Steam Demo Spree, Oct 2025

22 October 2025

Lo and upon ye, Steam Next Fest came and with it tons of demos, and like last time I've decided to not only play Next Fest demos but also just Demos in general from my Discovery Queue and Wishlist.

I've ordered the demos into four categories here: Highlights, for games I really loved the demos of; Played, for stuff that ranges from good to bad but ultimately didn't particularly do it for me; and Broken, for stuff I couldn't play. I'm also gonna star the best-of-the-best highlights.

Something that happened a lot this year, that I haven't encountered in previous years, is demos which crashed because they were compiled against a specific bleeding-edge version of Vulkan. The solution to this is to do add a run parameter to force them into OpenGL 3 mode. I didn't, however, do this, because to me the point of a demo is to be as low-friction as possible, and it doesn't leave a good impression when my modest graphics card cannot run a 2D pixel art game! There are more games than time, so I would urge developers to please consider factors like this when developing!

Also just a side note but WOW you can really see how Balatro captured everybody's minds. This year is just FULL of "Balatro, but" games!

Highlights

• All Living Things: This is some of the coolest claymation art I've seen in a long time. This looks like a game that would be released exclusively in Japan for the CD-i in the 90s, extremely cool.
• ALL WILL FALL: This one is really cooking. The building and scrapping mechanics are really fun and it has a really good building-block energy. It's a little bit Bridge Constructor and a little bit Tropico. The absolutely by far worst part of it though is the Loyality (Democracy/Despot) system. Comically early-2010s morality-politics system. Every minute engaging with it feels like a weird abstraction layer designed to be cheeky for gamers. Aside from that, really engrossing. Played 5 hours.
• Barda: Ohhh I really like this! It's a travelling challenge game where you're climbing a mountain while arranging things in your pack. It's very cute and has a mellow theme I really enjoy. Would love to see more of this!
• BIRDCAGE: Holy SHIT, fuck yes, I love a shmup like this! This is great. Fuck yes.
• ⭐ Dice A Million: Oh NO it's here, folks we might have the next Balatro! Fuck, this is good.
• Dice Legends: We did it gang we have furry Dicey Dungeons X Slay the Spire video games are OV-ER!!!!!
• Divine Frequency: Have you ever thought Silent Hill should be more like E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy and made in ZDoom? No? Well I have GREAT news, we're back baby, horror shooters are real again.
• Dogpile: Suika game roguelike with funny dogs. Whats more to say? This is basically perfect. 🙂
• ⭐ Effulgence RPG: Oh WOW this is SO COOL looking, please everyone check this out in motion even if it's not your kind of RPG, it just looks so unique. This is demoscene.
• Elation For The Wonder Box 6000: Finally more people making deranged acidic video games designed for me to lure Zoe into playing more walking sims
• GIMMIKO: This is. Okay hear me out. Somebody figured out exactly what a transporter accident between UNDERTALE and The Binding of Isaac would be like. This is really fun and very frenetic and irreverent and who gives a shit about obeisances. Im in.
• Hermit and Pig: Finally another alt-RPG about pigs! Well, about one pig. One hermit and one pig. But the pig has dialogue made entirely out of oinks, which is really all you can ask for from a game.
• Identifile: Desktop Dungeon: Bullet-hell cursor game mixed with a dungeon crawler on a virtual windows installation. Hell yeah, this is really fun and i love the concept
• Mesmalie: Very cute visual novel with an eccentric idiosyncratic witch girl.
• Moonsigil Atlas: Finally somebody has a REALLY fresh take on how to do a Slay the Spire clone, this time it's all about placing shapes on a grid every turn! I love inventory games! Very fun I want to play 200 more hours of this
• ⭐ No Players Online: OHHH HOLY SHIT. I PLAYED THE ORIGINAL PROTOTYPE YEARS AGO AND ALWAYS THOUGHT THEY COULD DO SO MUCH MORE WITH IT. AND THEY HAVE. HOLY SHIT. This is CREEPY and it's really a slow burn iteration on the original in a GREAT way. I quit the demo early just cause I was sold so completely on the first 15 minutes I played. PLEASE check this out.
• Primal Echo: Dude I love megastructures!!!
• project_Structure_01: Liminal exploration via ego destruction and universal awe like 2001: A Space Odyssey? Oh fuck yeah, baby this is cooking with gas.
• ⭐ Rue Valley : Holy shit here we GO! We've got an actual Disco Elysium contender finally! Let's see where this goes!!
• ⭐ Skate Story: Hey this one is FUCKING SICK, what a cool skate game! This whips.
• Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown: They turned Star Trek: Voyager into a tactics decision making game with ship management and its good???? The demo recreates the first episode of the show. But it's actually quite fun and plays really well. I'm genuinely impressed I did not expect to see new Voyager media in 2025.
• Super Cabbage Kabumi: Oh hey it's a Nubby-like with linear progression and boss stages!! This is actually really fun, the mixels are kind of messy and the style is a little all over but it's actually REALLY fun in practice, I'd love to play way more of this. One small note: Lawnmower OP.
• The House of Hamelin : Ahhh here we go, a fresh take on the horror-deckbuilder, it's a little bit of a classic dungeon crawler and a little bit of Slay the Spire, wrapped up in the aesthetics of a point and click horror game in an endless ghost house. FUCK yeah.
• The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time: I was about to lose interest in this one and then they did an extremely funny bit, then revealed this is actually an unreliable layered narrative, and now I'm hooked and I NEED to see where it goes.
• ⭐ The Séance of Blake Manor: This one REALLY gripped me, I love the investigation and time mechanics and I really wanna see where it goes.
• Tingus Goose: A tingus a tangus a goose and a gangus!!! Hot dog!~ The world's most fucked surrealist shape horror idle phone game has been completely revamped into a more strategic desktop idle game! The changes are really fun and the animation looks top notch! Deffo recommend!
• ZPF: Simultaneously feels like a lost DOS shmup and a MAME arcade cabinet, this thing is oozing style and is an absolute delight of pixel art. Holy shit this is fun! And after a little more research I discovered it's actually a brand new MegaDrive (Sega Genesis) game!

Played

• A Game of D.I.C.E.: Wayyyy overwrought to the point of it being clunky and unfun. Sorry, there are much better dice games at this Nextfest.
• Backrooms: Reminiscence: Wow! That was nothing!
• BALL x PIT: Really compelling mashup of breakout, space invaders, and survivorslike. Fun gothic aesthetic. A littttttle bit too much game per game but I can live with that.
• Beyond the Doors: This one feels a little thin on the ground, it's an interesting idea for a horror game mixed with a bit of an infrastructure sim but the demo was kinda boring.
• Brno Transit: Did you want another game from the HROT dev about how the soviet union sorta sucks? Eh.......... it's got some hints of good ideas, but much like HROT I mostly felt bored.
• Call of the Golden Valley: I'm not really sure where to place the vibes of this. It clearly wants to be some kind of investigation game, but the demo was SUPER short. couldn't really get a read on it.
• Cardopolis: A Balatro-style citybuilder is an interesting idea but in practice it just sorta feels... weird. It doesn't really work haha.
• CiniCross: I don't... get why this is nonograms mixed with Slay the Spire. It genuinely feels like the Slay the Spire components are just sort of tacked on, with zero synergy between the two sides of the concept.
• Desktop Survivors 98: It's another survivorslike. It's cute, but it doesn't really bring much interesting to the table.
• Dice Dice Baby: Another dice Balatro, another pretty good one
• Dice of Kalma: Very grounded game of rolling dice with Balatro style scoring. There sure are a lot of them this year lol. This one's pretty good.
• Dicealot: Luci I love rolling dice, I love dice games, I could have such a bad gambling addiction.
• Dominova: Interesting domino game, doing its own thing with scoring, and some slay the spire deckbuilding stuff. It feels kind of unbalanced and hard to follow, but I like the concept
• Execute: This is what AI guys think Roko's basilisk is gonna do to them and it's just a dumb edgy flash game you would find on newgrounds in 2009. It's stupid as hell and dark and edgy and oooooh, but also tbh, it's pretty fun, hahaha. Maybe we're the baddies.
• FlippUp: Okay I get it, it's Getting Over It with really unnaturally heavy pinball. I genuinely cannot play these kinds of games.
• Gloomy Juncture: The tone of this just felt sort of off and unappealing and the puzzles it threw at me felt more like busywork than interesting. Idk, not really doing it for me.
• Gumshoe Detective Agency: Agh I really tried to give this one a fair shake, but the writing didn't grip me, the interface is clunky and full of anachronisms, and it just feels like an inferior version of The Roottrees are Dead.
• Heaven Does Not Respond: Okay, this was cheesy as fuck and full of anachronisms, but it also was a lot of fun and is exactly the kind of Analog horror Interface Game I would expect to have been made by now. I'll probably play the full version of this some day just for a lark. It's not as consistent and polished as other interface games that have shined recently, and I have a feeling the horror will run thin, but who cares, I love some shlock.
• Incredicer: Eh.... like many modern incremental games there's a big slog trying to get to the part which is fun, which then becomes very fun briefly until the high runs out, and then there's not really any new tricks up its sleeve.
• Locator: GeoGuessr on a Myst-like set of worlds! That's a really cool concept, and it works pretty alright. It feels a little... vacant, in some ways. I feel like I need more of a hook. But it's very cool, and they're very clever puzzles. Definitely good if you want a new investigation game to play
• LOVE ETERNAL: This game might be doing something really interesting, and the aesthetic is pretty compelling, but I just don't like platformers much unfortunately haha.
• Lumines Arise: God I'm so spoiled by the PSP release because this just felt SO noisy and difficult to read the screen, and not in a fun way. Really feels like the only thing they could think of doing to freshen Lumines up was make it busier.
• Mik: Okay so you know how I just said I don't like platformers? There's an exception to this, which is that I love parkour games. Anyways this game is basically what if Portal 2 was a little bit more Blame! and it is a pretty fun megastructure game. The writing... is pretty bland and did not grip me at all, and the writing and aesthetic have a real big uh... "anime PFP" vibe if you know what I mean. But apparently it will be free so I'm curious what the final game will look like.
• Minefield Fractalis: I uh, couldn't get the trick of this one to activate? It just seemed to be normal minesweeper, IDK, I feel like I missed something here. Maybe I'm too good at minesweeper?
• MISERY: I played a bit of the tutorial, it seems... fine? I think the "solo dev" here may have bitten off more than they can chew. The idea of doing Abiotic Factor but for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is great, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
• MOTORSLICE: This is really solid parkour and combat! It feels very inspired by Shadow of the Colossus and Nier. It also..... the writing is very... the voice actress is doing good but... the whole thing has a slight SFM vibe if you know what I mean, lmao.
• My Little Spider : This is a desktop pet game for Juniper I don't know what else to say. You get the world's cutest spider and it sits in the corner of your screen while you do other stuff and its a cute little spider.
• Odd Town: Mmmmm its trying, but I spent most of my time flailing around while everything felt just kinda off. Could really use a second pass on controls
• Overencumbered In Another World: Doing Save Room but for Fallout is a good idea in theory but the amount of gamer cringe all over this really stinks it up for me. I'm sorry, I just, I really fucking cannot wait for gamers to stop finding Isekai inherently funny.
• Pixelogic: Nonograms Unlimited: Hey look it's the good nonogram game that everyone loves from online and mobile, but on desktop now! And its really good! But this is just another nonogram game, so its really up to you if that is something you want or not.
• ROLLA: Play as a big blob and roll around slurping everything up. It's uh... there's not much to it really! I genuinely was kind of surprised, it's very arcadey I guess, but I was really hoping for more.
• SECTOR ZERO: Not much in the way of story or even much exploration, very quickly just turns into skill jumping to dodge laser traps. That might be interesting to some folks? But I ran out of steam on it very fast.
• Slots & Daggers: Do you really like coin games, like the thing that bounces back and forth and you hit the button to drop, or the spinning slots minigame from Mario 3, or any of those other skill games that cheat in the arcade? Well they don't cheat here, and it's a fun roguelike, and it all feels really good... Except I personally hate those kind of games so this isn't for me. But maybe it will be for somebody else!
• Stackflow: Hmmmm "Tetris but Balatro" is an interesting concept and it's decently fun here but it's also... too easy? I'm curious whether the full game will flesh things out more
• Summit Drive: Okay, I see you played Enviro-Bear 2000 and wanted to try it for an actual driving game, the bad news is that it's not that fun alas. 😔
• Tabulo: This one is trying SO HARD to be Balatro but with chess pieces and it... has a lot of interesting ideas, but is really missing the rizz. It feels slow and clunky. I feel like with some polish this could be pretty fresh, but it also really, really, should try to be its own thing. For its own sake, honestly.
• Together: Moon Escape : It was fun for a little, and then it admitted the only puzzle it has is timed lever action, and we got bored
• TRACE Definitive Edition: If you like escape rooms it seems a pretty good one! I'm a little past these sort of games personally but I like the vibes it gives.

Broken

• DEMON DUST: Vulkan error.
• Elfie: A Sand Plan: The game just didn't render for me alas
• Mosaic of the Strange: It's another of these! But none of the dialog loaded when I played.
• Rita: Vulkan error.
• ULTIMAHJONG: Vulkan error.