, ranging across 40 hand-crafted levels and eight endless mode maps with four difficulty levels reaching up to the brutal beast mode, you’ll need to really think about your upgrades and make optimal use of the tools at your disposal. Force your foes down carefully planned chokepoints and make use of knockback and repositioning abilities to get them exactly where you want them.
“I absolutely adore this as a tower defense game as well as having some of those fun little actives,” judge Ovilee May says after their playtest. “I also really like the character and boss design, I think it’s really creative, with the bosses being able to use the environment that’s surrounding them. It forces you to adapt to whatever enemies are being thrown at you; I think that makes for really fun and engaging gameplay.”
Now, just a few weeks on from its Pixel Pitch performance, Bailey has released a Bean Beasts demo on Steam, giving you the chance to try it out for free. “A huge thank you for your support and patience,” Bailey says of the release. “As a solo dev I mostly rely on social media and word of mouth to promote my game, so I would be extremely grateful to anyone who helps spread the word.”
The Bean Beasts demo is available now on Steam. You can download it right away to try the game out and, if you like it, add it to your wishlist to keep track of the remainder of development ahead of its planned launch some time in 2024.
Alternatively, test your skills with the best strategy games to play in 2024, or take a look through our pick of the best free Steam games if you’re on the hunt for something new that won’t break the bank.
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