// KOTAKU — GAMING
11 Fascinating Next Fest Demos To Immediately Stick On Your Wishlist
It’s Next Fest yet again, and Steam’s Wishlist-tempting festival of demos grows ever more unwieldy. This time, among the 8,764 demos included in the week-long event, we also have the miserable chore of weeding out the AI-riddled drivel, alongside the cavalcade of nonsense. But fear not, for I have plunged myself deep into the piles of sludge to pluck out some true gems! Below you’ll find eleven demos for games you’ve likely never heard of before, but will immediately rise to the top of your radar.
Can radars have tops? Try not to think about it, and instead delve into this eclectic mix of genres, where I’ve deliberately put a couple of games you might have heard of before at the very top in order to lull you into scrolling on to those you’d never have heard of otherwise. Anything that takes your fancy, remember to stick it on your Steam Wishlist, as this helps those games get better attention and indeed reminds you to grab it when it comes out.
A new game from Kyle Thompson (Islets, Crypt Custodian) is always something to be excited about, and metroidvania Well Dweller immediately shines with his stunning artwork and incredibly competent controls. Darker and tougher than the tone of Thompson’s previous games, the invitation of comparison with Hollow Knight seems pretty unavoidable, but playing the demo it really seems to hold up. And the boss art is like nothing you’ve seen before.
This super-scratchy, super-creepy arcade seems to feature just one machine: a game about controlling a UFO-like ship, avoiding enemies through a 3D maze until it can reach a gun, at which point the game flips over to twin-stick shooter as you attempt to survive a timed wave of attackers. Do well enough and you earn tickets from the machine, which can then be fed into a strange cabinet containing what might be a sentient robot. And thus the loop begins. It’s smart, incredibly well presented, and utterly intriguing.
It’s odd to see a game underselling itself, but South of the March calls itself a combination of visual novel and turn-based combat. It’s not that! It’s a proper old-school RPG with packs of descriptive text. The hand-drawn game reminds me first of Inkle’s classic Sorcery! games, and while it’s not aiming for anything close to that ambitious, it absolutely is delivering an involving tale of two freelance mercenaries on a quest to discover the source of rumors of an unnatural entity in a nearby cave. The combat is great, the characters are novel and interesting, and very excited to play past what’s on offer here in the demo.
I think it’s fair to say from the screenshots that you might not be expecting much from Kwad, but I’m delighted to tell you otherwise. This is an incredibly smart puzzle game about manipulating squares to join into larger shapes through a unique movement system of hopping and descending staircase-fashion, which sounds insane now I write it. What’s so fascinating here is how the level select screen can be even harder than the puzzles themselves, and the whole thing just oozes with cleverness.
It’s not entirely reductive to describe Pixel Washer as PowerWash Simulator but in 2D, given that’s exactly what it is. But it’s still absolutely brilliant. You play, of course, as a pixel pig, armed with various spray-washing devices, and have a whole bunch of places to clean up. What’s important is that it remains as compelling and satisfying an experience as the big, 3D game, but with a delightful layer of extra silliness, and rather crucially, Peggle-like chimes to mark your success. The demo gives you six increasingly large areas to clean, while dangling the possibilities of unreachable upgrades and features before you.
There are probably thousands of beam-of-light puzzles out there, and goodness knows I’ve been bored to tears by plenty of them. But there’s something different about Grid_Hacker, which delivers the same format—drop mirrors into a grid to redirect a beam to a goal—in a far more engaging way. It’s not just