Sometimes during Steam Next Fest I enter a sort of fugue state where I download like a hundred game demos and go to town. I give them fifteen minutes to grab me. If they do, they get 15 more minutes. If they’re fun for half an hour, I play until they’re done or until an hour passes.
Sometimes they’re good enough that I keep playing them even after that hour, which is rare, but that’s how I arrived at these five games: I played 83 of this year’s Steam Next Fest demos and these were my favorites, or at least the ones that stuck out most in my mind.
Badlands Crew
This was the biggest Next Fest 2025 surprise for me, a game I didn’t really expect to do anything special. I figured that after Bomber Crew and then the sort-of-tired Spaceship Crew I’d seen everything developer Runner Duck had going. Except it seems like they’ve found the perfect theme for their game mechanics: Wasteland warfare. You build up your war rig and take it on the road, running down caravans of enemy cars and blowing them to pieces while keeping your own in running shape. You set up speed and steer, but also use your crew’s special powers on foes while you micromanage the crew to repel boarders, put out fires, and make repairs.
If it were just that simple then I’d be interested but not impressed. The thing that clinched this as a top-5 demo for me is how the post-apocalyptic-badlands setting has potential for interesting variety in what you’ll get to do. You’ll escort valuable civilians from one point to another, take down marauding gangs, and conquer other crews’ fortresses to expand your territory and demand tribute from them—all while trying to keep your previous conquests satisfied and in line.
Skin Deep
Skin Deep is a brilliant mess of a concept from a wildly diverse, veteran studio: Blendo Games. It’s an immersive sim, and this is your job: You’re the guy who gets put in frozen storage on a spaceship hauling valuables. If pirates take the ship, you get thawed out in your secret spot and take the ship back. You against an army of pirates. You have a pistol, but you have no shoes, so that kind of balances out. Blendo says it’s a game where you “sneak, subvert, and sabotage to survive” which yeah, that’s exactly right.
You can sabotage the security checkpoints to shock people. You can jump on a dude’s back and choke him out. You can go outside a ship in your spacesuit and then blow out a window and watch everyone get sucked out and then casually float inside the ship and trigger the emergency shutters and laugh your ass off. You can walk on broken glass and get it stuck in your feet which sucks. You can free the ship’s cats to help you. This is some real Blendo Games vintage is what I’m saying and I like it.
Shape of Dreams
Shape of Dreams is a promising, yet subtly surprising, mix of MOBA and action roguelike gameplay. It’s something like an isometric Risk of Rain in format but with much more focused, combo-driven game mechanics. It’s playable in roguelike runs alone or with friends, with your characters taking on more generalist roles if you’re playing alone or specializing if you’re playing with pals, as in a MOBA—tanking and crowd control suddenly become options when you’ve got buddies along. The characters themselves are weirdly varied in that way modern MOBA designs are, too: Lizard with a shotgun, knight in full plate, floating wizard fox. You know the drill.
The gameplay is surprisingly smooth, which is what really sells it. You’ve got standard attack and dash type movement you’d expect from action roguelikes, but on top of that you’re stacking and customizing a set of skills that you pick up along the way. Each of those gets its own slots for gems, all of which do weird stuff: Add a bonus to the attack every 10 seconds, or let you use it to steal life, or blow you up for extra damage. I foresee some groups losing a month or more to playing this co-op when it releases.
9 Kings
My final two Next Fest 2025 favorites are both king related. They’re also both in a similar genre and have similar mechanics, but pressed to choose between the two I wouldn’t do it. Even the developers have recognized the similarities enough to offer a bundle of the two.
In 9 Kings, you’re plopping down buildings and armies on the grid of your kingdom. You get to play one card, building or unit, from your hand each round before an enemy army attacks and your troops fight theirs in a little autobattle. 9 Kings is a deckbuilder of sorts, except your pool of cards is determined by your own chosen king’s cards combined with those of the enemy kings you fight. Your job is to figure out how to combine your chosen card pool with the other guys’ card pools to make an absolutely busted combo of some kind that snowballs out of all control and runs down armies until an enemy king shows up and you whoop their butt in person.
It’s a fun combination of limited time—you can only play one or two cards—with limited resources—you’re not sure if you’ll get more units, enchantments for the units, buildings that buff over time, or towers that take down enemies. Layer on top of that the spice of roguelike life: Weird, run-defining artifacts that’ll do stuff like spit out a ton of free units, or fundamentally alter how a unit works. I think this one’s going to be something special to watch for on release.
The King is Watching
This second royal choice started a bit slow, but it grew on me fast once I realized how it wanted me to play. In The King is Watching, you drop buildings from your little stable of cards, then use them to generate resources and units in real time. The twist? A little box on the map represents your king’s gaze, and only the buildings actively under your attention do anything at all.
That’s where it turns frantic, as balancing your resource incomes and unit production in real time is a kind of delicious chaos that few games pull off well. You have to figure out how to build a combination of units that can keep you defended while you get the piles of resources you need to build advanced buildings and climb your tech tree—oh, and find the resources in there somewhere to expand your gaze area and repair the walls and expand your army size.
You can even find random magic spells to throw at enemy waves, which are also interspersed with events that let you pick nice bonuses in addition to being comedic pixel fantasy versions of popular memes. There’s a lot of character here that’s really attractive, and I must recommend it.
Bonus round: Cauldron
Those were my top five, but here’s one more for good measure: Cauldron is a turn-based RPG where you’re a little witch and adventuring party who battle and win primarily through… minigames. It’s an oddly compelling mix of filling out a big ol’ tree of upgrades and playing funny minigames that’ll appeal to the incremental-idle crowd and the RPG crowd at the same time. To those of you who like the keywords I’ve dropped above this is guaranteed, absolute catnip.
