Our favourite demos from Steam Next Fest Winter 2025

Another Steam Next Fest is drafting to a close, having had to vie with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing nary of its knack for highlighting absorbing and offbeat games acceptable for aboriginal release. A speedy dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a fewer months disconnected the next Next Fest, though astatine the clip of posting, determination are inactive a mates of precious hours to download and effort retired the champion samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played thing you deliberation deserves immoderate much attention, wherefore not stock it successful the comments?

DoubleWe

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/NightByte Games

James: I don’t person the intelligence cognition to genuinely grasp wherefore paranoia, a feeling truthful rooted successful mistrustfulness, stress, and fear, makes for specified entertaining games. Yet it does, arsenic the proliferation of high-tension conflict royales and extraction shooters – and, I guess, the connection "sus" – has demonstrated. Maybe it helps erstwhile that paranoia is wholly justified, arsenic is the lawsuit successful DoubleWe: a lo-fi, first-person roguelite wherever your murderous clone could barge done crowds of twitching NPCs and marque you a unfortunate of pseudo-fraticide astatine immoderate moment. Fighting backmost is the goal, but DoubleWe perpetually blurs the enactment betwixt huntsman and hunted, with slow-opening limb cases and lookalike civilians keeping the hostility astatine a piano-wire tautness. Even checking your mirror, to punctual yourself of your randomised quality (and frankincense that of the clone), feels similar a lapse successful attraction that could easy effect successful a astonishment knifing.

Play the demo connected Steam.

Deliver At All Costs

Image credit: Konami

Brendan: I similar the mode driving feels successful this comic 1950s top-down transportation game. It's got each the close vrooms and zooms. The story, astir an underachieving courier who takes connected wacky jobs to wage overdue rent, takes perfectly thing seriously. And that temper continues erstwhile you donk a pedestrian disconnected the bumper and clang your rusty motortruck done the nearest effect stall. Almost everything is destructible, and erstwhile your lone instrumentality is simply a large car, everything starts to look similar a too-smug postulation cone.

Play the demo connected Steam.

Wanderstop

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Annapurna Interactive

Brendan: The "cosy" farming sim offers a batch of alleviation to the banjaxed brain. Simple chores successful an often conflict-free satellite wherever the writer is greenish and the clouds endanger lone predictable rainfall that doesn't dampen your spirits truthful overmuch arsenic h2o the crops. Wanderstop is taking purpose astatine this genre and making it slant. Your hero, Alta, is not the classical "likeable" protagonist oregon plain-faced subordinate cipher, but a grouchy arena combatant who doesn't cognize what's bully for her. In this case: chilling the flip retired and making a cupful of tea. The demo gives america a chunk of the game's opening (if not galore examples of the tasks you'll beryllium doing) and I walked distant desirous of galore much cuppas than it teased.

Play the demo connected Steam.

The Horror At Highrook

Image credit: Nullpointer Games / Outersloth

Edwin: Shortly earlier the latest Next Fest, I expressed a tendency to excavation up immoderate “weirder”, “more surprising” crippled demos that scope beyond the established genres and “get maine retired of my comfortableness zone”. Then I got waylaid by property events and different things and exhausted my capableness to process novelty, truthful present I americium bigging up The Horror At Highrook, a haunted location boardgame that ably channels my passionateness for cosmic horror, Hell Boy-style occultism, and play environments that lucifer desiccated parchment maps. I’m looking guardant to scraping the particulate from that blueprint, and unearthing immoderate diffuse malevolence lurks wrong those card-crafting systems.

Play the demo connected Steam.

Artis Impact

Image credit: Mas

Edwin: My enthusiasm for Artis Impact is checked by my distaste for the demo’s wacky script, successful which your protagonist is sleazily deed connected by assorted otaku-ass NPCs, but it’s imaginable immoderate of that is owed to the WIP English localisation. Beyond that, this is simply a dishy accumulation indeed. It’s a pixelart RPG with turn-based combat and presumption that is some grandiose and deft. Look guardant to: picture-in-picture manga panels for actions similar pushing buttons; a florid creation benignant that ranges from elegant minimalist scribbles done emojis to unrecorded photography, without ever rather losing itself; delicately observed animations for cloth, hairsbreadth and sword strikes. Exploration happens successful top-down snowglobe environments, portion battles are acceptable wrong a pop-up publication machine OS. Really anticipation the publication finds its feet.

Play the demo connected Steam.

Is This Seat Taken?

Image credit: Wholesome Games Presents

Nic: Despite concluding with readers that, yes, this puzzler is a play connected the logic questions you get connected tests, I’m inactive fizzling to get my hands connected the afloat thing. Jumping betwixt monolithic RPG reviews precocious has fixed maine a toucan’s appetite for snack pecking, and this peculiar food fits successful my bill. Stuffing fussy punters successful seats is mellow - but inactive crunchy capable that the crippled doesn’t shed its ain skeleton and illness into a formless puddle of cosy. Also I respect anyone that struts into the cinema with a gangly cowboy chapeau and, erstwhile questioned, states “I americium wearing my large hat”.

Play the demo connected Steam.

Sandustry

Image credit: Lantto Games

Ollie: Usually successful mill games, whenever you person to bash manual enactment with your ain 2 quality hands, it's tedious. Deliberately so. This is the driving unit down the tendency to automate. In Sandustry, a crippled wherever you're gathering a large dirt-sifting mill to plop buried golden into a large bin of dollar signs, everything's powered by 1 of those beauteous physics-based falling soil engines. And truthful whenever I had crushed to hoover up a cube of soil with my ain 2 quality hands, it was hella satisfying. I've hardly had clip to bash much than the basal setup of dumping soil into water, past hoovering the bedewed soil up onto a conveyor loop that sifts the golden into 1 heap and the useless slag into another, but that's capable to spot that determination could beryllium thing successful this. The demo's a amusive small impervious of concept; I'm hoping the devs spell large connected extent now.

Play the demo connected Steam.

DeadWire

Image credit: Shotgun Anaconda

Graham: There are plentifulness of cyberpunk games which let you to usage hacking successful combat, but fewer with specified immediate, explosive consequences arsenic DeadWire. This is simply a topdown shooter successful the Hotline Miami mold, but you tin power astatine immoderate infinitesimal into a Gunpoint-style presumption that lets you nexus astir immoderate constituent of the situation together. Enemies, TVs, doors, explosive barrels: each tin beryllium wired up truthful that erstwhile you sprout one, the others each dice and explode, too. You request enactment of show with what you're linking, truthful there's immoderate constituent of puzzle-solving here, and instant restarts if you backmost yourself into a corner, but mostly it's astir the delirious powerfulness of making a tube detonate erstwhile a doorway opens due to the fact that you flicked a switch.

Play the demo connected Steam.