Every so often, an event called Steam Next Fest rolls around, offering up a bevy of demos of upcoming games to dig into, with varying quality. Sure, you can go to the Next Fest page and wade through the mountain of AI slop, NSFW, and NSFW AI slop, or just let me do it for you.
Every time this event is on, I make sure to comb through every genre, recommendation, and hidden gems I hear about, all in search of the best demos you can find here. It usually ends up bringing me a bunch of rough titles with a couple of diamonds here and there.
I’ll be listing off the ten best demos I could find during February’s Steam Next Fest, but first, there are ten others to talk about before we get into the juicy stuff.
Honorable Mentions
These Next Fest demos are all ones I felt were worth mentioning, mainly because I found them fun or interesting, and enjoyed what they were trying to do. I recommend giving them a shot if you think they might be your thing.
- Retired is one of several games at Next Fest that could get a Sonic comparison, but I’ll have some restraint and leave mentions of The Hedgehog to that. This game has you simply rolling down big hills as a high-speed tire, and it’s really damn satisfying to master, despite the jank physics.
- Sonki’s Lagoon is the most fish game ever. It feels like it nails my exact style of humor, completely absurd and with a lot of big dumb visuals to accompany things and keep it constantly fresh. The Next Fest demo itself is actually pretty fun on top of being hilarious, with a lot of momentum-based platforming to find.
- Pachincro would be at the top of my Next Fest demo list if it were sorted by raw play-time, as it’s a fusion of an idle game and a pachinko machine. You get to watch your balls drop, upgrade them in a big skill tree, and watch as some wild visuals go off in the late-game. I just want more of it, as the demo feels really limited.
- Rolling Rascal is one of many 3D momentum-based platformers trying to perfect a formula that was left behind decades ago, and it’s a pretty solid attempt, with rolling down hills and gaining tons of speed to fly off into the distance being superbly satisfying. It’s rather lacking in sound design and content at the moment, but it’s a super promising start.
- Denshattack! has a ton going for it, with a super neat, simultaneously depressing and joyous environment, and multi-track drifting and 360 train tricks that go absolutely nuts. It’s rather on-rails, but with enough training, I think you will grow to enjoy just about every inch of chaotic content this demo has.
- Elevator is the next game from the developers of Tower Unite, and while I did not expect to see them at this Next Fest, I’m not complaining at all. It’s a revival of GMod Elevator, and if you’re familiar with Regretevator on Roblox, you will probably love playing through this version of the same concept just as much.
- Sledding Game is rather huge, and despite being nothing like it, it gave me the same feeling I had as a kid exploring Club Penguin for the first time. It’s fun to play all the little minigames, sled down slopes, and hang out with friends. It’s just fun to make discoveries.
- DEG had me intrigued off the bat, namely by offering me the choice to not be told any of the rules and figure everything out for myself, and I do not regret playing it that way. It turned out to be a puzzle game that was similar in essence to Picross or Minesweeper, and despite its simplicity, I really loved my time with it.
- Super Alloy Crush is like a fusion of Mega Man X/Zero and a traditional arcade beat-em-up, a match made in heaven, if you ask me. The art is somewhat rough, but it’s just viscerally enjoyable to beat the hell out of everything in sight with combos that make you feel incredibly cool.
- Raccoin, lastly, is one of those games that gives you the feeling of gambling without making you lose all of your money to unfair odds. It’s a Balatro-style roguelike with a big coin pusher machine, something my partner would easily get addicted to. It’s got the perfect amount of bright lights and great sounds, and it’s super satisfying to get big wins.
Croak
What separates a game like Croak from the rest of Next Fest is the amount of promise shown in such a small amount of gameplay. Within just the first couple of levels, Croak is already demonstrating a Celeste-like masterclass in using a simple mechanic to its fullest extent, and creating a great platformer with it.
As someone who has struggled with making a great mechanic to become the backbone of a platformer, I’m jealous of how good and how malleable Croak’s tongue mechanics are. You get different effects depending on your timing and distance to whatever you’re tonguing, and using it to bounce around walls is simply great fun.
There isn’t a ton of content here, but it works as a very simple, short, and effective pitch to get me hooked on Croak and wishlist the game damn near instantly. The level design trusts you to get a hang of things instantly, and once you grapple with the mechanics, throwing yourself at a wall becomes rather fun.
Terrafactor
If you’ve ever played Forager or tried a Minecraft mod full of automation where you need to unlock the world chunk by chunk, you’re probably going to enjoy Terrafactor’s Next Fest demo as much as I did. It’s very focused on feeding the mysterious pocket of void that has manifested in your front yard to expand your land.
While the beginning is rather slow, it picks up to a pretty brisk pace for a survival crafting game, having you make a rudimentary base and planting Iron Seeds to get Iron Ore, because that’s definitely how it works. Automation starts pretty quickly, too, and becomes the main focus of the game.
You get to make your farms automatic within a few minutes of starting, then set up a series of conveyor belts to feed the hole without you needing to do anything more than crank it sometimes. It’s really quite fun to optimize your mechanisms and watch the world grow piece by piece, and this demo is pretty lengthy to boot.
Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar
One of the very few games I had wishlisted prior to Next Fest starting, Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar brings back the warm memories of playing LEGO games in co-op, and I love it. You get to split your cat in two and use it to cause twice the amount of malice-induced chaos as usual.
It’s a puzzle game that felt very reminiscent of both Portal 2 and It Takes Two, but letting you simultaneously control both split copies of your cat at the same time, which took quite a bit of getting used to, and I’d imagine it would be way more enjoyable to do in co-op.
The aesthetics are adorable, the writing is rather cheeky and silly, and it’s just one of those games that puts a smile on your face the entire way through. It’s very dedicated to letting you go kitty mode and be an absolute gremlin, and I love it for that.
Dice Vaders
While the original Star Vaders isn’t my favorite game, the same team really locked in on the Next Fest demo of Dice Vaders, which made me quickly fall in love with it. You need to assemble an army of little dudes, but those little dudes only proc when you get certain dice rolls.
This means you need to maximize the effect that rolling one of your six different rows of units will have, and it can be pretty brutal if you aren’t thinking strategically the entire time. The scaling gets ridiculous incredibly quickly, but if you’re smart, you can plan perfectly and make any run winnable.
The combinations you can make feel incredibly satisfying, especially when things go to plan, and it’s rather forgiving with a life system that allows you to retry every encounter around five times until you end up exploding due to poor planning and being overly attached to a really bad unit.
Frog Sqwad
When I heard that some ex-Fall Guys developers were making another game that hopefully won’t be dragged down by Epic this time, I was on board, and the fact that Frog Sqwad got a Next Fest Demo makes it all the better. Plus, the game is very fun, and I enjoy forcing my friends to play it.
It’s like an extraction shooter with all of the extraction and none of the shooting, where you and your buddies tongue each other and vomit out food to succeed in feeding your demanding ruler. It may be frogslop, but it’s some of the best frogslop I’ve ever played, and also maybe the only frogslop I’ve ever played.
It’s got surprisingly fun movement, with the ability to grapple onto most surfaces with your tongue and swing like Spider-Man, as well as grapple onto your fellow frogs and launch them into orbit. Easily my favorite part was diving into a pit and having my friends pull me up by their tongues to secure a burger Mission Impossible-style.
Vampire Crawlers
As a certified Vampire Survivors disliker who is completely apathetic towards the Bullet Heaven genre on the whole, seeing the same team bring out a Next Fest demo didn’t exactly have me excited, and yet playing Vampire Crawlers made me regret ever doubting them for a minute.
It’s a roguelite dungeon crawler that is far more fast-paced with some extremely satisfying Slay the Spire-esque combat, and all that mixed is an apparent recipe for success. The visuals retain the crunchy pixel art from Survivors, but in a rudimentary 3D space instead.
I think it’s pretty telling just how fun it is to dive into this game when I’ve only had it for a few days, and I’ve already wanted to play it far more often than Vampire Survivors, which I’ve had for years. It’s incredibly satisfying, and even right now I want to go on another run and die to not getting enough candelabra chicken.
Ultrapool
Aside from idle games, Ultrapool is absolutely the Next Fest demo that I’ve played the most. It’s a roguelike based on Pool, or Billiards, or 8-Ball, or whatever you want to call it, and it’s fire. It’s still rather luck-based, but unlike something like Balatro, raw skill and execution are required on top of strategizing.
Every unique ball you can get adds another layer to all the things you need to keep track of, and you need to make sure you get some balls in the holes immediately, while keeping others on the field to rack up points. The amount of synergies and combos you can make in this game is wild.
It is still pool with a few roguelike mechanics at the end of the day, but I absolutely love it. I got to round 27 on one of my runs, with an insane scoring combo on top of getting tons of combos and a food item that allowed me to have five extra balls, all leading to one of the most enjoyable roguelike runs I’ve ever had.
The Bold Bogey
Speaking of hitting balls with sticks and scoring points, the Bold Bogey is as bold as the name implies, turning Golf into an open-world adventure game. This is one of those Next Fest demos that shows far more promise than anything else, even though it was never a guaranteed hole-in-one.
It feels incredibly satisfying to chip your ball across a massive open field, then make it roll really fast down hills and through valleys and into individual challenge portals. I’m very thankful there isn’t any penalty for hitting the ball a ton, because you get to focus on Golf Rail Grinding instead of stressing about hitting it as few times as possible.
The physics feel tight, it’s very fun to angle your shot perfectly and hit it all the way across a field while bouncing across bouncy trees, and even with some jank here and there, it’s a really damn solid experience and the most unique take on a golf game I’ve ever seen.
DownSouth
Next Fest brings with it a ton of things that feel like no one on earth has ever thought to do before, and a grungy, incredibly serious, and somehow comedic game featuring a character that could be a Jelly Bean mascot, and controls akin to Wario Land or Pizza Tower have never crossed my mind once.
Despite the absolutely ridiculous contrast between goofy character design and a gutpunching, grim story with a very muddy and hardcore aesthetic, DownSouth feels like it’s doing everything right. It plays incredibly smoothly, it looks sublime, and I’ve never felt so bad for being mean to a Leek before.
The soundtrack makes me feel like I’m playing through the next best Wario-like out there, and it somehow just creates this perfect, weirdly beautiful contrast between silly and sadistic. It also has a reference to Wing Gaster, the royal scientist, so it might be absolutely peak.
Alabaster Dawn
Easily the highlight of Next Fest for me is Alabaster Dawn, which is the successor to CrossCode. If you weren’t already convinced to play this game by the fact that it’s made by the CrossCode team, you probably need to go play CrossCode and get back to me, as that game is genuinely incredible.
Alabaster Dawn takes everything great about that game and doubles down on it, putting similar mechanics in a far more fantastical setting instead of going for sci-fi. This works really well, and with the increased animation quality, it makes me feel like I’m living out the raw flash animations I grew up with.
Everything in the skill tree adds an entirely new layer to think about during the combat sections. The characters are so charming that it made me instantly care about them, and everything felt so tightly crafted and lovingly made that I couldn’t help but love every single inch of this game.
