From Metroidvanias to roguelikes, survival games to strategy games, here are the best things we played during Steam Next Fest

Another Steam Next Fest is over, meaning another collection of indie game demos have vanished into the ether. As ever, with so many options at your fingertips, it can be hard to know what to play, but now that the dust has settled, we've collated our Steam Next Fest coverage to point you towards the games we loved that deserve a spot on your wishlist.

I'd be remiss to start anywhere but Dungeonborne, the PvPvE RPG that plays like the second coming of extraction fantasy frontrunner Dark and Darker. Throughout the week, Dungeonborne's presence at the top of pretty much every Next Fest chart spoke to its ability to successfully fill the gap in the market left by its progenitor's continuing absence from Steam. Easily the breakout hit of this festival, it'll be interesting to see if it can maintain that hot streak into a full release in a notoriously tricky genre.

Dungeonborne might have dominated, but that still left plenty of space for other games to infiltrate the Next Fest charts. One of those was Dread Dawn, an open-world zombie survival game that got off to a slow start but built plenty of hype over the week. There's a touch of games like Project Zomboid here, but Dread Dawn is much more interested in its narrative than many survival games, with an element of slice-of-life genre stalwarts like Shaun of the Dead or All of Us Are Dead. It's a slow burn, but likely to keep dedicated fans busy for a long time.

It came as no surprise that among the many, many demos, two genres in particular caught our attention. The Metroidvania is at the peak of its power right now, with the roguelike not far behind; the impossibly colorful Ultros caught our eye with its "prismatic assault on the senses"; the Don't Starve devs have another hit on their hands with co-op roguelike Rotwood; Bore Blasters smelts together Vampire Survivors and Deep Rock Galactic in its mining roguelike; and Palworld developer Pocketpair smashes it all together with a Metroidvania roguelike that wears its