Steam Next Fest, the week-long demo festival held multiple times per year, is a great way to find your next favorite PC games, at least if you’re willing to sift through page after page of obnoxious AI-generated slop. With growing numbers of participants competing for attention with the mountain of great games already out in the wild, it’s harder than ever to find the diamonds in the rough.
To make your search a little easier, I did some sifting of my own to come up with the best demos you may have missed from this October’s Next Fest. Here are some of my under-the-radar favorites you don’t want to miss.
Gunny Ascend
You’ve probably never wondered what Tetris would be like as a roguelike platformer, but Gunny Ascend is here to say maybe you should have. In Gunny Ascend, you’re a character stuck on the familiar screen of a falling block puzzle, arranging pieces by hand to earn a high score and escape the dangerous miasma rising from below. Single blocks fall one at a time from the top, only showing the outline of their full shape once you grab them. You can them rotate them before placing them by hand, forming full lines to increase your score and chucking falling bombs away to prevent them from destroying your hard work.
Between rounds, you earn bonuses and new abilities to help in increasingly difficult levels, culimating in unique boss fights. Gunny Ascend hits the sweet spot between puzzles and action, forcing you to think and act quickly or risk being overwhelmed.
Birdcage
Bullet hell shooters can be a tough sell if you’re not already a fan, with their bewildering, screen-filling hail of projectiles making them look nearly impenetrable. That certainly applies to Birdcage, but it’s absolutely worth checking out even if you haven’t honed your skills on arcade shoot ‘em ups. Birdcage starts you off with an impressive arsenal of weaponry — including a spread shot, a focused barrage that slows your ship, and a destructive beam sword — and immediately demands you use them to perfection. The reward for your effort is a demo that’s all but guaranteed to make you feel impossibly cool for pulling it all off.
On top of that, Birdcage is worth checking out for its immaculate aesthetics, and a story that draws on sci-fi from Metal Gear Solid to Armored Core VI.
Turnip Mountain
Like Blippo+ earlier in October, Turnip Mountain originally debuted on PlayDate before making its way to PC. Playing, for some reason, as a turnip with arms, your goal is to climb a mountain one handhold at a time with a bizarre but fascinating control scheme. Pushing up on a joystick with make the corresponding arm reach out, and pulling down while holding a trigger button will let you pull yourself up. That makes Turnip Mountain feel like a looser, wackier version of Jusant, where sometimes the solution to a climbing puzzle is just flinging yourself toward another wall as hard as you can and hoping for the best.
Dungeon Bodega Simulator
Shopkeeping sims are so in right now, but most are missing a certain sense of adventure, not to mention adorable slimes. Dungeon Bodega Simulator takes care of that, putting you in the shoes of an adventurer recently laid off by Mega Questing Co. (with a generous severance package of three days’ pay), now running a shop at the mouth of a dungeon to get by. In the demo version, you can grow crops and feed potion-producing slimes to keep your store stocked, while the full version promises more potion crafting and quests.
The simulations of gardening and shopkeeping are compelling in Dungeon Bodega Simulator, but it’s the game’s lo-fi art style, sense of humor, and pervading weirdness (like a low-poly cat with an unnecessarily detailed face locked in a prison cell) that make it stand out.
The Legend of Khiimori
Horses are a staple of open-world action games, but for all they do for us, our four-legged friends are usually nothing more than vehicles to ferry players to the next fight. Not so in The Legend of Khiimori. Set in 13th-century Mongolia, The Legend of Khiimori follows a young courier criss-crossing the landscape on horseback to make deliveries. While it’s not an entirely pacifist game, as you’ll need to hunt and defend yourself from wild animals, combat takes a backseat to riding and caring for your horse. You’ll need to make sure your horse is fed, watered, and brushed regularly while making sure they don’t succumb to injuries or the elements. Even in its time-limited demo, The Legend of Khiimori clearly seems like a game for players who want to think more about the environments and animals companions in their games — and of course, the aspiring horse girls among us.
Dobbel Dungeon
This autumn already saw the re-release of one of the best turn-based tactics RPGs of all time, and Next Fest is full of demos for similar games. Among all of them, Dobbel Dungeon is a welcoming introduction to the genre, with a lovely clay-like art style and simple but deep character progression. Each of your three party members has an entirely different skillset, from the destructive power of the pyromancer to the healing abilities druid. At the start of your turn, you roll a handful of dice to power your attacks, adding a degree to unpredictability to fights while still letting each character’s unique abilities shine. There’s also a surprising amount of flexibility in how you upgrade your characters as they level up, while missions have varied objectives (like defending NPCs) to keep each battle feeling fresh.
