Next Fest 25|1 Summary
Summary of the best demos from Winter Next Fest 2025
Another Next Fest came and went, with over 50 demos played in a span of a week. I won't always be able to play so many, but I'm making full use of the free time I got. As expected, there will be better and worse games in every batch, but this Fest was definitely on the more positive side. From sequels of games I enjoyed, to stunning visuals on new contenders, all the way to challenging titles I never heard of before. Great stuff, and you should check out the posts if you're looking for games to play.
But the summary is here for if you don't have time for all that. First a rundown of the highlights for each day, then a deeper look into the top picks, and finally I have a bonus micro-review for something I played during the Fest, but couldn't talk about until now
Day By Day Rundown
Essentially a collection of all the highlights
Day 0
- Lily Fantasia - A brilliantly playful rhythm game, where both the notes and the judgement line dance across your screen
- Sandustry - Industry game where you're working with pixel-based sand physics like in Noita. Very unique and satisfying
Day 1
- Buffet Knight - At its heart, this is a Kirby x Zelda crossover, where you adventure out into the 2D world as a very hungry knight. A very charming style
Day 2
- Axyz - A retro-styled 3D puzzle platformer, all about rolling around walls and changing gravity. What is ceiling at one point is floor at another, and the whole thing is surprisingly confusing (in a good way)
Day 3
- Haste: Broken Worlds - A fantastic runner-roguelike, all about going faster than the end of the world. Really fun, really smooth, really worth trying
- An Elaborate History of Chess - A mix of many genres (dungeon crawling, puzzles, city/farming sim games), connected by the themes of chess pieces. So much more than it seems, do give it a whirl
Day 4
- The Knightling - A fantastic 3D action-adventure title, that integrates your massive shield into the gameplay in every way it can think of
- The Swordfish: Knight of the Deep - This is a unique recommendation because basically everything in this could be improved. And yet I somehow enjoyed myself tremendously with this one, despite its many problems. Try it maybe?
Day 5
- Nebulock - An incremental bullet hell where you get exponentially stronger as do the enemies
- Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping - A silly little detective game that has good quality art and voices, while not taking itself seriously
- Savara - A colorful action-roguelike that takes strong inspiration from Hades and soulslikes, but stands on its own
Day 6
- Run TavernQuest - A phenomenal comedy text-based adventure, where you're the adventure responding to a "player" who is not very smart. Lotsa paths and lotsa laughs to be had
- Gentoo Rescue - Visually unassuming, this puzzle game holds many hidden interactions between its simple mechanics
Day 7
- Aethermancer - Monster tamer x Roguelite. Fatnastic pixel art, involved combat, and lots of good design decisions that make you question why this wasn't done sooner
- AVENGE MYSELF - An actually difficult speedrunning game, that requires you to not only go fast, but also to decide the path to run through in very open levels
- Shrink Rooms - A box-pushing puzzle game, but the play area shrinks every few moves. Neat concept that can get surprisingly tricky
Top Picks
While all of the highlights above are worth trying out, some will be better than others. Obviously I couldn't play everything, and I tend to focus on indies, so there likely are many other good demos I haven't even touched. That being said, below are my favorites from this Next Fest, in no particular order:
Haste: Broken Worlds
I enjoy games where you need to go fast. The balance between increased speed and decreased control makes for an incredibly effective skill-based system. Especially when it's pulled off with the smoothness of butter-smeared running shoes. And this game delivers in heaps.
The main gameplay is roguelike in nature, with short levels for you to run through as you approach the boss at the end. It's a good enough excuse to run through dozens of procedurally generated levels as you collect sparks, keep up speed, and generally try not to die. It's a ton of fun, and has oddly fitting Risk of Rain 2 vibes.
The Knightling
It's great when games have a sense of consistency, and The Knightling excells in that. You have a shield. That's it. Bring it up to defend. Swing it to attack. Throw it for range. Sit on it to slide and traverse the world faster. There is a wide plethora of interactions from just this single piece of equipment, and there are teases for more in the full game. Such focus alone is worth admiring, but it's also paired with a great game around it.
The enemies feel good to fight. The quests are pleasant, with a good balance of humor and seriousness. The world is very open, with lots of nooks and crannies for you to explore. There is space to ruin this first impression further in the game, but I have high hopes for this to be a great 3D open world action-adventure metroidvania collectathon. Gosh, we really need better genre names for stuff like this...
Aethermancer
This game is visually stunning. I'm hard to please when it comes to pixelart, but man does this game deliver in spades. It's so pretty to look at you don't even need the rest of the game for some people to enjoy it. But for those of us who aren't just satisfied with looks, the gameplay itself is very well crafted as well.
At its core, Aethermancer is a monster tamer with a roguelite gameplay loop. Your monster level up as you fight, both within the run — unlocking new abilities and buffs — as well as through overall progression, strengthening them more permanently, albeit also a lot slower. In combat itself you have to balance generating elements and using them up, creating deep multi-turn strategizing of what move to use when. The only real downside is it's quite length for a demo, so the full game's roguelike runs might be humongous. But that's not necessarily a bad thing in this type of game.
Bonus Micro-review!
I actually played this last week during the Fest, but could not share it due to an embargo. Now that the prologue is out, have an extra review, as a treat.
Steel Century Groove: Midnight
The game is certainly something different. You traverse a futuristic world where giant mechs are used for dance battles with the same frivolity as pokemon fighting. The visual design direction is so unique I'd struggle with saying it's either good or bad. It's just truly its own thing, and as much as I did find the repetitive and extremely synchronized robot movements a bit jarring, it's also just a big fancy background piece for the actual rhythm combat, which is just as unique as the rest of the game. If you like experiments, this game is a bit of one, but just gently so. Overall enjoyable enough to put the main game on my radar.
Playtime: 1h+
Massive thank you for reading if you got this far, seeing people appreciate these micro-reviews is why I keep writing them. Do consider joining the mailing list for the blog, and I'll be back June 8th, with Steam Next Fest 25|2 Day 0