Steam Quickplays: January 2026 Part 2

Posted on January 15, 2026 by Aywren

I’ve been pretty good at playing through some of the shorter games in my Steam Backlog lately. I even spent time breaking out the super short games based on data from How Long to Beat into their own folder. While this is a Quickplays post, I’ve actually played through an entire “round” of all of the games I’m going to talk about today, and even finished one of them!

Dead in Bermuda

Dead in Bermuda is an interesting survival strategy and resource management game that I got for free over the 2025 holidays from Steam. In this game, a group of travelers survive a plane crash on a remote island, and it’s up to you to manage what each survivor does (salvage, harvest, fish, cook, research, etc.) based on the skill set they have. You also have to manage survivor needs (hunger, depression, fatigue), and pushing any one person beyond their means can lead to death.

However, it is a punishing game that expects you to be willing to learn from your failures and come back to play it for another try after you screw up. And you probably will fail the first time as there’s no real obvious answer or guidance on what you need to be focused on to get enough food to survive as the days tick on.

I managed to make it a little over 14 days before my survivors started dropping like flies. Let me tell you, it gets really depressing really fast, and is not for the sensitive player.

This grim aspect, along with the funky controls, led me to call the game my first time through after about an hour and a half. I decided not to put yet more effort into it for another round, even if I had learned what I should have been bee-lining towards after the first failure.

I wasn’t a fan of the drag and drop elements – to assign characters to stations, you have to drag and drop each of them individually. That got a bit tedious for me after about an hour into the game. If there was a more simplified way of assigning people to tasks, I didn’t see it, and that would have been an improvement to the game flow.

However, it’s not a bad game by any means. Folks who enjoy resource management games may appreciate this more than I. Just know that when it starts to spiral, things fall apart really quickly.

Tell Me Why

A few years back, I got the first chapter of the game Tell Me Why for free on Steam. This was created by the same folks who did Life is Strange, so I knew it would be a solid story-telling narrative exploration game.

This one tackles some pretty serious topics including murder, violence, and uncomfortable situations dealing with children. It also deep-dives into what it’s like to live as transgender individual, and does it in a way that seems emotionally realistic.

Ultimately, it’s a story of two twin siblings who are reunited many years as adults, after a childhood tragedy tore them apart and left them as orphans. Together, they deal with the past head-on as they return to their childhood home, and begin to unravel the mystery of what actually happened so many years ago. They have a supernatural bond that helps them to look more closely at the world around them, specifically when recalling memories.

I did play through this game’s entire first chapter. Since that’s all I own, I’m going to call it complete. While it was an engaging experience, and I really liked the characters and story, my goal isn’t to purchase more games to add to the backlog, after all! So, done is done!

Monster Prom

I’m not sure where I picked up Monster Prom. I believe it was part of that Jingle Jam bundle from 2023. It has fairly high ratings, so I expected it to be a pretty good game. I put this on my Steam Deck, where it performed really well for me.

This is a quirky dating sim where you attend school through a number of weeks with the focus of impressing one of the monster-type students go with you to the prom at the end of the time-frame. This game is quite replayable with lots of characters to try to woo, all of them with diverse and unique personality traits and desires.

It might have been the route I took and who I pursued, but I will say there’s quite a bit of crass adult language and humor in this game. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by this given the game’s premise. It is a bit over the top, though every scenario and character appears smartly written – quality is not lacking in terms of art, humor, or writing.

I will likely give this game another run to see if it was just my initial choice of prom partner that colored the game the way I experienced it. The game only takes about an hour at the most to work through for each storyline on the Full Game setting.

While I do enjoy some visual novel dating games, they’re not at the top of my to-play list. Overall, this one has enough quirks to make it stand out from the others. Obviously, it’s done well enough for itself to have a whole series following it up. Worth a try if you enjoy humorous dating sims and don’t get offended too easily.

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