An Array of Demos - Steam Next Fest (June 2025)
Next Fest is back, and there's a lot of demos around. I've neglected this promotion in the past because I don't like playing games before they're finished if I plan to buy them, and I feel that's kind of how Next Fest gets treated in online circles - like a free early access snippet.
But I'm making a shift away from just following big releases, and while I'd love to just buy everything that catches my eye I'm not made of money. I'm using this Next Fest to play some demos specifically for games that I'm on the fence about - interesting ideas or smaller projects that I might like the look of but not want to buy immediately at launch otherwise (and thus immediately forget about in this market).
Here are some of the ones that I've tried so far (images are from the Steam pages unless obviously otherwise).
Stellagate
A really cool, tightly designed cubes and portals puzzle platformer game.
The greys-and-blue presentation really caught my eye with this so I went in very blind on the gameplay, and the initial reveal of the main mechanic was a little bit revelatory. The demo took me about 30 minutes to work through all the main puzzles (15 or so I think?), and I like how they incorporate puzzling into the overworld as well - you can't access some of the harder levels unless you figure out how to access it.
It's a game rife with interactions and "a-ha" moments, and the early levels are extremely good at presenting you with a room that makes you think "there must be some way to do this" even when it's not obvious how. Through tinkering with the limited tools available you can learn about some of the more complex interactions, or even simple ones - one of the longest stumpers I had just involved figuring out that my jump height isn't always the same, for entirely sensible reasons.
This is the kind of game that would usually languish on my wishlist because I'm rarely in the mood for puzzle-platformers these days, but it's jumped up pretty high in my view now. If they price it well this'll be a day one purchase.
Modulus
A logistics game (Factorio-like, if you will) where they've shaken up the core assumptions in a few interesting ways.
The two main ones are infinite resources (I've seen a few do this now) and the way resources become "stuff" - it all starts as big cubes of voxels, and you have to slice them up and recombine them to make the pieces you need. This is a game that's 100% focused on the production lines, and doesn't want you to worry about running out of stuff to make it, or even particularly about getting finished products to where they're needed - you belt your blocks and slices around, but the finished modules get handled by drones.
It does limit the space you can use - forcing you to build on the fairly small roofs of buildings, and I think this is the more interesting puzzle. Your facilities are large and processes can become spacially inefficient very quickly - I made the monstrosity pictured above mostly to see if I could, and once it was in place I knew I was buying Modulus at launch. I'm a little worried that it may end up in Early Access hell if they take that route, but the idea is interesting enough that I'll give it a go anyway.
Dice Gambit
A tactical RPG using dice as your action pool, with a really distinct style.
This is a perfect example of a game I want to play during Next Fest: I would not buy this on a whim. TRPGs are very hit-and-miss for me, I think because they're pretty easy to make but hard to balance. I can't genuinely speak to the balance of Dice Gambit from the half hour of demo I played, but the rest of it is interesting enough that I don't really care.
The art has that sort of Cartoon Network energy, and it's clear that making the UI dynamic and distinctive was a priority here - we will forever be living in the shadow of Persona 5, and that's fine with me.
The extra hook for Dice Gambit is the recruitment system - the setting is a sort of alternate techno-renaissance Italy, and you gain fighters through marriages, with stronger fighters attracting stronger suitors. I'm not sure how much further the system goes, but this is a decent twist that pulls in that Crusader Kings "good lord look at that mess of a family tree" goodness.
I've played a couple other demos that haven't hit the spot for me, but I'm not here to talk down about projects based on a snippet of gameplay. Demos are inherently incomplete, and with how they're produces in the modern market (i.e. long before the game is finished) the gameplay is incomplete as well.
I still have a couple of demos downloaded and ready to go, and I'll do another scan this weekend if I have time, but this is the result of the first batch and I'm liking with what I'm seeing. It's cool how this demo renaissance has impacted the industry, something I think I want to write about a little more at a later date - demos are a really weird and tricky concept, and I think people tend to apply overly broad heuristics to figuring out their value.