Next Fest 26|3 Summary

Another week went by, and this time I managed to claw my way through 56 demos across all sorts of genres. In fact, this may have been one of the more varied Fests as there has not been any genre that particularly dominated like roguelikes or puzzle games have done in some previous editions. Some day I might run some analysis on all the demos covered, but right now it's summary time! Though before I get to that, I'd like to share some of my thoughts about Next Fest. Feel free to scroll down to the images if you're here for the games.

Thoughts About Next Fest

A little over a year ago I had a similar segment in a previous Next Fest Summary. Back then I talked about how Balatro tipped the scales for quick copycat games to be flooding the Fest with their grasp at fame. Don't get me wrong, this has happened before, but the quickly-made games (on Steam) were usually obviously an imitation of something else and thus could be more easily avoided when looking for Next Fest gems. The one-two punch of Vampire Survivors and Balatro provided devs with some basic blueprints of power-scaling gameplay which lead to many games trying to copy that style, and releasing their demos as means of marketing, trying to put themselves out there much too early for their own good.

We are now seeing a continuation of that trend. There were somewhere in the range of 7-8 thousand demos this Fest (I've seen conflicting numbers, potentially due to devs joining late/pulling out. SteamDB goes over 10,000 even), and I believe a lot of them weren't worth much, even if they weren't flat out terrible. There have been more and more demos that were... "empty entertainment" so to speak. Games that exist not without care like asset flips used to in the past, but they still lack a soul to them. And even if the gameplay is unique, they hardly feel like they do anything fresh. Now at this point some say "oh it's AI ruining gamedev," but I think the answer is a lot more nuanced than that.

To preface this I want to explain my process for selecting demos. Some I get direct from the source: a dev emailing me, someone telling me to check out a specific game, or me checking out someone that interacted with me on socials only to find that they have a demo worth trying. This process has not changed, but it only contributes a handful of the demos in my coverage. A lot more I get directly from Steam, digging through hundreds of demos. I essentially quickly judge every single demo I pass for its premise and style. The less generic it looks the more likely I am to check out the Steam page, potentially add it to my list of "maybes" and from there I may download it if it seems more worth it than the rest. The actual picking process is a lot more complicated since I consider many factors, but the gist of it is "I scroll, I pick, I play".

I've been participating in Next Fests since 2021 and have been covering them in more depth since 2024. At the start most things I looked at were an "interesting game someone made". Not all would be for my tastes, not all would be high quality, but most were competent in what they were doing. By the time I started covering the demos I played I have had to look through 2-5 demos to find something worthwhile. This year, it was more like one in 10-20 games that were worth considering, much less picking up. In part that is of course a mix of my changing standards and Steam's changing algorithms. But even considering those factors, I feel like there is a decrease in how many quality demos there are present proportionally during the fest. If it was just about Next Fest getting more popular or more games being made we'd see the same ballpark proportions, but I'm (subjectively) seeing a much higher ratios of rocks to gems.

So why is that?

The reasoning, in my opinion, is multiple factors coalescing into this overall trend. First of all, the age old desire to make the most profit with the least effort. On that, you put a slab of vague idea taken from a "successful but simple game". Lethal Company, Vampire Survivors, Balatro. All manner of shop/market/cleaning simulators. Something that's proven to work, so all you need to do is make something similar to try and bait people in. Interweaving through all that we have AI, which made pumping games out significantly faster and easier, across both assets and code, with no respect for actual consistency or quality. None of these factors alone are the cause of this shift, but together they stack up to form a noticeable degradation in overall quality.

A secondary trend coming from all of the above I've noticed are devs that are pumping out games en masse, presumably with hopes of one of them striking an audience. Now there is nothing wrong with having multiple projects going at once, or having focus on making small titles quickly so that if some of them fail it's not a big deal. More suited for the mobile market, but still fine. But a company like Dinomore Games has released one game in Dec/25, one in Jul/26, and has 9 more games with steam pages set to release soon, 6 of which are to come out within a month from now, 3 of which this next week. With how different all the titles are, there is no way that every single one of these games would not be improved if the studio worked on fewer projects at the same time. This, in turn, suggests that quality is not the main goal, leaving profit as the most likely motivator. Pay the $100 for a Steam page, create a basic thing that is passable – if empty – entertainment, hope to make more money back than you put in. I played one of these during the fest, Rhythm Roll, and it's... fine. One of the games of all time. It functions and does what it wants to do, half-decently even, but it possesses no soul to the project. In this case it matters little whether AI was used or not, what matters is that the end result is something that isn't "slop" in the modern understanding of the word, but potentially something worse: a seemingly fun little thing that is entirely hollow inside. And personally I think that's worse than slop.

I am a big proponent of video games being art. But I also recognize that they are entertainment as well. And to me, you can be both, but also you can be one without being the other. Most games have to strike a balance between art and entertainment. Between their desired scope and realistic expectations. Between the vision and the gameplay. This new wave of demos has not bothered with that. All they care is to pump products out, something in the vague shape of an entertaining idea, in hopes of it catching on. Entire focus on entertainment, none on the art. Not much focus on quality either, beyond basic functionality. And I think that's a real shame, because due to this rush for cash genuinely great games are harder to discover, in a world that already makes marketing a slot machine. But those games are still out there, so it's high time I share what I found as the most worthwhile during this Next Fest.

Day by Day Rundown

First, a quick collection of all the highlights. A "best of" for each day:

Day 0

• Dino Cleanup – A pixely 3D platformer about cleaning goop and reusing it for platforming. Extremely charming
• Beat Weaver – Rhythm game where each instrument/vocal is on a different track, and you need to swap between them

Day 1

• Magnavale: Eternal Soul – Castlevania but more modern quality, and dragon characters
• polymorphite – A soft mix of rhythm, dodging, board games, and more; in that order
• Anonymized – Puzzle game where your moves control where you can go. Sounds trivial, gets tricky quickly

Day 2

• Lelu – A relaxed metroidvania about a toy escaping a toy factory
• I Like Trains – Incremental game about building an expanding train network

Day 3

• Loftia – An MMO Farming Sim, with a lot of side activities to do alongside other people

Day 4

• Funeral for the Sun – Mystery game about who were the now-dead inhabitants of a ghost town
• Stip – A puzzle game where finding the true puzzles is a puzzle in it of itself

Day 5

• Citadrill – A game where you have to simultaneously drill down for resources, and use them to build a city on your drill
• Folder Dungeon – Roguelike dungeon crawler stylized off of a fictitious operating system

Day 6

• Shroud of Gloom – Puzzle point'n'click with great audiovisual polish some light spooks/jumpscares
• Remote Control – Control another person using only text commands, and explore a derelict spaceship

Day 7

• Temple of Glyphs – A brilliant puzzle game that you have to understand without any text
• Solar Voltage – Isometric platformer, stylized like old Sonic 3D Blast but with modern fluidity

Top Picks

As always, anything from the highlights above is worth giving a whirl to see how you feel about it. But if you're very strapped for time (and let's be honest, who isn't these days) then below are my favorites of this fest, starting with #1:

Magnavale: Eternal Soul

Look, I get it. Girl obsessed with dragons says the best game of the Fest was dragon Castlevania. But trust me when I say that this demo was good. It has significantly exceeded my expectations in size, it has nailed the visual aesthetic you'd expect from Castlevania while not copying anything specific (other than absorbing souls and general castle vibes I suppose), and is generally a good retro game without the retro jank.

The core of the game is two-fold: On one hand it's a platformer with a lot of enemies, where you need to both jump and fight your way to new areas. On the other it's a metroidvania where you need to get new movement abilities to unlock new areas. Some of those will come from defeating bosses, others from absorbing souls of defeated enemies. Either way you'll be exploring a lot around the surprisingly sizeable demo map, and all the areas are very different and distinct from each other, enemies included, so there is constantly new stuff around every corner.

Now to be fully fair, there is some frustration that comes from the game. I do dislike how combat requires you to be both very close to enemies for melee attacks, and not too close because of contact damage. It leads to the fights being awkward at times, in ways too convoluted to explain in a short summary such as this. Regardless, once I defeated a boss I struggled with due to contact damage it was a satisfying victory and not a sight of relief, so I think the combat may just be a me issue. Similarly how it was also a me issue when I was too blind to see an unexplored path, and just wandered aimlessly back and forth, very lost...

Small frustrations aside, it is an impressively well made demo that any fan of retro games is likely to enjoy.

Dino Cleanup

Dino Cleanup is one of the first games I've played for this Next Fest, and it hasn't left my mind since. The premise is simple: You're a dinosaur with a vacuum backpack, cleaning up goo spilled all over the place by some over-eager archeologist/scientist. The game is played as a 3D platformer with a lot of pixely charm.

Each level is split into three primary goals: Reach the end of the level, clean up all the goop in the level, and get three golden butterflies. That last one can be hiding in some harder to reach spots, or require you to help denizens of this land by cleaning goop off of them or doing a minor task for them. It's a simple and straight forward formula, but it really works with how cute the game is as a whole. And for those seeking something more, there are hidden secrets to find too! Though don't go expecting some overly complicated parkour or anything.

Now if cozy and simple pixel cuteness made by a single dev isn't your cup of tea, there is actually a second game with a surprisingly similar premise that I want to bring up as an Honorable Mention. Muri: Wildwoods also deals with cleaning up goop though from an alien and not prehistoric world. The game is area-based in an interconnected world, and the cleaning is more like powerwashing than vacuuming. A lot of differences, but if you're interested in something that's a more typical 3D platformer and with a higher budget, this might be for you.

Solar Voltage

Solar Voltage is probably the first game to ever induce nostalgia in me, and I am well aware how this might be biasing my opinion of it. It induced strong memories of Sonic 3D Blast, but it's also very much its own thing, with a more modern feel to it all, despite the isometric platformer aesthetic.

The demo is only two areas, but I really enjoyed their level design. It's not very challenging to traverse, but it does do a good job at leading the player from secret to secret. First you do the main stuff, but then it opens a gate or you realize you never went to some other side of a wall and decide to investigate until you find an optional path to get the remaining collectibles. And there are multiple secret movement techniques that I'm wondering if/how will come into play in the full game.

In the time it took me to write this summary the game managed to come out, so if it sounds interesting you can play the full thing now!

Potentially more than ever, the above are my subjective favorites. Not everyone will get the same feelings from playing them as I did, and that's okay. There are plenty of other recommendations from me for other genres, and plenty other games if none suit your fancy. Not every game genre makes for a good demo, or fits my type of coverage, so while I hope to help people find cool games, if nothing here is for you then you might need to dive a bit on your own. Whatever the case, thank you for reading this far, and I'll be back in four months with more new demos!