Steam Next Fest recommendations and game demos
Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little twin-stick shooter called Minishoot' Adventures and ended up paying it more attention than any other random game I see that looks kinda cool, because they had a demo available. I installed it, played it for a couple hours, and instantly bought the full game once I was done. It's quite a good game, but they got my money primarily because the demo was able to hook me into making an impulse purchase, totally defeating my usual standard of decision-making about buying games.
For Next Fest, Steam is recommending me a deluge of indie 2D platformers and metroidvanias, and I'm not sure if that's because those are the games in development that tend to have demos or if Steam thinks that's all I'm interested in (spoiler - I'm not). So, have you discovered any truly noteworthy upcoming games in this year's Next Fest? Also, what was the last demo to win you over?
Self-promotion alert! My game Serenity has a demo in this Next Fest. It's a relaxing multi-player space-sandbox with music that changes with your play style. A kind of 3D Electroplankton? Collect spheres to advance, see wondrous things every 10 stages, perhaps some other players, and maybe get to stage 100. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4309910/Serenity_Demo/
Others I would recommend (for better or worse):
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2522120/Airframe_Ultra/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3349980/BrebeMan/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4142750/Denshattack_Demo/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3833720/Rhell_Warped_Worlds__Troubled_Times_Demo/
Oh yeah I got to trying out the Serenity demo yesterday -- or at least trying to, it didn't want to cooperate with Proton after toggling several settings (on Bazzite, not my deck). If anyone else figures it out, let me know!
I think it's a no go, so I'll release a Linux build ASAP (unlikely during Next Fest if I'm honest)
Cool! Feel free to ping me once you get one to test it if you like~
I was told to try out cursed words by a friend and I got hooked. It's satisfying to play, has a good number of systems it introduces as you unlock characters, and overall the game slots in perfectly with my need for something I can walk away from at any moment without issue.
I've done like 10 runs so far and I still have things in the demo to unlock along with some hinted-at secrets.
This looks a lot like Rogue Words on mobile; will check it out!
Someone on r/Steam posted this vibecoded site that tracks the increase in followers for Next Fest games and lets you filter the list of games by different parameters. Might be a useful tool for finding games.
Amanita Design, makers of cute hand-drawn point and click adventure games (does anyone else remember Machinarium from like 2010-ish?), have a demo out for their next game Phonopolis. The art, as always, is impeccable. They've done a great job with building the atmosphere, and I look forward to the inevitably short but incredibly sweet journey of the final game.
I rather enjoyed a game of Catmarine with some friends! It's like a typing game version of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, with a hint of Barotrauma. Or if you're unfamiliar with those titles, you need to quickly jump around to, coordinate with others, and type at controls on a little cat-themed submarine (a catmarine if you will).
Catlands, 3.5/5, Play Time: 77 minutes. Wishlisted: Yes.
Review here.
Cute and cozy puzzle game with nice music (if a little repetitive, I did end up turning it off). I like the art a lot. You are assembling landscapes from puzzle pieces that slide on pre-determined rails (some vertical, some horizontal). Your reward is some xp and a choice between tilesets (random type, random amount) which you can use to build up your own tiny cat village with cute little cat NPCs (non-playable cat?) that wander around.
My main frustration point was feeling like the puzzles were not being presented in such a way to provide more complexity/interesting challenges fast enough but that really might be a me problem rather than a problem with the game. As you level up you unlock new things (new puzzle modifiers, new difficulties) but it felt entirely too slow for me (or maybe my variety of ADHD). You play 1 or 2 star difficulty (out of 5) for 13 levels until you unlock 3 star difficulty at level 14. The puzzles provide varying amounts of xp but this progression still feels too slow. I tried selecting puzzles with the most tiles or that provided the most xp but it didn't seem to make a major change in difficulty of the puzzle itself. I really think this likely more of a me issue if you're playing this for cozy vibes and just enjoy the puzzles for what they are.
The NPCs are very cute with different little outfits as you find new ones (there are 3 to find in the demo) and the village building system is also quite intuitive and enjoyable. One thing I really liked and wanted to highlight is that each tile has a few varieties so there was an unexpected amount of customization that made it very nice to design my little cat village. I will say I wish the rewards per level were a bit less random. Your initial village is 3x3 (it upgraded to 5x5 at some point but I don't see it listed as a reward so somewhere between levels 1-13) and you unlock a few slots so you can build multiple, separate villages. However, levels can offer the same/similar rewards where you get like...23 sea tiles or 19 sand...What am I going to do with 23 sea tiles on my little 5x5 square? I would really prefer a mix of tiles rather than just wild amounts of one type. Ultimately wishlisted but I don't suspect I'll go out of my way for it if it's priced over $15.
Abyss Depth Control, 1/5, Play Time: 6 minutes. Wishlisted: No.
Review here.
I think I may have to give this one another shot but the beginning was painfully slow, the controls were clunky, the audio directional (somehow too loud and too quiet?) and I was honestly not in the mood to continue trying to work past my issues with it. I enjoy spooky games and I've enjoyed other "do this menial task for your unseen corpo overlords" games of this genre (see: Iron Lung, The Oily Depths, Cloverpit, etc.)
I think this might be a solo dev but even so...the lack of polish just felt overly frustrating. The game description still seems interesting and I think there might be quite a lot of demo in there if I can just make it past the beginning...I may revisit this review later.
The Last Gas Station, 4.5/5, Play Time: 3.9 hours. Wishlisted: Yes.
Review here.
Incredibly polished and very enjoyable pixel game where you're running one of the last gas stations out in the middle of nowhere where strange happenings may or may not be afoot.
Like many other shop simulators, you buy supplies and keep your stock fresh, you help refill gas, and pick up after messy customers. I don't have much to say about this one because it largely focuses on mechanics you would find in other games and the mystery that is unfolding around you is too spoiler-y for this type of review. One interesting thing I will note is that, towards the end of the demo, you unlock "trends" where customers are more likely to buy an item if it's in a trending theme. I haven't seen that in other games and thought that was fun and unique. Would absolutely recommend.
One weird thing that did stick out to me is that the cover art for the game doesn't seem to portray the character you are in the game...? I'm not sure if it's referencing a different character altogether or if perhaps the art changed directions during development. Given the polish on the rest of the game this was something that struck me as a little strange but it's probably not a big deal to anyone but me :)
Let's Build a Dungeon, 4.5/5, Play Time: 87 minutes. Wishlisted: Yes.
Review here.
Absurdly fun! I enjoyed Let's Build a Zoo and this is that but also so much more. There is a campaign mode, a "just build" mode, a creative mode, and a multiplayer mode (which was available last night but I didn't get into it and it appears to be disabled right now).
The campaign demo is bittersweetly short but offers some replayability which I appreciate. You play as an aspiring game dev building a fantasy mmorpg from the floor up (you have a budget, the playtesters leave little reviews, your boss is...interesting) and as you unlock new assets you set up dungeons for your playtesters, you set up the NPCs who give out the quests...it was just SO charming to me. There is even a portion where you play the game you're building and that's probably when I knew I would have to wishlist this.
The "just build" mode removes the company building aspects of the campaign even though you're still building a game. Instead you focus on gaining research points which in turn let you unlock things in a sort of deck building fashion. You're presented a few different choices (more money which you need to build the assets, more server space so your playtesters can save their characters, more bandwidth so you can have more playtesters online at the same time, a marketing campaign, etc) and you have to select one of those choices each time. This was a fun alternative to the campaign mode though I did find the budget constraints a little more noticeable and frustrating. In this mode you are limited to 14 days of in-game time for the demo which felt a little short but I think it offered a good idea of what to expect.
I only briefly looked at the creative mode but that one seemed really incredible. You're given access to all sorts of tools so you can control things at a much more granular level. Rather than randomly generating the starting map you can choose the texture of the tile, you can draw the map, you seemingly can write the quests...I didn't get super into it but I will absolutely be revisiting it because I'm very curious of how in-the-weeds you can get. There was also a mention that these levels will be something you can share with friends or have them play? It was 2am at this point and I had to go to bed so my memory is a little fuzzy. 100% wishlisted and will likely be replaying bits of the demo until it's no longer available.
Steam keeps recommending me Survivor-likes because I like twin-stick shooters and roguelikes. I don't enjoy Survivor-likes (too much meta-grinding and luck manipulation for builds and weapon synergies and non-interactiveness in the actual gameplay and having to search some wiki for the stats and weapon paths and blah blah blah).
Haven't had a chance to do a deep dive into demos yet (plan to do that Saturday and update with another comment then), but currently I'd say Voidling Bound has my interest. Third-person shooter (controls like Risk of Rain 2?) with monster raising and a hub/mission format kinda like Warframe (speed loot everything for resources and complete the objective, then spend the loot on upgrades and unlocking new mons to level up too). Ended up with a fast-firing pyro DoT mon that melted things as long as I could tap reload before overheating, though I did decide to stop so I could test the other demos out.
Might keep an eye on, might not impressions
PRAGMATA: Capcom's Sci-Fi Third Person Shooter with hacking. Dodge enemies, hack them to expose their weakpoints, then fire away. The hacking system definitely feels made for controller. Regening ammo for the base pistol while the subweapon pickups are meant to be used ASAP. Liked the gameplay flow and completing the demo adds stuff like counterattacks so I'm intrigued in how the finished game feels. Demo's story is generic, but here's hoping they'll have something passable. Pretty short demo: Opening, get the 3 locks, boss fight.
People of Note: Music themed RPG with action commands and a BP recovery system. The skill customization seems to have potential, but the game kinda throws you into Chapter 2 which isn't exactly the best first impression for flow or pacing: lots of running around and gathering info from NPCs before getting to the dungeon.
The Eternal Life of Goldman: Metroidvania that is very beautifully animated with pogo-jumping being the main interaction. It's also kinda dark? Visually it's bright, but the opening sequence is a forest fire where 2 animals burn in agonizing pain before the action actually starts, all the children there are mentioned to have died in the fire after the level is over, the first 2 minibosses writhe in pain when they're struck; just kinda a overall vibe thing where I don't think I personally want to engage further. Had a few frame dips at times, control is stuck to control stick instead of d-pad, and the cane customization requires opening a mini-menu to swap between parts as obstacles come up. Still, it did leave an impression.
Morning woke-up Edit: Forgot to double-check the AI disclaimers, removed one of the recs with AI-assisted art, added Hordes of Fate in its place.
Still working my way through the demos (went from biggest size to smallest, now at the less than 2GB games). Haven't had anything quite speak into my soul yet, but I've at least got my list of top so far, following, and the maybe pile.
LUCID: Metroidvania that's smooth to control with a seeming focus on maintaining aerial control through the various weapons (sword dashes for the demo, a spear unlocked post-demo for a 3rd aerial jump and pogo-jumping). There's also a blaster for taking out small enemies/big enemy barriers and the left shoulder buttons are dedicated to diagonal aiming. The demo has quite a bit to it and I've apparently only gotten 41% in the post-demo stats so I'm impressed gameplay-wise.
Parasite Mutant: Survival Horror RPG hybrid which is apparently based off of Parasite Eve. There's the limited resources, saving in saferooms, and wandering around to solve puzzles and open places. On the RPG end, you get pulled into battles when ambushed at specific spots on the map and need to juke (or interrupt?) enemy attacks until your action points are off cooldown at which point you can get your own hits in. More lenient than the standard Survival Horror: you're obviously expected to win battle encounters, plenty of pistol ammo is dropped, and there's an EP meter that builds up in fights which can be used for a self-heal or a massively damaging laser. Developed by the same team as Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune which is somewhere on my "wait for a deal" list.
Esoteric Ebb: Disco Elysium-inspired (the FAQ says it was modeled after Planescape: Torment first but then Disco happened, still need to play both of those), but in a D&D setting as a washed-up (literally fished out of a river and likely died, metaphorically described as the worst) Cleric sent in to figure out what happened to a tea shop that blew up. Politics, your stats talking to you (Dex is the selfish capitalist dick rogue, one description of Charisma is a sociopath saying whatever they need to for people to like them), absurd rolls (one of the first situations is eating through a pile of apples). I don't think I got far (decided to stop after getting to Snell's apartment for the other demos), but I had fun with it.
Celestial Return: More noir sci-fi dice-rolling stats-talking-to-you RPG with a touch of eldritch supernatural. In this case though, it's a lot more text and art-focused instead of the typical isometric view which streamlines the walking around part. The dice are also consumed when rolling which forces some consideration for how to spend it when it's used to purchase things, spending more dice for a higher chance of succeeding, and how having no dice at all for a roll is an automatic failure.
Prime Monster: Roguelike deckbuilder where you need to have more supporters on your side by the time the debate ends. Tactics are the permanent cards in hand that require energy to cast while 3 free cards are drawn per turn that can be used for its effect or discard for energy. You can also toss a tv at one of the opponent's voters with a 5/6 chance of not getting caught (yet).
Croak: 2D Platformer with the main mechanic of grappling towards a wall to either do a short hop up or a long hop away. Looks good and plays good.
Also keeping track of
The Dungeon Experience: It's... an experience. It's about a dodgy crab running a cheap LARP dungeon while promising the secrets of financial success (read:pyramid scheme) with dialogue options that are different levels of rolling with it. That's doing a disservice in describing the game, but I was fine with its brand of humor... maybe not pushing the barbarian nipples near the start though.
Cursed Blood: Isometric Roguelike that kinda makes me think of a rated-M TMNT game if the turtles were stone ape guardian samurai who hunt down gangs to pay blood sacrifice to their shrine. It's got that feeling of sneaking around and running around rooftops to get into position for stealth kills and then the melee combat and deflecting. The shrine gives resources, but also demands a random curse be given as well which does enforce some adaptation.
The Weeping Swan: Ten Days of the City's Fall: Chinese visual novel that's a sequel to The Hungry Lamb. This one takes place inside a city that's being raided and pillaged and the quest to survive. The protagonist Zhiyou is a scholar with mental trauma ever since his childhood friend took her own life and now occasionally falls into lapses where he sees people as beastmen. Now he has to take care of a little girl who's the spitting image of his childhood friend as the narrative goes between the present and his memories of her. Characters from The Hungry Lamb show up in Chapter 2 and it's assumed you've already played it.
Last Man Sitting: Survivor-like 3rd person shooter, but it's unlocking different equipment and there's just something joyful about the aesthetic of office workers speeding around on their office chairs and being ordered by their corporate anime girl to kill some jank robots. Apparently developed by the same team as Abyssus which I liked the demo of, so I'll have faith here.
Might keep an eye on, might not
Black Jacket: Blackjack Roguelike deckbuilder. While I'm not sure how to optimize a deck for blackjack, I do like the underworld aesthetic of gambling against other souls to work your way up to the ferryman.
Reap and Rush: Twin-stick shooter with spell modifications. Clear the objectives to get the shop open before the mob timer causes them to swarm (or be overpowered enough to farm the swarm). Kinda standard-fare but I have a soft spot for spell customization and the build crafting is easy, though the bosses are super tanky for an unoptimized build.
Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted: Twin-stick room clear roguelike. The passives are mostly +x% thing so it's more of a skill focus instead of broken build planning. The boss that constantly transforms the hunter is BS though.
The Magus Circle: Survivor-like, but you have to actively draw the spell patterns and pick up the mana drops which incentivizes playing aggressively just to get through. Mostly focused on duration spells and the ice spears and thunderstorm did the most work for me.
Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War!: FPS Campaign with the demo showing an open map level with the objectives in any order. Kill bugs to recharge the resupply beacon to kill more bugs. It's also obviously satirical with the store description and FMV videos about defending humanity against these alien bugs.
Hordes of Fate : A Hand of Fate Adventure: The Hand of Fate series but filtered through a survivor-like. Same meta-questing to unlock new things and card minigames to determine choice successes, but on the survivor end, there's objectives throughout the map to interact with and an active ability to be more proactive with.
Really wishing Next Fests lasted like 2 weeks or something or at least that most of the demos stay up. Well here's my last call of stuff.
Alabaster Dawn: It's by the Crosscode team. Same style of gameplay and the UI is definitely familiar and it's by the Crosscode team. I am HYPED.
Schrödinger's Call: Visual Novel about making phone calls to help souls remember and move on in the moment before their death. The art and music definitely strike an impression.
Fogpiercer: Turn-based 5-energy deckbuilder, but with grids and damage avoidance/unit manipulation ala Into The Breach. The player unit is a train so you're free to reposition an enemy car in front of you to ram it or causing a chain reaction of cars crashing into each other after taking one out.
Solateria: Souls-like Metroidvania with parry seeming like the best option since it looks like the only way to break enemy poise points. Decided to leave off on Phase 2 Fidiel, but I liked going through it.
Super Alloy Crush: Sequel to Super Alloy Ranger (I still need to finish that), a 2D platformer that's Mega Man-inspired with Muu as the red CQC character and Kelly as the blue shooter. This feels like going from 8-bit to 16 bit in progression with Muu pretty much having a juggle combo system. The demo level is pretty easy and there doesn't seem to be collectibles besides monies for score before shifting over to the survival roguelike shop-between-waves mode.
Burden Street Station: Point-and-click with surreal graphics and picking out the right emotions/words to advance the conversation. Some key NPCs keep moving around after each essential conversation is finished though which causes quite a bit of backtracking.
Might keep an eye on, might not
Galactic Vault: Roguelike FPS room clear with gun customization upgrades after every room. I feel like the rooms were all the same in my demo run, but I'm hoping the rest of it is more refined.
Gambonanza: Chess Balatro. Your units die for real though, so you need a way to keep restocking your pieces or spawning more of them.
Ardenfall: Indie 3D Elder Scrolls. Haven't had as much time to play around with it, but that's definitely the direction the game was going for.
Goblin Vyke: The Thief Tycoon: Part 2D stealth platformer extraction, part shop management, both of which tickle a very specific part of my brain though the game enforces autosaving. The shop haggling is either accepting the base price or basically playing blackjack with a D6 and going more rounds with the same customer if you want to sell more stuff or get a higher price multiplier. Once you start haggling though, you have to either win the round or bust and either accept the 0.6 multiplier or reject the deal entirely at that point. Meanwhile the stealth consists of keeping out of site, hiding in bushes, or picking up coin bugs to toss as a lure. The actual stealing comes from looting a corpse or being on a timer to pass the QTE and pick out the items before the guard notices you. Most of the negative steam reviews are pointing out that the devs didn't disclose their AI art usage for their previous demo, though they've stated they have human art for the Next Fest demo. Kinda conflicted in that I've absorbed enough anti-Generative AI views to not want to deal with anything using them, but they've also replaced the art, but public AI placeholder art assets in the first place, but...
I think I was still actually playing CrossCode when they announced Alabaster Dawn, or first gave a peek at what they bad developed, and I didn't think I'd be interested at all... but the more I see of it, the more I reconsider. I've downloaded the demo but who knows if/when I'll get around to playing it.
This was the first fest I was made aware of early, so I actually got some games from my wishlist, and some from the discovery queue.
Wishlisted games.
UDLRClover's Quandrant is a game I got to see it evolve (a little) since the dev's on the discord I keep talking about.It's a puzzle game where your movement is also your inventory, and it aims to teach you through gameplay alone, so I'll keep my explanation down to a few stages of level 1.
Basic rules are simple: grab all items, then get to the end, problems are:
Otherwise, it's artstyle is very unique (compared to what I usually play), since it's a heavy paper/cardboard style (with shuffling paper sfx for the menu) and the music is very relaxing (and also made by the dev).
It's a fun (if too difficult for me) game, so give it a shot if you like puzzles.
Also Idolon (the dev) found someone comparing their game to Baba is You and it terrifies them lightly.
Driving Rogue is a game I would like, racing (well, Outrun racing but still), roguelike, music is more good than bad, but the drifting...
It's tap brake to drift, except it immediately throws you halfway into the drift, and while controls in it is not as twitchy as some said in the steam reviews (and that might due to TM teaching not to fully steer in any direction most of the time), you need to spend a little while straight before it removes you from the drift.
It's not lost like NFSUnbound, but it's still very awkward to drive (and going off the trailers, that's more to do with it being just shy from the usual driving style than anything else).
It could use a training mode where you can just drive and drift without penalties. Oh yeah, hitting walls remove HP, no HP means you lose, so feeling things out kinda require you to consider wasting a run.
Beside the biggest element of the game, the rest IS good, so that's an issue they'll have to figure out. Or not, they aim for a pretty specific playerbase from the looks of it, I might just not be it. Just... somewhere adjacent.
Vampire Crawlers is a remix of Vampire Survivor's setting into a card based roguelike. It fits the VS gameplay surprisingly well (up to 5 enemies at a time, attacks all hit multiple enemies, gems pushes stat boosts onto attack cards, letting them build up through each encounters).
Give it a shot, same polish and style as VS, somewhat different gameplay style.
Scott Pilgrim EX is narratively a sequel to Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and mechanically mostly more of the same. Mostly. To be honest, there isn't much to say? Not that it's bad or anything, but if you played vs. The World first you know what to expect.
Discovery Queue games.
Pocket Flight is... Weird. It a freeform arcade plane sim.
It doesn't have settings (and has performance issues on Deck but put a pin in it), it apparently has a native linux version (but it doesn't work, use proton), and what we have access to is just the sandbox, a plane (out of 11) and 2 out of 5 worlds.
Sandbox is a sandbox, look at the biomes, collect coins and go through hoops to get coins, use 'em to upgrade the bird.
The game is fun on Steam Deck, and would be a great fit, not too heavy on the battery, good for short, quick sessions, but not only are there performance issues like I said (almost certainly due to render distance), the game does not support gamepads at all as far as I can tell. Still works well once you map the controls, but still.
Also due to digital controls you set speed like a ship. Kinda weird when you're used to AC/PW.
So a settings menu and gamepad support would help make this a good "Great on Deck" game.
Wireworks is a roguelike where you defend a castle with weapons and modules... that you control indirectly through modules installed on a server rack. Can you keep track of your wiring?
The combat is simple because, well, you interact with it through modules on a rack! Even if you do something like use one movement module for everything, your attention is still going left and right like you're watching a ping-pong match (and again that's one module to handle, more will make this even more messy, just y'know, in a good way). This plus the wiring challenge could be fun.
Not completely sold, but still good.
Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is a wiki-crawl whodunnit in the style of The Return of the Obra Dinn, demo is too short to really say much (2 pages to fill, 3rd is missing one element). Interesting enough to whishlist from what little there was.
Those are the ones I played through so far, might look for more.
Second half:
BOOST VECTOR EX is an extreme parkour racer with excellent aesthetics, menu designs, art style, music, it all works great. Gameplay is all about speed and boosting, which you can get through tricks (drifting and air time, mostly), but also through boost crystals (which can only be used once a race each).
The AI really needs a balancing pass, when I did a quick race offline, the Proto-rivals were almost consistently 10 seconds ahead of me, while the random bots were 10 seconds behind me. There are 5 racers in those races. Also could use more content (9 tracks, 3 characters shown. Could have more).
RIG Riot is a solo extraction shooter, I'll be honest I dipped after one run.
In short, it has a forced 4:3 aspect ratio, and basically throw you into an arena to be attacked from all directions.
Oh, and it's UI is small (with no scaling?), and I played on a steam deck, so it was extra tiny.
CICADAMATA is FPS Trackamania. You got a shotgun-railgun hybrid, a triple jump, a dash, and a stomp. Grab all cores, and make your exit. If a threat's in the way, remove it. All stages are short too.
From what I understand, game won the NF lottery and got a lot of wishlists, so I'll just say that yeah, game good. Hope it gets a level editor of some kind, I'm not joking about it being TM for shooters (more than shootmania is).
AUDIOMECH is a shoot-em-up that uses whatever you're playing to power your gear and enemies.
You have a (bass) sword, a (vocal and lead) gun, and a (treble) bomb, all of which are color-coded. So are the enemies.
The more of a thing there is the stronger the weapon and enemies of that type are (mainly, it means they're faster and spew more projectiles, both for you and the enemies).
Big thing from most games like it is it does it's thing live, rather than taking a file and "translating" into game data, so you can use anything as your background track. It probably won't work very well with other stuff like podcasts, but nothing says you can't use that as your audio to play with...
Beside that, this fest made me wish we could install things to other active devices, since installing demos on the deck is a bit of a pain once you have multiple things you wanna check.
The Windrose-Demo got the game on more than a million wishlists, and I'd say that's justified. It's a Survival-Crafting game, starts basically as a Pirate Valheim with nice Quality-Of-Life-features, but it apparently transforms into a pirate colony builder (like Aska or Bellwright) later and adds sea battles like in AC Blackflag.
The demo has about 5-6 hours of gameplay (but it's not limited), it's very well made, and the game is planned to release into early access later this year. I'm definitely interested, but I'll probably wait for a full release.
I also tried the Replaced demo for a short time. It's a 2.5D platformer (like Limbo or Inside) in a cyberpunky setting with light puzzles and (mostly melee) fighting sections. I thought the gameplay was ok, but I really liked the graphical style and atmosphere, it looks fantastic.
Every time I see Replaced I wonder if The Last Night will ever actually see the light of day; it plainly took heavy inspiration from TLN for art direction.
The folks at Thinky played most of the puzzles demos and put together a huge writeup of them: https://thinkygames.com/features/we-played-over-50-thinky-demos-from-steam-next-fest-february-2026-here-are-the-best/
The only one I've played myself is Puzzle Spy International, which is very stylish and charming. Tons of other stuff went on the wishlist though!
The demo for 868-Back is amazing. A sequel to the original, it's a 6x6 grid-based puzzle game where you balance picking up points and fighting the enemies that spawn as a result, while managing your "deck" of collected abilities.
It's got a really great hacker grunge style to it, a very nice drum & bass soundtrack, and a good tutorial to get you famliarized with the game if you haven't played the first one.
Feels very nice to play on the steam deck with WASD+mouse mapping to the track pad.
That's indeed a fun little game! Another review: https://buried-treasure.org/2024/04/minishoot-adventures/