Steam’s Next Fest is a week-long showcase of game demos and upcoming devs. It’s primarily indie-focused, and it’s a great way to find your next favorite game.
There are also hundreds of demos to choose from, and that makes sorting the standouts from the, let’s say, not-ready-for-primetime options, daunting. Below, we’ve listed our 11 favorites (so far) out of the demos we’ve played.
Next Fest runs through June 16, 2025 at 1 p.m. Eastern, so make sure to grab those playable demos over the weekend! Many Next Fest demos will disappear on the 16th, but you’ll still be able to play them (as long they aren’t betas like WildGate) if you download them before they go away.
Absolum
Release date: Coming soon
Dev: Guard Crush, Supamonks, Dotemu
Absolum looks like a traditional side-scrolling beat-em-up at first glance, but really it’s more like if you combined Castle Crashers with Hades. It’s a run-based game where you have a few different characters to choose from. Once you’ve selected your hero and that hero’s special power — of which you can unlock more — you’ll head out into the world and encounter throwable items, bosses, and power-ups. The dwarf I was playing not only gained an ability that caused him to emit water that pushed enemies away after a dash, but also caused any all punches to light foes on fire.
Of the games on this list, Absolum feels the most polished and ready for primetime. It’s something I would expect to do very well once it finally arrives.
All Will Fall
Release date: 2025
Dev: All Parts Connected
Ryan and I both have a soft spot for city- and base-builders, so All Will Fall was an obvious choice for us. It’s a survival city-builder set on an Earth destroyed by sea level rise. Your ragtag bunch of survivors are tasked with scavenging enough supplies to build a city.
All Will Fall’s hook, though, is that it’s physics-based. Real thought has to go into where you place each building block on the limited real estate. Bridges need to be supported or they’ll collapse. A nasty storm can destroy entire rooms that aren’t secured well enough. And you’ll have to manage the happiness of your survivors at the same time with things like luxuries like food and roofs.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream
Release date: July 15, 2025
Dev: River End Games
I didn’t get to spend as much time with Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream as I’d like yet. Even from the few minutes I played the demo, Eriksholm feels like something special. The cutscenes look far better than you might expect from a 20-person team (hell, they look better than a lot of AAA games out there) and paint a rich picture of the game’s world.
Eriksholm is an isometric stealth game. You play as a young woman named Hanna as she evades the police (ACAB) while looking for her missing brother. It’s all the best parts of stealthing in an old Metal Gear game through a quasi-Victorian lens. And the richly detailed environments make all the sneaking around feel all the better.
Hell Is Us
Image: Rogue Factor/Nacon
Release date: September 4, 2025
Dev: Rogue Factor
Hell is Us has shown up at a few “big trailer events” so you’ve probably seen it before. It’s the game with the Dark Souls Man in a poncho, fighting Nobodies from Kingdom Hearts. But that’s pretty reductive, especially once you actually play the demo.
While Hell Is Us looks like a Souls game set in the world of Death Stranding, it’s not really either. It’s more like if you added the deliberate combat you’d find in a From game, but put it into more of a Resident Evil setting. During the demo, I investigated things, deciphered languages, solved puzzles, and beat the piss out of some evil creatures. It’s an interesting mix, but a little odd for a Next Fest, considering this is closer to a multiple A game than the indies on this list. That said, it’s still a ton of fun and quite an interesting tease for September.
Mina the Hollower
Release date: October 31, 2025
Dev: Yacht Club Games
Mina the Hollower is the latest game from Yacht Club and the team that made Shovel Knight. But where Shovel Knight was fantasy Mega Man, Mina the Hollower is more Link to the Past with a mouse. But just like Shovel Knight, it spices up the older style of game with new mechanics, like a healing flask, checkpoints, and leveling up.
The art style is truly delightful, and the gameplay has just enough of that retro feel to ride the line between authentic and frustrating. Shovel Knight fans have been waiting a long time for this one, and it’s looking very promising based on the demo.
Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault
Release date: 2025
Dev: Digital Sun
The sequel to 2018’s Moonlighter, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault continues the story of Will, a shopkeeper who wants to be an adventurer. After the end of the first game, Will and his friends are dropped on a strange world with strange denizens and they have to put their lives back together. And Will does that by, well, continuing to be a shopkeeper by day and a dungeon-delving adventurer by night.
Moonlighter 2 is a roguelike, hack-n-slash dungeon diver mixed with some shop sim mechanics between runs. If you played the first one, more Moonlighter is nothing but a good thing. If you missed Moonlighter, Moonlighter 2 is extremely welcoming (and explains everything).
Both Moonlighter games are just nice, straightforward fun and I’m happy that there’s more to play.
Occlude
Release date: July 10, 2025
Dev: Tributary Games
It’s tempting to compare Occlude to the other classic-card-game-with-a-twist, Balatro, but that’s not really what’s going on here. Yes, you’re playing solitaire, but there’s also a larger meta-narrative happening about performing a tarot-themed ritual of redemption through the act of playing the game.
The gameplay is more or less spider solitaire, but with the added rule of being able to build your foundation pile either up from the ace or down from the king at the same time. The hook, however, lies in that larger ritual. Each of the rituals have four hidden rules you need to understand to complete it. You’ll only get the barest hints about them by playing solitaire and it will take you multiple games to fully grasp them. The only clue you get is a coin moving when you do something right.
Occlude is a really satisfying twist on solitaire, and the mystery of the ritual will keep me coming back for (a lot) more.
Star Birds
Release date: 2025
Dev: Toukana Interactive, Kurzgesagt
Star Birds feels like it was built for my factory-game-loving brain. You represent a weird race of space bird people trying to colonize various systems. And to do that, you need to collect resources and send them back to your space station. I’d click onto an asteroid (which are fully 3D and spinnable), set down a rocket distribution center, and then place resource miners on little nodes that would appear. I’d then drag pipes from the nodes to the rockets, which, when full, would fly back to my home base.
It’s a game all about resource management, and the tasks got more complex as I played. I started to place down special buildings to refine resources. Or route resources from one planet to another so I could combine them into a super resource. There’s a lot going on, but it’s never overwhelming or stressful. Instead, it’s cute, intuitive, and pretty chill. It’ll make for a great “winding down at the end of the day” game once it releases.
And, even better, it’s made in conjunction with Kurzgesagt who you might know from their incredible YouTube channel.
Super Loco World
Release date: July 2025
Dev: Andriy Bychkovskyi
Super Loco World is a train game where you raise islands from the ocean and then build a network of locomotives to supply the island with resources. It’s much more complex than something like Star Birds, but it’s also remarkably low stakes and relaxing — partially due to its vibrant, smooth art style.
After setting up a train depot (which caused a town to grow around it — there is no city building here), I built another depot on the other side of the island near some flour. I then built a train circuit around the island, running the tracks though both depots. I placed silos on the train, and told it to go — and it did. Following the track, it grabbed flour from the other depot and then continued along until it reached the town.
Things got more complex when the town got bigger and started to demand wood in addition to the flour, which involved building a new train on the same track. Now I needed to build in traffic lights to ensure that my trains wouldn’t smash into each other mid-delivery. It’s the kind of thing that seems like it’s able to become as complex as you want it to.
Undusted: Letters from the Past
Release date: TBD
Dev: 5minlab Corp.
Undusted is a story-based game, which normally I try to avoid demos of, as I’d rather just experience the story on my own once it’s all in front of me. But similar to something like Venba, Undusted’s scenes are broken up with puzzly gameplay segments. In Undusted’s case, that involves using a toothbrush, sponge, or cloth to clean an old item.
On the pocket watch, for example, I used a sponge to cover a lot of surface area and get some of the preliminary grime off of it. Then I swapped to the toothbrush to get in some of the cracks. Finally, I popped it open, cleaned everything I could with my other tools, and then broke out the cloth to wipe down the glass. It’s a really neat little thing, and the demo ended well before I had my fill — always a good sign.
Wildgate beta
Release Date: July 22, 2025
Dev: Moonshot Games
WildGate is a four-player battle royale game in space. But instead of getting new weapons and defenses for yourself, you’re collecting them for your ship. The goal is to find an Artifact on the map and escape through the eponymous WildGate with it. The caveat is there are four other ships in the system looking to do the same thing.
The result is a truly hectic race for power, where every team is stopping at space stations, or caverns filled with creatures, and trying to find better turrets, modules, and shields for their ship. Ships are slow and difficult to maneuver, which can make committing to battles very dangerous and exciting.
It’s a blast with a team full of players, and everyone always has something to do — piloting a ship, scouting with a drone, collecting resources as you drive by. I can see having a dedicated WildGate night with my friends for a few weeks this summer.
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