If you’re anything like me, there’s nothing you love more than diving into Steam Next Fest and emerging from its murky pool drenched in demos. Whether it’s a narrative RPG, a quirky roguelike, or a chilled out puzzle game, I want to experience them all.
I’ve found brilliant gems in previous Next Fests. Last year I loved Harold Halibut and Arco in February; I Am Your Beast and Conscript in June; and Kill the Shadow and DieselDome in November. One of those games even made my Game of the Year list, while another was an honourable mention. Aside from the highlights, there were countless more demos that I tried, enjoyed, and remembered over the course of the year. Put simply, Next Fest never fails to remind me why I love playing video games.
However, it can also be overwhelming. There are so many Next Fests these days, and so many demos available during each one, that it’s easy to get struck by analysis paralysis when scrolling through Steam. Luckily, I’m here to help out. Here are my favourite ten demos from Steam Next Fest 2025, in no particular order.
He Is Coming
This retro style roguelite RPG is instantly engaging. You’re dropped on a 2D map, which you’re forced to explore. Find items, battle monsters, survive long enough to face the boss. He Is Coming has a simple loop, but effective, and I really enjoyed tinkering with builds even in the short demo. Do you buff your armour, your health or your speed? Can you sacrifice armour if your weapon replenishes your health? What happens if the Bloodmoon Werewolf attacks of a night?
Super stylish and instantly ticking those roguelike boxes, He Is Coming is bound to be an instant hit. If you play one game this Next Fest, make it this one.
Promise Mascot Agency
Okay, maybe play this one too. Like some kind of Yakuza x Pokemon crossover, the only way I could imagine this game being conceived is in some kind of fever dream. Hire mascots, break curses, and pick litter in this bizarre adventure that must be played to be believed.
It’s all too easy to spend hours upgrading your love hotel and playing the card-based game where your local ‘heroes’ help out a mascot who is stuck in a door or surrounded by bees.
Blue Prince
If House of Leaves was a video game, this would be it. Blue Prince is an intriguing puzzle game about a house with no fixed floorplan, an unsettling atmosphere, and an inheritance with a catch. The puzzles are clever, often abstruse, and this short demo alone has countless ‘a-ha!’ moments as you work out exactly what this mysterious abode is offering you.
Shotgun Cop Man
You are Shotgun Cop Man. Go to hell. Arrest Satan. The premise is simple, and completely off the wall. The mechanics are simple, too. Shoot your pistol with your left mouse button, your shotgun with your right. But the way that this 2D platformer utilises those two weapons as both movement tools and killing machines is nothing short of ingenious. Go to hell. Play this demo. Arrest Satan.
Skin Deep
Prey meets Alien: Isolation in this immersive sim where you’re an insurance worker on board a spaceship crewed by Minecraft-headed cats. Behind the humourous veneer, Skin Deep has surprisingly deep stealth mechanics and numerous ways to diffuse any situation, be it flushing a pirate’s head down the loo or stunning them into a fit of sneezing by dousing them in black pepper.
Honourable Mentions: Katanaut, Is This Seat Taken?, Beholder: Conductor, Empyreal, War Rats, Break Arts 3, Once Upon A Puppet, Best Served Cold, Runeborn, Into The Void
Moonbase Lambda
Another Alien: Isolation-like? I’ll take it. This time Moonbase Lambda uses that stunning Obra Dinn-esque dither-punk art style to set the scene as an astronaut trying to survive on the eponymous moonbase. It has wonderfully tactical controls for every action, and that grainy aesthetic lends itself to the dim, dark horror that chases you through the maze of corridors.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown
You never know what to expect next from Xalavier Nelson Jr. and Strange Scaffold. After making a strand game, an organ trading simulator, the most uncomfortable game I’ve ever played, and a first-person shooter satirising the military industrial complex, the small studio is now working on a TMNT game in the vein of XCOM. The systems in Tactical Takedown are as great as you’d expect, with each attack giving you a different approach to any combat, but I want to shout out the animations and between-turn freeze frames, which are implemented to make this look as slick as it feels.
Deliver At All Costs
What if Disco Elysium was set in 1950s Americana? I won’t start every one of these mini-previews with a comparison, but this one was begging to be said. Drawing plenty of inspiration from movies as well as fellow RPGs, your new role as a courier in the deprived town of St. Monique will take more unexpected turns than a diversion on the M6.
FEAR FA 98
What happens when you make a survival horror football simulator? Fear FA 98 is what. It plays like a proper old school FIFA game, except the ball regularly catches alight and there’s an enormous monster who prowls the halfway line like a ten foot tall Wataru Endo. The best part of this demo is the custom song that plays on an infuriatingly short loop throughout your matches – the true ‘90s football game experience.
I still think that my suggestion submitted via crowdsourcing to call this game Dead Ball Specialists was better than the title the developer ended up going with.
Mecha Break
The sleek mech game that has taken Next Fest by storm, Mecha Break looks great and plays fine. An exercise in style over substance, don’t go into this expecting the granularity of Armored Core and you’ll have a good enough time. I found the boss fight particularly anticlimatic due to a lack of mechanical complexity and the fact I was forced to punch the mech’s crotch repeatedly to win, but there’s a decent game buried somewhere beneath all this hair dye and armour polish.
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