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, alongside the cavalcade of nonsense. But fear not, for I have plunged myself deep into the piles of sludge to pluck out some true gems! Below you’ll find eleven demos for games 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 before at the very top in order to lull you into scrolling on to those you’d never have heard of otherwise. 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 it when it comes out.
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 the tone of Thompson’s previous games, the invitation of 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.
This super-scratchy, super-creepy arcade seems to feature just one machine: a game about controlling a UFO-like ship, avoiding enemies through a 3D maze until it can reach a gun, at which point the game flips over to twin-stick shooter as you 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.
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 of an unnatural entity in a nearby cave. The combat is great, the characters are novel and interesting, and very excited to play past what’s on offer here in the demo.
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 otherwise. This is an incredibly smart puzzle game about manipulating squares to join into larger shapes through a unique movement system of hopping and descending staircase-fashion, which sounds insane now I write it. 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.
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.
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 rogue 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.
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.
This puzzle game about a flute-playing cat hides what I suspect will be enormous depths beneath its simplistic presentation. The demo is a unique set of puzzles, separate from the game proper (due in July), for unexplained reasons that suggest it would be “impossible” to do otherwise. 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 anything more musically complex) or using by your imagination to decipher cryptic hints. I have very high hopes for a deeply peculiar game.
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.
Pickel Pete is Brotato but with pickles. It’s so blatantly copying the bullet heaven classic as to cause some sense of second-hand 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.
