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Valve has revealed the 50 most-played demos from 2024's Steam Next Fest, and topping the list is the dungeon crawler RPG Dungeonborne, the self-styled "next-gen" RTS Stormgate, and my personal favorite, the moody survival driving sim set in the lush Pacific Northwest rainforest, Pacific Drive.
When Valve first announced The Steam Game Festival – the event which would eventually become Steam Next Fest – it was an answer to the damage wrought on exhibiting developers by the pandemic. Launched in June 2020, the Festival was billed to developers as "an opportunity to get early feedback from players and build an audience for future releases." That remains true today, even as Next Fest has grown into an industry-spanning event that Valve rolls out multiple times a year – but it's more true for some games than others.
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.
Over the years, simulation games have given us a taste of what it would be like to run hospitals, theme parks, zoos, and even whole cities, trying to balance the books while also making sure everyone stays happy. This new offering from Nokta Games takes that idea and gives it an all-new and more down-to-earth setting: a supermarket.
I was doing pretty well in the Next Fest demo for Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown. I'd achieved a happy equilibrium, with all my villagers gathering and producing the necessary supplies for my hand-built hamlet's steady growth. Lumberers were lumbering, quarriers were hauling rocks, and my orchard farmers were churning out apples: the basic fuel of every thriving feudal society, as any medievalist will tell you. The idyllic atmosphere was so peaceful I could almost forget about the accursed fog plaguing the land. Until that accursed fog manifested a rampaging snake kaiju, at least. Thrive, which you can check out in its Next Fest demo until February 12, has you play as one of the few people who've entered the deadly Waelgrim mist and survived, which was apparently all the excuse your king needed to pass the crown off to you and make the whole apocalypse situation your problem to manage. Now you're leading that fallen realm's refugees in the hopes of building a new home and future for your people. Evil fog's still around, though. Unfortunate. Due to arrive in early access on Steam sometime this year, Thrive is shooting for a blend of city-builder, 4X strategy and RTS combat. In practice, based on a run through the demo's tutorial, you can imagine it like a bunch of parallel games of Banished scattered across a big map, with AI or player-controlled kingdoms developing alongside yours. I like my share of laying roads and managing resources and Thrive serves up plenty of both, particularly on the resource front. Advancing through building tiers in the demo involves so many different resources that they don't all fit on the UI—at one point the tutorial informed me how to swap out the resource displays so I could track the ones I really cared about.
Steam Next Fest's demo bonanza is winding down, sure, but we still have time to slot in a couple more must-play demos. I'd recommend jumping on Mullet Mad Jack, the first-person shooter with an absolutely bonkers art style, right now.
Xbox 360 Arcade enjoyers might have fond memories of Geometry Wars, a series of excellent top-down bullet hell shooters that's since made its way to other platforms. Now it's back! Kind of. One Steam Next Fest demo unofficially emulates the series' blinding neon style and inserts it into the Vampire Survivors formula.
I'm ending a week packed with Steam Next Fest demos on a high note with Gatekeeper, a top-down bullet hell roguelike clearly inspired by Risk of Rain. Pick a character, drop into a medley of environments, and shoot dudes while hoovering up items until the number stops getting bigger. It's a familiar formula with a new perspective, and while there are some mechanical and artistic similarities to Risk of Rain and its sequel, Gatekeeper feels like it's found its own identity.