I played over 70 Steam Next Fest demos and wrote one-sentence reviews of all of them
You ever play so many game demos that your brain turns into a kind of game-infused gelatin capable only of learning new controls and input schemes? Well, I have, and I did it for you.
Below, you’ll find single-sentence assessments of nearly every one of the 83 demos I played during Steam Next Fest this month. I didn’t include my top five, because I wrote about them in a separate article, and I skipped a few that I didn’t think warranted even a brief comment, but I still wound up with 72 takes. My favorites of the list are bolded.
Monster Train 2 – It’s a more complicated Monster Train for people who liked Monster Train, I’m not sure what else you could want from it.
Sandustry – Noita meets Factorio in an oddly intriguing pixel-physics factory game.
Nomad Idle – Action RPG is an odd genre for the idle game treadmill.
Deliver At All Costs – This is like if the first few GTA games were about delivering packages and making ridiculous gadgets for your delivery truck. Kind of a great idea.
Machine Mind – Automate resource gathering and base defense in a Borderlands-style wasteland.
Mech Havoc – A tasty top-down blend of Brigador and MechWarrior weapons tweaking against always outnumbered, never outgunned missions.
Solarpunk – Bland survival with an eco-friendly gloss that’s barely skin deep.
Tempest Rising – An attempt to revive the spirit of Command & Conquer with all the good and bad that implies.
Mecha Break – You ever boot up a game so infected with free-to-play nonsense design that you just immediately uninstall?
Void War – Knockoff FTL plus knockoff Warhammer 40k isn’t doing it for me, but that combo might be exactly what someone’s been waiting for.
Wizdom Academy – Nobody has made an exceptional wizard school management sim yet, and I’m afraid that’s still the case.
Settler’s Domain – I almost quit this one because it started slow, but it’s actually a minimalist colony-builder where you’re supposed to go at top speed.
Behind the Sword – A minimalist, indie take on a grand strategy 4X game with a cool spherical grid.
RoadCraft – Surprisingly chill take on the genre from the SnowRunner devs, focused more on big truck logistics and less on vehicle simulation.
Grit and Valor – 1949 – Promising dieselpunk mech micro-RTS. Control a handful of units on tiny battlefields.
Drop Duchy – A promising tile-plopping city builder demo with a bit of a randomization problem.
He is Coming – A lo-fi roguelike RPG with a lot of promise and a strong style.
Desperate Place – This is just Thronefall, but sci-fi, and that doesn’t bother me.
Roman Triumph: Survival City Builder – A neat take on the survival city-builder blighted with some godawful AI art.
Icaria – A worker-programming factory building game that I’m not sure stands out from the pack.
Rise of Industry 2 – The ’80s landscape is cool but the mechanics and gameplay here are wafer thin.
Windward Horizon – Windward was cute, but I’m not sure it needs crafting and RPG mechanics this complex.
Guntouchables – Co-op action roguelikes are a pretty good idea. There should be more of them.
Game of Thrones: Kingsroad – Didn’t even make it to 15 minutes.
Darkwater – I’m sure this premise is great but the tiny fisheye field of view gives me motion sickness.
War Rats: The Rat em Up – This is completely unhinged but I think I like it, wishlisted.
Chip ‘n Clawz vs. The Brainioids – The rare action-strategy game, even rarer for its all-ages simplicity and friendliness for co-op play. From X-Com creator Julian Gollop!
Outworld Station – Quite pretty for an automation game, but inventory management gets tedious.
As We Descend – Stylish and fun, but balance issues have plagued every demo of this tactics roguelike.
Railgods of Hysterra – Co-op survival on a train through lovecraftrian hell is certainly a weird pitch, but it has my attention.
City Tales: Medieval Era – A charmingly simple medieval city-builder with a solid base for mechanics.
Task Force Admiral – A really promising glimpse at a very realistic wargame about a very cool era of being in charge of ships.
Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall – More Yes, Your Grace? Don’t mind if I do.
Dark Moon – A tiny slice of an interesting Frostpunk-esque premise about a walking city on the moon.
Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone – Another round of The Farm 51’s take on a bizarre, psychic horror Eastern European apocalypse.
The Horror at Highrook – Card-driven exploration of a haunted mansion inspired by early 20th century horror—I’ll keep my eye on it.
Radiolight – Solo developer takes on 1980s mystery thriller Firewatch and doesn’t do too bad a job, so far.
Is This Seat Taken? – An adorable, appealing logic puzzler about fitting very needy people into very particular seats.
God Forsaken – A bland action roguelike.
Total Chaos – I’m not yet sold on this Doom mod turned standalone horror game, but it is pretty.
Nordhold – I’m a simple man: You give me hex-based grids and I’ll play your weird little tower defense demo. It was good, too.
Missing Banban – Weird little 2D platformer. Did not find Banban.
Wheel World – A bike racing adventure-sports game where you are chosen by the bike gods. That is not a joke. It’s also kind of good?
I Am Legion: Stand Survivors – One of the only promising bullet-hellish action roguelikes from the entire Next Fest—and even then just enough to keep watching.
Labyrinth of the Demon King – Delightfully atmospheric and somewhat upsetting first-person dungeon crawling survival horror game.
Unyielder – Boss rush movement FPS with looter shooting is probably exactly what some people want but it turns out I do not like that.
Reignbreaker – It’s a Hades-like action roguelike that has a pretty unique “medievalpunk” style and actually understands the “punk” part of that.
Urban Jungle – An adorably chill little game about fitting as many houseplants as possible into your tiny apartment.
Dagger Directive – I never figured someone would be doing a deliberately lo-fi Operation Flashpoint successor in 2025 but you know what, more power to them.
Star Crafter – This wants to be the blank in the Factorio : Dyson Sphere Program :: Satisfactory : ???? analogy.
Blightstone – I’m not 100% sold on the tactics part of this hardcore resource-management roguelike.
Redemption of Liuyin – I’m just not sure you can pull off soulslike and high-fidelity graphics at this scale and budget, but I wish them luck.
Cybertaxi: Lunatic Nights – A bit too jank for my endorsement, but taxi driving in the kind of city where you need a flamethrower on your car is too fun a premise not to watch.
MechaKnights Legends – Really early proof-of-concept demo here, but fantasy mecha Monster Hunter is a good idea.
Jitter – A funky little spaceship management game that needs some control refinement.
Rock Crusher – It’s early in development, but these are the solid bones of an incremental time-waster.
Chaos Front – China’s foremost—to me, at least—indie strategy developer turns their hand to mech mercenary management.
Savara – A nicely pastel action-roguelike that’s more fun than it appears in trailers.
Pochemeow – A strange little strategy game about running trade wars.
Death Ring: Second Impact – An intriguing little mecha tactics game about taking down waves of giant monsters.
Mystical Tactics – Lo-fi tactical RPG that moves at a nice quick pace.
Uber Urban – An indie city builder with a few novel mechanics.
Sweep – A dungeon deckbuilder where you pick whatever cards you want from your hand, which reveals why we draw random hands to be honest.
Anoxia Station – Wouldn’t have thought that a combination of colony sim and horror would work at all, but it does.
Starless Abyss – A thematically rad, rather hard deckbuilder about sci-fi scientists and occultists teaming up to battle eldritch horrors.
Scarecrow – Somehow furry Hotline Miami is more upsetting than regular Hotline Miami.
Wanderstop – A very wholesome little life sim from the dev of Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide—worth watching.
Conquest Dark – An action RPG that only runs on turbo fast mode, which is what’s good and bad about it.
Fumes – A lo-fi vehicular combat game that was very, very close to being in my top 5.
Dice Legends – A cards and dice battler with not much to recommend it over others—still, genre lovers might want to take a look.
Neongarten – A delightfully minimalist cyberpunk puzzle city builder that jumped right onto my wishlist.
Where Noble Plans Lie – It needs work, but the idea of a city builder where you’re actually trying to ruin the kingdom is cool.
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