It’s Next Fest yet again, and Steam’s wishlist-tempting festival of demos grows ever more unwieldy. This time, among the 8,764 demos included in the week-long event, we also have the miserable chore of weeding out the AI-riddled drivel. But fear not, for I have plunged myself deep into the piles of sludge to pluck out some true gems! Below you’ll find 11 demos for games that you’ve likely never heard of before, but will immediately rise to the top of your radar.
Can radars have tops? Try not to think about it, and instead delve into this eclectic mix of genres, where I’ve deliberately put a couple of games you might have heard of at the very top in order to lull you into scrolling on to those you’d never have heard of otherwise. Should you spot anything that takes your fancy, remember to stick it on your Steam wishlist, as this helps those games get better attention and indeed reminds you to grab them when they comes out.
Well Dweller
A new game from Kyle Thompson (Islets, Crypt Custodian) is always something to be excited about, and metroidvania Well Dweller immediately shines with his stunning artwork and incredibly competent controls. Darker and tougher than Thompson’s previous games, the comparison with Hollow Knight seems pretty unavoidable, but playing the demo, it really seems to hold up. And the boss art is like nothing you’ve seen before.
Unshine Arcade
This super-scratchy, super-creepy arcade seems to feature just one machine: a game about controlling a UFO-like ship from a top-down perspective, with you avoiding enemies as you navigate a 3D maze until you can reach a gun, at which point the game flips over to a twin-stick shooter as you fight back and attempt to survive a timed wave of attackers. Do well enough and you earn tickets from the machine, which can then be fed into a strange cabinet containing what might be a sentient robot. And thus the loop begins. It’s smart, incredibly well presented, and utterly intriguing.
South of the March
It’s odd to see a game underselling itself, but South of the March calls itself a combination of visual novel and turn-based combat. It’s not that! It’s a proper old-school RPG with packs of descriptive text. The hand-drawn game reminds me first of Inkle’s classic Sorcery! games, and while it’s not aiming for anything close to that ambitious, it absolutely is delivering an involving tale of two freelance mercenaries on a quest to discover the source of rumors about an unnatural entity in a nearby cave. The combat is great, the characters are novel and interesting, and I’m very excited to play past what’s on offer here in the demo.
Kwad
I think it’s fair to say from the screenshots that you might not be expecting much from Kwad, but I’m delighted to tell you that you should. This is an incredibly smart puzzle game about manipulating squares that stick together, joining into larger shapes as you hop and drop across the environment. What’s so fascinating here is how the level select screen can be even harder than the puzzles themselves, and the whole thing just oozes with cleverness.
Pixel Washer
It’s not entirely reductive to describe Pixel Washer as PowerWash Simulator but in 2D, given that’s exactly what it is. But it’s still absolutely brilliant. You play, of course, as a pixel pig, armed with various spray-washing devices, and have a whole bunch of places to clean up. What’s important is that it remains as compelling and satisfying an experience as the big 3D game, but with a delightful layer of extra silliness, and rather crucially, Peggle-like chimes to mark your success. The demo gives you six increasingly large areas to clean, while dangling the possibilities of unreachable upgrades and features before you.
Grid_Hacker
There are probably thousands of beam-of-light puzzles out there, and goodness knows I’ve been bored to tears by plenty of them. But there’s something different about Grid_Hacker, which delivers the same format—drop mirrors into a grid to redirect a beam to a goal—in a far more engaging way. It’s not just the simplicity of its presentation, but far more that, in a shocking twist, the puzzles are really good. In the levels available in the demo you’ll be immediately required to think far harder than this sort of challenge usually requires, with witty ideas introduced smartly.
Dopaminer
I’m not going to pretend that the current trend of incremental games represent high art. I’m not even going to try to argue that Dopaminer is a stand-out example of the form. But I’m also not going to pretend that I didn’t have a splendid time flying an elf-like creature with a laser beam down 2D mineshafts with an ever-growing number of skills and bonuses unlocked as I went. These are as close to mindless as gaming gets, but it’s undeniably engaging, and Dopaminer is a really damned good pun.
Fugaz
This puzzle game about a flute-playing cat hides what I suspect will be enormous depths beneath its simplistic presentation. You move around the game’s maze of rooms by solving peculiar puzzles that often involve playing a flute, whether following spell-like tunes (you play using the arrow keys, rather than doing anything more musically complex) or using by your imagination to decipher cryptic hints. I have very high hopes for a deeply peculiar game.
Hack 42
OK, now we have a very original approach to the incremental game. Hack 42 is a typing game of sorts, in which you hack through networks of computers, phones, and servers by pressing the key shown over each on a mind-map-like diagram. So rather than typing words, you’re aiming for a single random letter at a time, which is so much harder! Complete the letters that pop up over an icon and you’ve hacked it, and might have opened a chain to more. You get money for each successful hack, which is then spent between the time-limited runs on improving your skills. This includes Stamina (lengthening how long your runs can last), regeneration of time, and most intriguingly, offensive hacks. These are randomly generated with the right collectibles, with your generation improved by buying yet more upgrades. Oh, and there’s a digital pet cat to feed and play with. It’s inexplicably good, and I cannot wait until later this year when the full game is out.
Pickle Pete
Pickle Pete is Brotato but with pickles. It’s so blatantly copying the bullet heaven classic as to give me some sense of secondhand resentment on behalf of the original game’s developers. But damn, it’s so good at being Brotato but with pickles. The demo is enormous, so big I forgot I wasn’t playing the full game, and tremendously fun. The big difference here is that between runs there are a lot more things to upgrade and equip, an ever-growing list of tabs in which you can adjust your next attempt, and it’s all very tantalizing. And heck, there’s room for one more Brotato, especially if it’s with pickles.
