Video games rule. Sometimes. They can be really cool. It can be tough, though. Finding them. The games are good, but the discoverability? Miserable. Storefronts prioritize what’s already selling in a frenzy despite an intimate record of your playing habits. If your tastes generally lie outside of roguelikes or survival games, you’ve noticed you’re not always being served to your palette. That’s why I love Steam Next Fest. A publicity window, sure, but an easy opportunity to dredge the trenches of the video world.
Steam, for all of its resources and data, never seems to match my freak. In my experience, the moment I buy Capcom’s Pocket Fighter on sale my discovery queue gets force-fed every Monster Hunter under the sun. I think of my poor YouTube algorithm, so confused, so eager to please me, that the moment I watch an old Gordon Ramsay clip the whole feed switches to Kitchen Nightmare reruns and Raj clips. As if to say, “Now this I can work with.”
Three times a year, Steam puts on Next Fest. A digital alternative to the E3 trade-shows of old, the event prioritizes demos for up-and-coming works. It’s a great, zero-investment opportunity to not just check out the biggest and most curious hits on the horizon, but to flesh out a sense of what games excite you, specifically. Because gaming doesn’t have common third spaces like rep theatres or record shops, this is as good as it’ll get for most.
Surprisingly, it’s on that note that Steam runs especially flat. The games that make Next Fest’s front page are just as traffic-oriented as what the store calls attention to every other day of the year. If you’re like me, you keep tabs on interesting curators and creators, squirrelling games away into your wishlist. But even if you are proactive, Steam doesn’t offer a function to see if anything you’ve earmarked has joined in the festivities (you’re welcome, by the way).
No one knows you as well as you do. So unfortunately it’s on you to try to shape an environment by following developers, creators, critics, curators and feeds that seem to gel. Like an esoteric game? Check out its Backlogged page, peek into its lists to see what company it keeps. Hit the wishlist button on Steam as if that rainy day is going to be a biblical flood. You should probably hit up some itch.io feeds, too, where creators you’ve purchased from eagerly share what they find exciting. And if you aren’t in the habit yet, here’s a little tour through some of what I’ve hit up so far, speaking as someone extra invested in the outer orbits than most.
When I first played Corn Kidz 64, it dawned on me that not only can indie devs pursue the games they’ve always wanted to make, they can make the exact game they would have made if they could have made one back when they were a brooding adolescent mall goth. That thread has beautifully blossomed. There’s a slate of games I’ve mentally categorized as “self-medicating interplay,” games in love with the magic-hat nature of what can be rendered on a computer and intense, uncontrollable energies taking the first multimedia shape they can.
One of those is Downsouth, a manic and lurid platformer from Troopsushi about a grinning purple bean descending into an urban underworld, its brisk pace distracted only by the fidelity of detail. Each environment is stuffed with more loaded imagery than a ‘90s MTV bumper. In a similar class is RUBATO, a fun, physics-based, frog-based platformer with visual tonal shifts rapid enough to make you feel like a sleeper cell agent being shown their trigger code.
Reemerging after some time is Blast Cats, an eclectic, explosive 3D platformer reared on all the PlayStation games you saw ads for but never saved up the allowance to play. Another long-awaited bit of goodness is PSI, a first-person adventure about cults, plumbing, and frogs. And if you’re snowed in this week, may as well force the chill deeper with Subjectivation, an off-kilter horror game about a bitter frozen world. Mommy’s Best, who have long made games from a world where the Amiga beat the Super Nintendo, have a demo up for their latest, ChainStaff, a pulpy, Metal Hurlant-flavored run-and-gun. Another retro-inspired game that would make more sense in another dimension is Bad Pixels, a 3D western shooter rendered to resemble something you might find on a floppy disc the size of your outstretched hand. And if you miss light rail shooters and adore names that would make an arcade operator scrunch their nose, you owe it to yourself to check out ᴛᴜᴍᴏʀ ɴᴇᴄʀᴏꜱɪꜱ ꜰᴀᴄᴛᴏʀ:// αᴍᴇɴ.
Again, just a vertical slice of what’s out there for those who have hit a wall. Find the routine that works for you, keep tabs and broaden your video game world. The major industry won’t. If you do it for anything, do it out of spite.
Happy Saturday eve! As always, at the end of the week, we’re here to offer up our suggestions for games to dive into during your time off. And even if you know what you’re going to play, hopefully we can suggest something new and exciting to consider.
Continuing with our spooky October suggestions, I’ve got two horror recommendations for ya’ll: A throwback to the GameCube era and a jumpscare-free experience spent wandering in strange, unknown spaces. But we’ve got more than just eerie hallways and virus-carrying zombies for you. This weekend we’re chilling in Pokémon-packed (infested?) cities and the abandoned remnants of civilization, hanging out with armed ducks (you read that right), and more!
Let’s get to it.
Absolum
Play it on: PS5, Switch, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Playable”) Current goal: Defeat Azra
I’ve always had a weakness for fantasy-themed beat ‘em ups. I just think pulp fantasy with barbarians and wizards lends itself really well to a genre in which you walk along, pummelling or zapping enemies from time to time, so I quite enjoy the likes of Golden Axe and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. This subgenre has been deeply underserved in recent decades, but at long last we have a pretty damn good one again. Absolum has roguelike elements that set it apart somewhat from the pure beat ‘em ups I mentioned before, and I have mixed feelings about that. I understand that such elements can draw players to a game and keep them playing for longer than they otherwise might, and I’m not immune to the allure of persistent progression myself. But I also enjoy it when a beat ‘em up feels purely skill-based, and here in Absolum, I’ve known since I started playing that my character would be too weak initially for me to win the game no matter how well I played. I’d have to grind my way to plenty of persistent upgrades first.
However, the world of Absolum is rich enough, and hides enough characters, stories, secrets, and alternate routes, that I haven’t much minded the requirement to fight through it again and again. That’s primarily because the actual beat ‘em up action is just so damn good. Did you play Streets of Rage 4? Do you remember how incredible the hits felt in that game, how much oomph it had when your attacks connected? Well, that’s equally the case here. Perhaps owing to the genre expertise of Guard Crush Games which worked on both this and Streets of Rage 4, the clobbering here is top-notch and definitely does reward skill, even if the various trinkets and abilities you collect over the course of a run can also contribute heavily to your success. Absolum is also visually gorgeous, at times making me feel like I’m playing a Ralph Bakshi cartoon from the 1970s.
It’s great to have a satisfying new fantasy beat ‘em up after all this time. Now I just hope next year’s He-Man game is good, too, and keeps the trend going! – Carolyn Petit
Pokémon Legends: Z-A
Play it on: Switch, Switch 2 Current goal: Lock in
God, I knew I was jonesing for a new Pokémon game, but I’m even more aware of it now that I’m actually playing Legends: Z-A. It’s almost like I’m manually breathing and hyperaware that oxygen is in my lungs again. Doctors and mental health specialists, don’t read that last bit.
I’m about six or so hours into Z-A, and after some adjustment to the game’s real-time combat, I’m so glad to be back in the Pokémon world. I still don’t have much sense of the grand plot because I’ve been too busy playing dress-up and using the photo mode to take sick pics of me and my party, but I just encountered my first Rogue Mega Evolution, and fighting a crazed Pokémon in its most powerful form really shows you how well this new battle system works. It’s surprisingly challenging and has me rethinking everything I once knew about Pokémon battles. I hope to have a bunch of Mega Stones by the end of the weekend so my party can face these foes on equal terms. I feel like I could marathon my way to the endgame pretty quickly, but I know I should savor this ride because the Mega Dimension DLC is still months away. Mega Raichu, my beloved, I wish you were here now. — Kenneth Shepard
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: officially “Unsupported” but seems to run well) Current goal: Finish the “Eternal Suburbia” level
Today I wrote about a wonderful surprise I came across on Steam; it’s called Dreamcore, and if you love liminal horror without jump scares, you can read more about it here.
I want to talk about two things here that I didn’t mention in my impressions earlier today. First, I have to give a shoutout to the art direction in this game. Not only are the environments impressively sterile while still having a sense of personality, but the VHS-style fizziness that permeates the screen helps to sell the eeriness of everything; that soft blurriness with gentle chromatic aberration just makes this game feel like some old piece of found footage that maybe you’re worried about watching too much of.
Secondly, this game just wonderfully gets into your head. I was playing it for the first time on Steam Deck in a public place, navigating the game’s first level when I started to hear things. I wasn’t sure if it was in the game or not so I started staring around the room before my eyes absently rested on someone I know. “Everything okay?” my friend said to me. “Yeah,” I replied, “this game is just fucking with me.”
I still don’t know if the sound I heard came from the game or the reality around me, but that’s what makes it so fun. It’s good food for your mind to encounter art that plays with your senses. – Claire Jackson
Resident Evil 0
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Unsupported”) Current goal: Survive
In my quest to prepare for the dreadfully good time I anticipate Resident Evil: Requiem will be next year, I’m jumping into the RE titles that passed me by (though I still might skip 5 and 6 because of everything I’ve heard about those games). I slept on Village, so that’s on my radar, but it made sense to first go back and play the prequel that originally launched on the GameCube back in the aughts.
And! Well, the jury’s still out on this entry for me but I am recommending it here because it already feels like classic Resident Evil. Much of that has to do with the camera angles, which though suitably retro, feel like a breath of fresh air in today’s RE4-inspired, over-the-shoulder world.
If you haven’t played 0, it’s definitely a neat little experiment in RE’s history. Instead of choosing to play as only one character the whole ride through, you can swap between protagonists Rebecca and Billy as you navigate the zombie-infested maps. It can lead to a little bit of weird item management, but it’s still a neat twist on the RE formula that came before. And I really am enjoying the campiness of this legacy era of RE, which make for a nice change after the very serious tone of Silent Hill f. – Claire Jackson
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: “Unknown”) Current goal: Be a menace and get away with it
Arc Raiders is running its “Server Slam” test this weekend and if you love extraction shooters, go download it right now and start playing. Even if you don’t love extraction shooters, you should still give this one a try. Who knows if this will be the game that finally helps this genre reach critical mass, but it certainly plays well, has a solid post-apocalyptic premise, and just might devour all of my free time when it launches on October 30.
I’ve only jumped in for one match. I died, but I had a good time harassing some poor soul who was also dealing with the antagonistic robots that patrol the game’s abandoned wastelands. It has the intensity I love from this genre, and feels capable of creating the kinds of emergent, unexpected moments of intensity that spontaneously pop up when multiple players are all trying to make it out alive. Hostile showdowns, unexpected alliances, plenty of WTF moments? I’m here for all of it, and Arc Raiders feels damn promising for this style of game. Especially now that DMZ in CoD has stopped getting updates, I could really use a new extraction shooter that isn’t going to be as punishing as Tarkov. Let’s gooo! – Claire Jackson
Escape From Duckov
Play it on: PC Current goal: Make the rest of the birds pay
I did not take Escape from Duckov seriously until this week. A looter shooter starring a duck? No, thank you. I have no patience for games riding high on the brilliant gimmick of giving an animal a gun. But Escape from Duckov, contrary to its name and marketing, is way more than just a gimmick. It’s a top-down, PVE, loot-based extraction shooter that controls well and has a ridiculously compelling progression loop of collecting junk, completing quests, and upgrading your hideout. I don’t know that I’ll stick with it long-term, but it only took a couple of sessions to convince me it has the goods. If you’ve been tempted to give the extraction shooter scene a try but find it too complicated, overwhelming, and sweaty to parse, I recommend giving Duckov a quack or two. It gets at the chaos and appeal but on a smaller, more casual scale that’s easy to grok. I mean, it’s intense for sure, but in a fun way. — Ethan Gach
A bunch of Steam Next Fest demos
Play it on: PC Current goal: Check out some cool games
I couldn’t narrow down my entry to one game, so I’m just lumping a bunch of Steam Next Fest demos together and calling that my entry. I can do that. You can’t stop me. Just like I can’t stop myself from downloading and installing more and more cool-looking demos. So far, I’m planning to check out typing battle royale Final Sentence, the new 3D SpongeBob platformer, that new Bubsy game, and many more. Will I enjoy them all? Probably not. But I’m just excited to stuff myself silly from Steam’s video game buffet. Though the last thing I need right now is even more stuff to play. My backlog is never going to get smaller. – Zack Zwiezen
And that wraps this edition of the weekend guide. What are you playing?
Next Fest is back! The biannual Steam event that celebrates demos for hundreds of forthcoming games begins today, October 13, and runs until 1 p.m. ET on October 20. But with 3,276 demos to choose from, it’s an overwhelming beast. Fear not, for we—like the brave knights we are—are here to highlight some of the best we’ve found across a breadth of genres, from indie to AAA.
I like to think of Next Fest as the games industry’s demonstration that genres don’t mean anything any more, as the thousands of demos are categorized through a combination of lies and jazz, and the words “point-and-click” are taken to mean “games that feature pointy objects and clicking sounds.” It can make looking for particular types of games an astonishing headache. So instead, push all such intentions aside: Next Fest is best enjoyed by just scrolling through into the deepest recesses and installing anything that catches your eye. Forget about the sorts of games you already like; instead plunge in deep and experiment. And to save your scroll wheel, we’ve picked out a selection of games that could be your new big obsession.
Of course this in no way definitive! There will be hundreds of demos worth playing, and if you’ve discovered anything you’d recommend yourself, then we encourage you to do so in the comments.
Tingus Goose
Developer: SweatyChair Release date: Q4 2025 Demo link
Normally with these roundups I like to start with a well-known name so everyone feels comfortable, safe, and familiar, before I then start adding the super-weird delights. But no such easing ourselves into the deep end today, because there is no more important demo to tell you about than Tingus Goose. I…words cannot suffice.
This is a clicker in the vein of Cookie Clicker, except you’re…well, listen, you’re clicking on the weird little baby-creatures called Tingus that fly out of the beak of a goose. A goose that is growing out of the belly of a lady lying on a bed. As you water your goose (you heard me) its neck grows longer, and it reaches for the loving kiss of another goose hanging down from the sky above. They want to mate, and it’s your job to have them meet. But you need money to water a goose, and that’s gained by, um, having the babies roll over protuberances that grow sideways out of the goose’s neck. That, as you’d expect, earns cash. And don’t worry, you can click on the babies, too, to get more money, but don’t click too often or they pop.
This is all a glorious piece of batshit crazy animation and gibberish game design, and I adore every second of it.
PowerWash Simulator 2
Developer: FuturLab Release date: 23 Oct, 2025 Demo link
See, in other years this would have been my more welcoming first entry. We’re all looking forward to PowerWash Simulator 2, right? And now we finally get to play it! Hooray!
And yes, it is of course utterly marvelous. It’s more PowerWash Simulator, but slightly prettier and with less clunky controls. I am having to force myself to stop playing to write this, and play the rest of the demos, and it’s proving tricky, and that’s what PW always did best: take over your entire life with its demonic pressure-washing powers.
Slots And Daggers
Developer: Friedemann Release date: October 24, 2025 Demo link
Oh my goodness this is the best I want to play it forever. This being Slots And Daggers, a post-Balatro roguelite slot machine game that purifies the mechanics to sweetest perfection. You begin by choosing the icons that can appear on the slots (starting with coins, sword attacks and shield) and then stop each dial to fight a monster. If you win, coins earned can be spent on new icons (perhaps a bow attack, or an upgrade to your shield), as well as on power-ups that boost your attacks, defense, and technique. You and the enemy have shield and health meters, with some attacks able to do true damage, others protected by your defenses. And, of course, the moment you lose it’s back to the start. Except you also win poker chips as you play, and these can be spent on “illegal” hacks to the slot machine that can permanently improve things.
It’s all there, right? All the ingredients of a great roguelite, in the neatest possible way. And I can assure you that it’s outstandingly moreish.
Developer: Mark Ffrench Release date: 7 Nov, 2025 Demo link
Mark Ffrench makes a very specific genre of game. It’s Fill-a-Pix puzzles writ large, the logic puzzle games that usually fill a small grid on your phone now taking up wall-size friezes. Proverbs was my favorite of his, a massive rendering of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, Netherlandish Proverbs, turned into a puzzle. And that might sound pretentious, but damn it was wonderful. Later came 2024: Mosaic Retrospective, an incredible collage of events of the previous year, and next comes Mosaic of the Strange, the follow-up to a game I now realize I entirely missed, Mosaic of the Pharaohs. (I know what I’m doing when I should be working tomorrow…) Incredibly, this combines the puzzle concept with a point-and-click adventure, and my mind’s made up.
It’s hard to know how to convince a skeptic to give a game like this a try, but they’re blissfully absorbing and I really cannot recommend them enough.
Painkiller
Developer: Anshar Studios Release date: 21 Oct, 2025 Demo link
I’d somehow entirely missed that Painkiller was coming back. As 3D Realms trawls its archives, 2004’s Painkiller is the latest recognizable name to get a total overhaul. A decade off has done it some good, and its return gives it fresh new central characters, and it’s playable alone or in 3-player co-op. It moves extremely quickly, which is my primary desire from any 3D Realms shooter, and the AI bots seem to do a decent enough job in the demo. It’s also gloriously gory and bursting with Quake 3 vibes.
Hands up, who’s old enough to remember the Heroes of Might & Magic games? No, it’s OK, don’t strain your arm. And let’s not even ask about the OG Might & Magic fans, as the breath of the question might cause them to collapse into dust. The RPG series goes back as far as 1986 incredibly, with its turn-based strategy spin-off Heroes of Might & Magic starting in 1995. Highly regarded turn-based strategy games right up until they weren’t, the series saw diminishing returns beginning with HOMM 5 and 2015’s Might & Magic Heroes VII polished the whole franchise off for a decade.
Well, it’s back, and its latest entry is coming from Iratus developer Unfrozen. Apparently it has the good sense not to meddle with a beloved formula, letting you build your mythological armies and grow a town, with its emphasis squarely on recreating everyone’s happy memories of HOMM 3. And look, I could lie to you and pretend I understood this demo, but turn-based strategy is a genre I have never gotten my head around. I’m just excited for all the Might & Magic fans I’ve known and loved that it’s back.
Kingdom of Night
Developer: Friends of Safety Release date: Q4 2025 Demo link
I installed this one on a complete whim, and I’m very glad I did. It’s an RPG by way of a point-and-click adventure, set in 1980s Arizona with some heavy Stranger Things vibes. You play a teenage kid at high school who finds himself embroiled in a bizarre adventure of invading demons and magical powers. The demo immediately shows how the characteristics you pick affect how you play, with a choice between brains and brawn opening up different conversation options and ways to handle school encounters. It comes with an intricate spell system, real-time combat, and lots of lovely isometric pixel graphics. And I’m really getting into it. This was first announced six years ago, but is apparently arriving this year, complete with an option to play the whole adventure in co-op.
Servant of the Lake
Developer: Rusty Lake Release date: 2026 Demo link
The incredible Rusty Lake series just celebrated its 10th anniversary with a typically macabre birthday game, but now is back with an upcoming full entry in the long-running Lynchian series. Servant of the Lake has the player arrive to the Vanderboom house by horse and cart, there to be a servant to the family for a single weekend. However, long-term fans will realize this puts us in the era of the first generation of the Vanderbooms, and thus in the presence of Aldous Vanderboom, the man who becomes the series peculiar antagonist, Mr. Crow. And, honestly, you own it to yourself to play every Rusty Lake game in order, building up to next year’s release of this one.
Reanimal
Developer: Tarsier Studios Release date: TBA Demo link
Reanimal is of course what Tarsier Studios is making instead of Little Nightmares 3. It’s a whole new project from the team and, still a year on from its announcement, it doesn’t yet have a release date. But at least we can play some of it now! You play as a sack-headed boy, who begins the game steering a boat to pull a mask-wearing girl from the sea, before finally reaching dry land and beginning the adventure of their attempt to escape their hellish home. It’s all extremely atmospheric, but very slow to get going for a demo. Still, persist and you’ll experience this horror-themed adventure for a decent while.
Marvel Cosmic Invasion
Developer: Tribute Games Release date: 2025 Demo link
I am delighted to report that Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a complete delight. Tribute Games follows up TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge with another old-school side-scrolling beat ’em up, this time with a broad cast of Marvel heroes to biff with. You pick two at a time (Spider-Man and She Hulk make for a great pairing), then alternate between the two of them as you set up combos and Streets of Rage your way down these pixel-perfect streets. In fact, it’s so Streets of Rage that you even eat food you find by smashing garbage cans, just like real superheroes do.
It’s so colorful and punchy (in every sense) that it feels like it could be a classic arcade cabinet hit from the ’80s, rejuvenated for modern machines.
