Next Fest 26|1 Summary

This summary is a bit delayed due to some technical issues, but I'm back and here to talk about how the Next Fest went! This time around the average quality of the demos ended up being surprisingly high, with almost every demo of the 55 covered being an enjoyable time. On the flipside, there have been much fewer amazing must-play demos that are worth trying no matter your taste in games. Either way, consider trying or watching for any of the games below, as they deserve eyes on them.

Day by Day Rundown

Essentially a collection of all the highlights

Day 0

• Croak – A 2D platformer with charming art, and level design suited for both casuals and speedrunners
• Tiling Forest – A tiling puzzle game with surprisingly many layers to a seemingly simple premise

Day 1

• Denshattack! – An action-packed parkour train drifting runner game? It's the best kind of chaos

Day 2

• GRIDbeat! – Rhythm-based cybernetic dungeon crawler with maze-like level design
• Ultimate Control Machine – A precision (rage-y) game that changes your control scheme in very creative ways as you progress

Day 3

• Voidling Bound – Third person "shooter" revolving around evolving your "voidlings" to act as ever-stronger weapons
• Deep Dish Dungeon – A food-fueled dungeon exploration, looking for new meals with up to two others

Day 4

• ShantyTown – Cozy diorama-building game, densely packing buildings and decor to form little shanty towns
• Snacktorio – A 2D factory game all about creating meals
• The Mermaid Mask – Mystery game with excellent voice acting and art, and a promising mystery to solve

Day 5

• Burden Street Station – A surreal narrative-driven adventure. Unexpected dialogues and characters around every corner
• Iridescent – A parry-focused sidescrolling platformer. Punishing, but enjoyable

Day 6

• Altered Alma – A cyberpunk metroidvania with some novel moves for combat/platforming
• Phonopolis – A mix of a point'n'click puzzle adventure and an audiobook with very unique visuals

Day 7

• Enter the Chronosphere – A turn-based bullet hell roguelike. And yes, that combination does work surprisingly well

Honorable Mentions

Before I get to the best of the best, some games didn't make it into the Next Fest posting for one reason or another, but I still want to bring attention to them, because I do think they're worth your time. No screenies, just quick descriptions:

DEG

A puzzle game about coloring a grid that was a part of last Next Fest posting, however since then the demo got a complete redesign with a smoother difficulty curve, tons of new puzzles, rules, and QoL content. It's an entirely different demo that only shares the same core idea and gameplay, selling it even better than before.

Far Far West

A co-op PvE FPS, set in a steampunk western with a bit of magic and a lot of whimsy. It's chaotic, it's funny, it's got actually good gunplay and movement. If you enjoyed Deep Rock Galactic, then this one is a must-try. The only reason it didn't make it is because we played the playtest long before the Fest, and I didn't add it to my Day 0 list.

LEIF SHIFT: Prototype Theta

And finally a demo that is not on Steam so it could not participate in the festivities, but is nonetheless worth trying. It's made by a friend, but I genuinely think it's worth giving a whirl. It's a 2D platformer with combo-focused combat, made by the same person who made combat for Glyde the Dragon: Prologue. Action-heavy, so try it out if it's your thing!

Top Picks

As always, any of the above are worth checking out whether they're your kind of game or not. But below I'll have some extra details on the three games I think are most worth trying, all of which still have their demos up post-NextFest (as of writing this):

Burden Street Station

It's hard for me to really put into words how much I've enjoyed this game, partially because there is no single thing that really sells me on it, but the full package of a surreal narrative adventure, where you can never know who you'll meet or what'll be the next stop on the journey.

What I have enjoyed the most though is the writing. I have not enjoyed writing in a game this much in a long time. Scrabdackle had unparalleled whimsy, but this provides a mix of relatability and exaggerated characters, stirred to a perfectly smooth texture and baked on medium heat for the entire 80min runtime, providing an exquisite demo cake. It's not going to be for everyone, but it was perfect for me.

The gameplay itself is relatively simple. Explore around the surreal environments, talk to people, and once you get to know them enough you can start mimicking their speech patterns. You can then use those new speech personalities to unlock more dialogue with other characters, so on and so forth. It's simple, but there was a lot of care put into providing you a lot of options to say, even if most won't progress the story. Really good stuff if you don't need adrenaline pumping gameplay from your games.

Snacktorio

You can guess what this game is about from name alone. It's like Factorio, but you're making snacks. For some that will be enough to play or ignore this game, but I recommend you to be open to trying it, even if it's just for the adorable aesthetic it has:

Unlike most factory games, this one is level-based. This felt odd at first, and I can imagine some parts may get repetitive, but the game does provide some baseline machinery for later levels so you're not constantly starting from scratch, and this way the game can throw interesting new layouts at you, forcing you into tight spaces or limited resource spots, really requiring you to make spaghetti-crafting pipe-spaghetti. It's slow and steady and worth giving a whirl

Deep Dish Dungeon

At it's core, this is a mix of a survival game and a dungeon crawler. You slowly dive deeper and deeper into a dark and dreary dungeon, getting resources to craft yourself some basic food and light as you look for gear to help you explore deeper into the dungeon in a very open, almost metroidvania-esque way.

But the core gameplay loop is about treasures and food. First is your target, the other is all around the dungeon, offering you ways to cook new meals to increase your health to brave the areas with more enemies. It's a good loop at a chill pace, made even better by the multiplayer aspect. You bring in some friends, and you will have a chill time as you discover more loot, enemies, and food. Even solo I had a wholesome internet experience with two strangers joining the exploration, and I hope the full game will have more of that.

And finally, with a week-long delay, this concludes the first NextFest of 2026. As expected, I had less time this week, which might be related to all micro-reviews being on the shorter side this time around. Not sure if that's good or bad, the whole point is to have a very digestible pill, in which case less is better. But then less text means less details to share about the game. A surprisingly tricky balance that I try my best with! For now it is time for me to go into slumber, and return with another round of Day 0 reviews on 14th of June