I played too many Steam Next Fest Demos.

I have never participated in a Steam Next Fest until now. In fact, I had never even heard of it until now. So for my first ever Steam Next Fest, I went overboard. Steam Next Fest is full of cool indie game demos and much like the first time I ever breasts, once I got a taste, I did everything in my power to see as much as possible. In total, I downloaded and played about 70 demos give or take. Did I like all of them? No. But I did like a lot and since this is my blog and I have no restraint, I’m gonna write a bit about all of the ones I liked, in alphabetical order, instead of being a coward and limiting myself to a top 10.

This is a rad action platformer with a pretty sweet style. It feels like a Gameboy Advance game based on a cartoon from 2004 that never existed. I mean that in the best way. Combat plays like a platform fighter with directional attacks and time slows down when you dodge into an attack at the right time which lets you pull off cool-looking super hits slow motion. Platforming is fast and precise. The best way to summarize the game is if Sonic, Smash Bros, and anime had a baby and turned it into a GBA game.

A comedic point-and-click adventure about a cat stuck in outer space. The real draw here is that it’s filled with incredibly catchy musical numbers. I mean just listen to that theme song and tell me with a straight face you won’t be singing it to yourself all week.

I’m not really a Pokémon fan anymore. Not because I dislike creature-collecting games, and not even because I don’t like Pokémon. It’s just that the games mostly suck with little to no meaningful innovation for god knows how long. Legends is the only Pokémon game doing anything good and even then there are only two of them. But back on track. Aethermancer is a creature-collecting roguelike. During runs, you use a team of 3 creatures to battle and capture other creatures in turn-based battles and it’s fun. Battles are breezy but still strategic. The monster designs are good and with the pixel art style they look lively instead of soulless 3D husks of once vibrant creatures.

This is Vampire Survivors except it’s Viking-themed and the maps are contained instead of being 15 times larger than they reasonably need to be. So yeah it’s addicting.

I didn’t really like this one when I first played it. I like the art style, I like the gameplay and I like the music. But at first, I found it a bit too busy. It was hard to follow and my eyes were bleeding. But the more I played, the more I got used to it and the more I liked it. It’s a rhythm side-scrolling action game where you jump and attack to the beat. Complete with psychedelic indie music and visuals that’ll make you feel like you just took the best acid ever.

I have never played the original ChromaGun but I’ve known about it. It’s one of those post-Portal first-person puzzle games. But based on this demo I need to go play the first one cause it’s really fun. The gist is that you have a gun that shoots colors and you have to color certain objects properly to progress through the rooms. Except in this one, there’s also an alternate dimension. Also I love the pun title.

It’s a top-down delivery game where you can drive your truck through buildings and watch them crumble to dust. Need I say more?

I love me a good 3D platformer and this is a great one. Tons of fluid movement options and a colorful cast of characters with a cute cartoony art style. It’s games like this that made the PS2 generation the best

A turn-based RPG set in a musical world where you’re on a quest to defeat an evil record company. Combat is a bit like Paper Mario in that you need to press a button at the right time during attacks to make them stronger but here it all has a bit more of a rhythm kick. All your attacks are different riffs on your guitar and you can argument your abilities with various pedals such. And of course, the music is catchy.

Low-poly Mad Max. FUMES is kind of awesome. I streamed a lot of these demos but FUMES is one of the few I didn’t and I regret that because I will repeat, it’s kind of awesome. Imagine if they made a Mad Max game on the PS1. That’s FUMES. It’s arcade car combat in an open wasteland. Destroy enemies to gain better parts to attach to your car and eventually take on giant boss vehicles.

If you’ve noticed a theme with this list it’s that I really like games that remind me of PS2 games because that’s the best era of gaming and also the last time in my life I was happy. Anyway, GearGrit is cool. Combat could be a little more fluid but it’s still fun. You play as a goblin lady with a big mechanical hand that is also a gun. And she shoots the gun by making a gun shat with her fingers.

Another game reminiscent of a PS2 game, Genokids is an action brawler with an anime style about a band whose instruments turn into weapons. Combat is simple and lets you switch between characters mid-combo for some added strategy and depth.

Something about me you need to know is that I love penguins. They’re my favorite animal. I have a penguin bracelet that I bought because it lets me track the movements of a Penguin in Argentina named Waterfront who left his penguin colony to form his own on the beach which is pretty rad. So I downloaded this because despite not being that big of a fan of sliding puzzles, I love penguins. Well, it’s not just the penguins that put this on this list. The puzzles are really well done and have enough variations of make-up to keep things interesting instead of frustrating.

GLUM is a first-person shooter where you’re only weapon is your foot. You are a goblin and you kick all the humans into various obstacles, objects, and death traps to kill them.

This game has a dedicated fart button and therefore it is good. I don’t make the rules.

GRUEL is an endless first-person shooter. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a roguelike or not but what I do know is that it’s very addicting. It plays like and old-school boomer shooter. And I mean old-school like Wolfenstein 3D. Except all the character models, including your guns, are hand-drawn cartoons. I love that. The shooter is super fluid and satisfying and it’s very hard to not succumb to “one more run”.

Haste is dope. The tutorial might make you believe otherwise but once you’re in the actual game and get into the groove, it’s a super satisfying gameplay loop. You need to get to the end of the levels before the world collapses around you. You don’t control your running or your jumps, instead that’s automatic. All you have to worry about is the direction you go and making sure you land well to keep up speed. And the soundtrack is bumping.

Is This Seat Taken? has one of the best premises to a game I’ve ever seen. It’s a puzzle game where you make sure everyone has the perfect seat for them. Some want to be seated alone, some want to be seated next to someone, and a concerning amount haven’t showered and smell. It’s your job to make sure they all have a seat they like. As someone who gets very annoyed when I have to sit somewhere I don’t find optimal (away from others), this is a game I can get behind

On the one hand, I’m getting kind of burnt out on roguelikes, but on the other hand, when they’re as sweet as KIBORG I can get behind them. This plays like a 3D beat ‘em up. A really good 3D beat ‘em up with meaty combat and the ability to dropkick an enemy from half the map away.

Remember what I said about possibly being burnt out on roguelikes? Remember what I said about getting behind them when they’re sweet? Well Kill the Music is sweet. It’s a Vampire Survivors-like except it’s also a rhythm game so when you press the button on beat your attacks get stronger and build up to a special attack called a solo. Each song im a run lets you choose a difficulty which each give a different bonus should you complete them. It’s rad.

Oh, look, another game that could have been a PS2 game. The Knightling is a charming open-world action platformer where you play as a little knight with only a big shield. You know what that means? It means you can slide down basically everything on your slide and it’s as fun as it sounds.

Koira is hard to explain. It’s not quite a puzzle game and not quite a point-and-click game. But it is a game about rescuing a dog and trying to journey back home with it and for that I love it.

This one is easy to explain. It’s an adventure game where you play as a skeleton snake in limbo and you help others move on. The twist is that in limbo everyone is cursed to have no memory of the previous day. That’s right, everyone is in Groundhog Day except you and you’ll use your knowledge to solve the puzzles needed to close their loop. And it’s got a sweet Paper Mario inspired art style and Latin American theme.

It’s Punch-Out except you fight sentient leftover food.

I really like the first Lost in Random. It’s not perfect but it’s got a cool Tim Burton-inspired art style, a nice story, and unique gameplay based on deck building and dice rolls combine with action combat. So I was disappointed when I learned the sequel would be a top-down roguelike. It’s just not what Lost in Random is. But then I played this demo and I’m on board. I’m still disappointed it’s not a proper sequel that builds on the strength of the original but it’s a damn good roguelike that wisely takes from the Hades playbook and has each failed run still progress the narrative.

I love me a good JRPG and this one has tons of potential. The gimmick here is that you can control time to alter the turn order. You can push your turn back to heal yourself, or make it so you and a party member have a turn at the same time to pull off a combo move for extra damage. It’s limited in the demo but if it expands well in the full game, it’ll be a cool variation in a well-worn genre.

A cute little game where you use your mouse to draw spells in order to revive lost souls. Not much more to say really. The concept either grabs you or it doesn’t. It certainly grabbed me.

An anime-inspired arcade racer where you race at almost F-Zero speeds. That may not appeal to you but it definitely appeals to me.

This was the biggest surprise for me of all the demos I played. This is apparently based on a Youtube sketch but I had never heard of it so all I expected was a little pixel art fishing game. What this actually is, is a full-on fishing RPG adventure in a parody MMO world where you play an NPC who suddenly gains the power of a player character to take on quests. Except all you can do is fish and all you can say is “Nice day for fishing”

The developer of this asked me on Bluesky to give this one a try and I didn’t know what to expect. If I’m being honest, I had seen this in the Next Fest line up and had skipped over it. But I’m glad I did end up playing it because it’s a really charming puzzle game where you play as a hungover dwarf who’s piecing together what happened during his drunken stupor the night before. Each puzzle has you recreating a memory from the night before and they’re really fun to figure out how to nail perfectly.

Anything that reminds me of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinnochio is good.

Paper Animal Adventure is a game that I wasn’t completely sold on at first. In fact, after playing through my first dungeon I was sure that it wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s a cutesy roguelike dungeon crawler but I found the combat fairly simple and frankly not that fun. Your animals have a basic attack and a special attack, you need to gain energy to do any attack. To gain energy you simply move around. What this means is I spent most dungeons just circling enemies or moving away from their area of attack and then spamming my attack until they died. In my head, this was kind of dull but then I kept playing and playing and finding other animals in the dungeons to add to my party and swapping between them. I’m still not entirely sure how much I liked it but I know on some level I did.

Another 3D platformer and I’m running out of ways to say I love 3D platformers and games that remind me of the PS2 era. So what I will say about this game is that it’s cute, everything is made out of paper and cardboard and you play as a chicken named Chick who has a chick sidekick named Nugget. It really annoys me this wasn’t called Chick ‘N Nugget but it’s still a nice game.

Top-down Grand Theft Auto, except you’re a cop doing cop things. Proper cop things that cops should be doing, like giving out tickets, and arresting perps properly. Always reading them their rights and never using excessive force. So a fictional cop.

I know you’re probably sick of 3D platformers at this point but too bad. I love them and you should too. They are the purest form of video game joy. This one is especially great with an incredible combination 3D and 2D and the ability to change objects and the environment by copying and pasting textures.

The title and trailer speak for themselves. This is what video games were invented for.

Remember 8 years ago near the beginning of this list I said I’m not the biggest fan of sliding puzzles? You do, okay good. Well, you should also know that I do not like metroidvanias. That may be sacrilegious to say as a gamer but I find most of them extremely tedious. Backtracking is annoying and I rarely find they integrate it well enough to get over that annoyance. Also, most of them are just a copy-paste of the same action-platforming mechanics so they’re annoyingly tedious and all the same. For me to like a metroidvania there needs to be a strong hook and the backtracking needs to be not annoying. Sliding Hero is a metroidvania where you can only move by sliding. It’s a sliding puzzle metroidvania. I should not like this game. And yet I found the combination of those two things incredibly fun.

Another game that I should not have liked considering it’s a metroidvania. But as I said, if a metroidvania has a good hook and finds a way to make the backtracking not soul-crushingly annoying and tedious, I may like it. And this here has a hook just for me because for the most part, this is just a 2D platformer and it’s a good 2D platformer. There’s some basic combat but other than the boss fights it’s mostly to help the platforming. And the backtracking isn’t annoying because it mostly isn’t there to begin with. You’re on a pretty straight forward path through all the rooms in this tiny and dangerous dungeon.

What if Bioshock took place at a creepy amusement park?

It’s far from my favorite genre but I have been known to get sucked into a cozy management/life sim game from time to time. I mean as I‘m writing this I’m in the middle of playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure. It’s nice to sometimes wind down from high-octane action games with chill, relaxing cozy game. Which coincidentally is the plot of this game. You play as a professional fighter in a fantasy world who is burdened with so much burnout that she can’t even lift her sword. So what does she do? She helps run a whimsical tea shop.

Wildkeepers Rising is the best Vampire Survivors-like that I’ve played. It has a story. It has actual objectives to complete. And most importantly it lets you cultivate a team of creatures that fight by your side. These creatures all have their own distinct attacks and stats. When you level up you can choose to give yourself a boost or one of them. They each even have a special ability that you can activate on a cooldown to help take down the hordes of enemies. It’s Pokémon meets Vampire Survivors and it’s as great as that sounds.