Reviews Steam Next Fest - June 2025

[Virtual Ruminant]

How to Next Fest:


Play Demos: Hover over any game on the Steam Store Next Fest Page and you'll immediately find a button to install the playable demo. Try one! Or try a dozen.

Wishlist Your Favorites: Find a game you want to hear about when it launches? Hover over any game and click the star icon in the upper-right corner to add it to your Steam wishlist. You'll get a spiffy email notification when that game releases.

Check The Current Charts: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest?tab=23

Post Your Impressions / Opinions / Reviews: In this thread!

 

[Panda Pedinte]

So many demos to try I'm just lacking the proper time, but I'll try a few and post some short opinions as the festival goes.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

First demo played and it was for Wordplay. It's like Scrabble! meets Balatro made by Game Maker's Toolkit folks. Overall it has a nice presentation but as someone who isn't a native English speaker it can get a bit harder trying to form longer words.

 

[Blizniak]

Stuff I can recommend so far:

Really short demo but it's adorable.


It's a one button mobile game but it's a relaxing low stakes precision platformer and the demo is huge. I played over 50 levels, unlocked a bunch of modes and still wasn't done.


I was very skeptical of this one prior to trying it but it's pretty well written and actually funny.


You have to request access to play this one but I got it instantly so I assume everyone's welcome. It's Sid Meier's SimGolf, there's nothing else to say really. If you miss SimGolf try this.

 

[manchego obfuscator]

Extremely charming and polished 3D platformers with excellent movement mechanics; Big Hops looks to be more of a traditional 3D platformer, whereas Gecko Gods has more of an exploration/puzzle focus.



Vampire Survivors meets a vertically scrolling shooter meets Breakout, with light base-building mechanics in between rounds. Not usually my cup of tea but I can see how this one could become pretty addictive.



Cinematic 3D puzzle/adventure about herding animals, from the developers of the FAR duology. I'm not sold on how herding works and the very limited control you have over the herd's movement (you can either stop their movement entirely or push them away from you, and those seem to be your only options), but might grow on me.



3D platformer with origami art style and where you can fold your character into different shapes. Shows some promise, but the movement of the default character is way too slow, and the level design isn't doing anything particularly exciting.



Walking sim/investigation game with static 3D models of real people scanned in via photogrammetry, about "diving" into people's minds to piece together their memories. Very cool premise (the "diving" is visualized as an underwater mindscape), art style, and simple puzzle mechanics, though had some significant optimization issues.



Metroidvania from the Hyper Light/Solar Ash devs. Very promising and I liked the feel of movement and combat, but some of the platforming doesn't work as well as it should and there are serious optimization issues.



Sci-fi open-world adventure with great-feeling hoverboard traversal. More demanding on my GPU than a game with simple visuals that had Switch as its lead platform should be, but what I played seemed encouraging even though the Switch version got mixed reviews.



2.5D Metroidvania with fantastic movement mechanics and a lovely watercolor art style. Undermined by the demo being capped at 1080p and some questionable design decisions (checkpoints are too far apart, and you need to spend in-game currency to acquire access to the map, but the game doesn't bother to explain how much currency you need or exactly how this system works), which will hopefully be fixed in the the full release.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

One of those intentionally Lo-Fi horror games that make up 50% of all games on itch.io now, but this one has anthro (as in furry) NPCs and at least gets straight to the point (which is: being weird) and doesn't waste your time.




Since "Space Tail: Every Journey leads Home" was unpublished on every platform, the sub-genre of hand-painted four-legged-animal-protagonist 2D platformer needs a a new champion and this game might become it. The player controls a cat this time and while it's not as mechanically ambitious as Space Tail was, the quality of the artwork is up there and the platforming is pretty decent as well.




This one also has a cat protagonist (walking on two legs however), but with much fewer pixels to its sprite. This game goes hard for a classic gameboy aesthetic and pretty much nails it - and it's also really fun to play.




Bennett Foddy going Epic Bacon on poor old QWOP. Less hard to play than I imagined and way, way less funny than I ever expected. And harder on the GPU than it has any right to.




The other rage game with surprisingly high demands on the computer it's running on, but at least the protagonist in this one is silent and the narrator does not have an annoying Aussie accent (he has an annoying European accent instead).




Style over substance.


'

This game recently got a shoutout from Second Wind and I have no idea what Nick Calandra was smoking that day. It's ok until the combat starts.




Incredibly polished. The animation and voice acting are premium streaming show quality and the gameplay ... well, there isn't too much of it, but it fits in really smoothly with the narrative. And even though the writing is full of MCU-style quippy dialogue (not surprising given the scenario), normally an absolute showstopper for me, I found myself enjoying it.




Okomotive of Far: Lone Sails and Far: Changing Tides fame does it again with a slow-burn, low-intensity-big-mood puzzling game, this time in third person 3D. You herd a bunch of very big and very fuzzy cow-like creatures through a changing landscape and have to take care of their well-being as well as open up the way ahead to progress. The game feels like a throwback to a particular kind of early 2010s indie that Sony featured a lot when they tried to position the PS3 as a platform to play offbeat, narrative-focused indie games on, like Rain or Papo Y Yo. Enjoyed this one a lot.




This one feels more like a game that would show up as a PS+ freebie on PS4 ca. 2014-2016. The styling is impeccable, but the gameplay, at least the one level the demo lets you play, is quite basic and not very exciting. Could be a case of a badly cut demo that just shows off a tutorial.

 

[Vantr]

This is a nice little puzzle game where you record your movements and play them back. I thought the recording mechanic get stale pretty quickly but they add enough new interactions to keep it interesting.



Alright a little bias here but I was looking forward to this one for ages and it did not disappoint. One thing I enjoyed during the demo was there was a lot of dialogue flow between the characters during the dispatch part of the gameplay. Made that whole aspect of that gameplay much more enjoyable.



Played 1 round of this. Did not impress at all. Looks like it was aiming for a MMO-ish Hades and it feels like one of those live service games and I'd rather just a complete singleplayer experience.



This impressed me a lot. Roguelike breakout and I can see this getting very addicting. Bonus points because I decided load this up on my steam deck to get a few runs in bed and noticed that it had cloud saves for the demo.



I liked the demo for this. Seems to be a 2D souls with it's rest and co-op + invade mechanics. The combat system is pretty interesting with light/heavy/feints there is also a block and dodge. You can also combine directionals with light/heavy/feints to do different moves.



Got mad. Quit. They have options for making the game easier such as checkpoints and egg modifiers (I didn't dabble in these options).

 

[Panda Pedinte]

This got funded via kickstarter and so far was a fun 3D platformer, from the demo it seems that some levels may be very open.



Tried a bit of it but I quickly noticed I'm not in the mood to play a strategy game, so it's a pass for me after some minutes.

 

[Panda Pedinte]

It's a mix between picross and a decoration game. Solving the puzzles gives you more furniture to put in your rat's house. It's cute.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Classic arcade-style vertical-scrolling sh'mup. It's arcade-style hard as well (you die in one hit, three lifes, no continues), however, there's a training mode with infinite lifes. In story mode, you get to read a partially animated digital manga between levels. The quality here is impeccable, anybody who's into this genre should enjoy this.




From classic arcade to Apple Arcade, here comes the Steam port of Sping (previously called Sp!ng). One button, physics, 2D, super easy to pickup but surprising variety in the level design and challenges and super polished. Perfect breaktime game.




Anybody who's seen my reviews of point-and-clicks knows that I'm incredibly burned out on the genre and have zero patience left for obtuse puzzle designs and bad imitations of LucasArts classics from the 90s, so when I saw "fast-paced point'n click thrill-ride" in the game's description on Steam, I downloaded it purely driven by spite. "Let's see how much of a lie that claim is", I thought. Turns out: It's not a lie at all! This game really wants you to experience a story rather than get you stuck and I'm here for it. Definitely will buy this on release.




And, surprise upon surprise, I found ANOTHER point and click-style game that's really well-made and I REALLY want to play more of RIGHT NOW. This one however is more of a mood-piece (- what mood? The game's title says it all -) and, at least as far as the demo goes, there's zero puzzling involved. It's purely an exploration / narrative experience, but made entirely in gorgeous pixel-art that is somewhat retro-styled, but not so much that the game's whole identity becomes nostalgia-centric.




Incredibly well made stop-motion animated puzzle game, unfortunately one of the kind that is intentionally obtuse - there's zero instructions, zero hints, and after about 10 minutes of being stuck right away, the fantastic artwork on display turns from awesome into annoying. Real shame.




Side-scrolling sh'mup somewhat reminiscent of the 8/16-bit home computer classic "Wings of Fury", mixed with the arcade classic "Defender", plus a modern rogue-lite-ish semi-random ability/power-up system. Quite hard to describe since any game you could reference to describe it is 30-40 years old, give it a download if it looks interesting, it's only 250 megabytes.




Looks and plays like a prototype of a game, not sure putting this out as a demo was a good idea.




This looked so much like Golf With Your Friends, I only downloaded it to see if it did anything notably different from Golf With Your Friends. Turns out: It does not.

 

[Parsnip]

I haven't been playing demos for the past few fests but I always like reading impressions from folks.

 

[Virtual Ruminant]

Microids steps in on Frogwares territory and brings a Sherlock Holmes game of their own, but it's not Sherlock Holmes, it's Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. High quality all around, fans of the genre will love it.




This game clearly is the (solo) developer's realization of a quite intricate and pretty strange original fantasy world of theirs, so it feels almost mean to criticize it, but underneath the bombastic presentation and pretty underwater graphics, it's just a pretty generic hack'n'slash and the "vast ocean" is just quite old-school-ish narrow corridor-style levels.




Another prototype of a game (it even opens a python debug console window in the background when you launch it), which really should not be in Next Fest at all.




The art-style and post-apocalyptic scenario of this game really intrigued me and I wanted to like it, but the core gameplay just isn't there, the controls are imprecise and the difficulty is high and I quickly got frustrated. Apparently this is slated to release next week, so there's little hope of the final product being any better either.




The game's description reads like it might finally be a continuation of the brilliant 2012 student game "Perspective" (which is free on Steam and everyone should play), but it's actually more similar to "The Pedestrian", but with awkward controls and pretty generic level design.




An endless-driving game. Well, barely a game. I got bored with it after 10 minutes. Looks worse in motion than on the screenshots, too.




The ambition with this one clearly is to make the next big scifi-horror third person action game, but the actual product feels more like a generic Half Life 2 mod. The demo hilariously ends after about 20 minutes of slowly trudging through snowly paths and empty rooms, just after you finally pick up a gun, but before you get a chance to shoot at anything other than an electrical closet.