Steam Next Fest is good for one specific reason: the bar to try a demo is approximately zero. You scroll, you click, you play for ten minutes, you decide. The format rewards games that establish themselves quickly, which lines up nicely with the format of the indies most worth my attention anyway.
I tried thirteen demos this Next Fest. Three of them I'm still thinking about. The other ten ranged from "competent" to "I don't get it." Here are the three.
Cupiclaw
This one is Steam Next Fest's most charming weird-design idea so far this year. Cupiclaw is a roguelike about claw machine arcades. You spend tokens to grab prizes. Some prizes are good. Some prizes are bombs that destroy other prizes. The roguelike loop is across runs of multiple machines, with upgrades and a meta-progression layer.
I played the demo three times before realizing I was running out of time and needed to try something else. The grab-prize mechanic has the satisfying physicality of an actual claw machine — the game is genuinely doing physics under the hood, not faking it — and the strategic layer of "do I take the safe small prize now or risk it for the high-value one in the back" has more depth than I'd have credited a claw machine game with having.
It's launching in early March. Wishlisted, on the day of the demo. This is exactly the kind of weird, focused, joyful indie that I write about when I write about indies.
Mythmatch
Mythmatch is harder to describe. It's a deduction game in the lineage of Return of the Obra Dinn, but the puzzle isn't "who killed who" — it's "which mythological figure is which." You have a list of names and a set of figures shown only by silhouette and partial information. You triangulate from clues to identify them.
The reason this stuck with me is the genre-blending. The game leans into the same pleasure as Obra Dinn — the intellectual click of "I have enough information now to know who that is" — but the subject matter is ancient mythology rather than a maritime mystery, which means the clues are stranger and the moments of recognition more delightful. I matched a figure to Anansi and felt good about myself for an hour.
The demo was about two hours long, which is generous for the format. I wanted more by the end, which is the right thing to want from a demo.
Titanium Court
This one I knew about going in — AP Thompson won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for it, the second year in a row a Thompson game won the award. The demo had a release date attached to it. I played the demo anyway because I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype.
It does. Titanium Court is a match-3 game with strategic layering that I haven't seen in a match-3 before. You're commanding faerie armies, the matches resolve combat encounters, and the strategy involves both immediate tactical decisions (which match clears the threat) and longer-term planning (which units to develop, which courts to ally with). The visual style is genuinely strange — surreal in a way that calls to mind Strange Adventures or the more abstract Italo Calvino — and the writing is funnier than match-3 narratives have any right to be.
I'm wary of games that win awards before release because the gap between "festival darling" and "game I'd actually finish" is real. The demo tells me Titanium Court bridges that gap. Out April 23.
What didn't make the cut
I'm going to skip the names because I don't think it's useful to publicly drag specific small-team indies. But the patterns I noticed in the ten demos that didn't grab me:
- Three of them spent the first ten minutes on tutorial content that taught me nothing I didn't already know from genre conventions.
- Two of them had pretty art and a single hook, but no second mechanic underneath.
- Two felt like asset flips with one decent idea applied to existing genre templates.
- The rest were fine, but I wasn't going to remember them in a week.
The Next Fest demo format is brutal that way. With a thousand other tabs open, you have minutes — maybe ten — to convince a player to keep playing. The three games above did it in different ways: Cupiclaw with novelty, Mythmatch with a genre-flip, Titanium Court with confidence. Whatever the way, the bar is "this game has a thing, the thing is clear, and I want to do more of the thing." Most games don't pass that bar. The good ones make passing it look effortless.
The takeaway
Steam Next Fest stays one of the best filters in gaming. For the cost of an afternoon and the disk space of a few demo downloads, you can find three games you'll buy on day one. That's a much better hit rate than reading reviews, watching trailers, or listening to me. Mostly because these are the games before the trailer-tuners and review-shapers got to them. They're closest to the developer's intent, which is, more often than not, where the interesting stuff lives.