Banishers imagines a world where the restless dead are a common occurrence, be they wisps, giant monsters or chatty ghosts bearing unfinished business. Much as you’d call a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, here you send for a Banisher to remove a troublesome spirit, either by hacking it to bits or peacefully ascending it to another plane of existence. They’re basically Witchers, but without the genetic experiments that leave them emotionally bereft.

If anything, Banishers is a game that goes the other way, practically wallowing in the full emotional palette as you aid a landscape that has been torn apart by trauma. There’s the trauma of the resident ghosts – many of which are literal manifestations of anger or sorrow – but also the trauma of the two main characters, Antea Duarte and Red mac Raith, who have recently been separated (in a manner of speaking) by Antea’s death.

I was doing pretty well in the Next Fest demo for Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown. I’d achieved a happy equilibrium, with all my villagers gathering and producing the necessary supplies for my hand-built hamlet’s steady growth. Lumberers were lumbering, quarriers were hauling rocks, and my orchard farmers were churning out apples: the basic fuel of every thriving feudal society, as any medievalist will tell you. The idyllic atmosphere was so peaceful I could almost forget about the accursed fog plaguing the land. Until that accursed fog manifested a rampaging snake kaiju, at least.

Thrive, which you can check out in its Next Fest demo until February 12, has you play as one of the few people who’ve entered the deadly Waelgrim mist and survived, which was apparently all the excuse your king needed to pass the crown off to you and make the whole apocalypse situation your problem to manage. Now you’re leading that fallen realm’s refugees in the hopes of building a new home and future for your people. Evil fog’s still around, though. Unfortunate.

Due to arrive in early access on Steam sometime this year, Thrive is shooting for a blend of city-builder, 4X strategy and RTS combat. In practice, based on a run through the demo’s tutorial, you can imagine it like a bunch of parallel games of Banished scattered across a big map, with AI or player-controlled kingdoms developing alongside yours.

I like my share of laying roads and managing resources and Thrive serves up plenty of both, particularly on the resource front. Advancing through building tiers in the demo involves so many different resources that they don’t all fit on the UI—at one point the tutorial informed me how to swap out the resource displays so I could track the ones I really cared about. 

In my case, that was apples. After running low on the basic foodstuff early on, I did some restructuring of my hamlet, making sure all the storage yards, food markets, and farmer houses were laid out to facilitate peak orchard efficiency.

Optimization definitely seems like the make-or-break in Thrive, assuming you’re not counting all the buildings that get broken when something that looks like it crawled out of Monster Hunter appears to ruin your day. As you play, a bar fills up to indicate the presence of the Waelgrim fog. When it fills, bad things happen. That might mean you lose some of your food stores. Or it might mean a massive reptile bulldozes some of your prime real estate. That’s life, I guess.

You’ve got another day to try the demo of Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown during Steam’s Next Fest. With any luck, figure out defensive structures before the devil-snake appears.

An upcoming blend of genres wants to put you in the boots of an astronaut commander running a mission to the moon in the near future. Moonshot wants you to manage the program that gets you there, then build the colony infrastructure that will enable your team to be the ones dominant on the moon.

Moonshot’s intent is that the game will be pretty realistic, unlike most other sci-fi survival games. Challenges of space like oxygen management, and the limitations of current technology, will be key to its plans. It’ll also be cooperative, letting players “join forces to build the ultimate Moon colony and even prepare for a Mars expedition.”

Two or three times a year Steam hosts a Next Fest, where every developer and their mom posts a demo of an upcoming or in-development game. They’re awesome, generally speaking, ranging from fantastically broken and hysterically bad to outrageously good and perfectly polished. 

During Next Fest you can almost always find some indie gem or discover that a mid-tier game is going to be way better than you’d ever expected. They’re also a great snapshot into the development process—one that you used to only get by attending big expensive game shows like PAX or Gamescom or Tokyo Game Show.