From deckbuilders to city builders, these are the demos you shouldn’t miss.
Two or three times a year Steam hosts a Next Fest, where every developer and their mom posts a demo of an upcoming or in-development game. They’re awesome, generally speaking, ranging from fantastically broken and hysterically bad to outrageously good and perfectly polished.
During Next Fest you can almost always find some indie gem or discover that a mid-tier game is going to be way better than you’d ever expected. They’re also a great snapshot into the development process—one that you used to only get by attending big expensive game shows like PAX or Gamescom or Tokyo Game Show.
Or you could do what I do: download dozens upon dozens of demos, fall into a kind of fugue state for an entire week, and emerge from the other end drained and exhausted and feeling like I’ve seen into the forbidden nth-dimensional futures of PC gaming for the coming years.
This year I tried about 50 demos, setting my arbitrary limit at a combined 230GB and playing about ten per day Monday to Friday. Some I only played for a few minutes before deciding they were, in fact, very bad. Others ate an entire morning. I cataloged the 30-some notable ones in a Twitter thread that you can go read—but the ones listed on this page are my favorites.Oddsparks
The most delightful surprise of this Next Fest, Oddsparks is basically an adventurous and brilliant combination of Pikmin and any number of automation games. Set in a whimsical fantasy world, Oddsparks doesn’t concern itself too much with being super hardcore, something welcome in the automation world. I found the loop really great: Grab a mission, explore the wilderness for resources, then fulfill the mission by automating a product or two… which rewards a new blueprint that you’ll need to go find some resources for and get to automating. It’s a combination of gameplay types so obvious I’m shocked nobody has done it before.
