They should've kept Bowser Jr. a secret. People would've started theorizing that he's in the movie because the trailer opened with a small Bowser using a paintbrush
A roundup of the demos I tried for Steam Next Fest, commenting on the ones I found to be great, worthwhile, worthy of comment or just interesting to discuss, and sometimes the terrible ones. I did one for the summer one this year as well. Same provisions as there, gold-silver-bronze order except where noted.
Also to get it out of the way above the cut this time: as in past Next Fests, I kept a count and list of the names of every roguelike I found before I called off my demo search, usually choosing to cut at 25-30 demos or ~100 roguelikes. Sometimes I get deranged and go over, sometimes I am crushed and go under.
This one's list is here; I was shown 104 roguelikes to 18 demos selected. Then, on Friday during my lunch break, I felt despair at that ratio as it was worse than usual, and went and looked for a few more without counting any additional roguelikes, getting to 25 demos. This genre is a plague and I long for it to fuck off and for people to try and make real games, but it's only getting worse with the continuing blight of Vampire Survivor's popularity and the foul plague of generative AI assets.
For comparison, the lists of June 2025, October 2024, and June 2024.
I won't discuss all 24 demos I did play, just the ones I found noteworthy enough to mention. Before I do, though, I have three to mention in case anyone was curious.
Death In Abyss and Don't Stop Girlypop failed out as neither have controller support, and I find 3D action games of any variety uncomfortable to play on keyboard and mouse. Both seem like great times in their own ways but fuck off with that.
Lumines Arise is a demo to distinctly avoid; it wouldn't close the game properly when I tried to quit it, so I had to alt-tab to right-click close the window, whereupon it stayed alive as a process and didn't respond to Task Manager end attempts. I had to kill it from command line, and Steam wouldn't acknowledge it as closed until I shut down my PC, turned it back on and then hit the Stop Running button in Steam. As it opens with a big fuckoff EULA and some required-acceptance guidelines for The Enhance Community (TM) and its Content (TM) I assume it was trying to install a crypto miner or some other insane shit, but seriously actually the game is likely just a shithouse port. To the sewers with it.
Off we go.
Absolum
Miracle of miracles, you godless cretin, you not only got over the line despite your affliction, you got into the upper echelon of demos I enjoyed this fest. Absolum is a beat 'em up "roguelite" from studios Dotemu, Guard Crush Games and Sugarmonks, but particularly that middle one, who developed Streets of Rage 4. Absolum is thus similarly a really fucking good feeling beat 'em up, and I was able to tolerate its roguelike side because it's barely there, to the point it probably shouldn't be.
It's standard stuff but excellently executed; basic light hit-string, heavy attack, special that uses meter. You have a dash-hop for evades, you grab enemies when you do an attack while right on top of them, walk up and down the screen and kill ass. The roguelite element is every now and then an item that gives stuff like 15%+ movement speed or your attacks 2% δ damage when Neptune shines its radiation upon the wastes of Pluto is vomited up at the end of a screen. Sometimes they do normal upgrade things like add an extra or new attack at the end of your hit string or modify an existing move majorly, but for the most part it's modifiers so small as to be meaningless.
But goddamn does the gameplay feel good. Movement is great and exact, hits feel and sound fucking great, elements like boss armour are clearly and cleanly communicated. I broke the boss of the goblins' armour and proceeded to hammerfist his shit against a wall, bouncing him off of it and spiking him down and continuing to hit before he got back up to continue the fight and it felt incredible.
About the only other issue I take with it is it has just two players, but also, to be fair, the screens and character sizes and all are clearly sized for two characters only and it'd take some doing to add even a third easily. Oh, and the map doesn't work on Playstation controllers in the demo.
Well worth your time, not enough people enjoy beat 'em ups.
Conjunctivitalizer
Conjunctivitalizer is a shmup that looks like it crawled straight off the Super Nintendo, or perhaps the Mega CD. The pixel art, animations, fonts and more are pixel perfect for 16/32-bit 90s shmups, it's absolutely gorgeous, and has nice music too. It feels real nice to play, with an interesting central gimmick: there are no powerups in the stages themselves, they are earned by hitting score thresholds. Thus, getting big score quick is the key to everything, and to feed this you have the enemy bullet system.
Yellow and blue bullets can be absorbed with your sword attack, a short-ranged swing. Yellow bullets get absorbed and fill your super meter, a big screen-covering laser swing that turns all slain enemies into high-point-value items. Blue bullets get reflected, and if they kill an enemy, they release high-point-value items. Red bullets can't be handled at all and will simply hurt you.
That's another thing, too, you have HP instead of dying in one hit. That gets paired with the ability to burn your super meter on HP recovery, but doing so also eats 1.5% of your score; if you fall under a score threshold you lose the powerup again, instead of losing it on hit. It's an extension on being weakened on hit/death in other shmups, making it now a player decision based on how they're doing otherwise.
Fascinating ideas in Conjunctivitalizer, and it has fantastic presentation. An easy recommend.
Fantasy Maiden Wars - DREAM OF THE STRAY DREAMER
It's Super Robot Wars but Touhou. And I do mean Super Robot Wars, like down to the exact style of menus, the style and cadence of battle animations, transition effects and more. It's goddamn impressive, and accordingly it looks fucking great. Being Touhou, it has killer music, too.
It's a turn-based strategy RPG set on grids, with a whole pile of systems and mechanics, many of them neat and remarkable translations of Touhou's shmup mechanics to the format. For example, enemies emit danmaku fields in a radius around themselves, and when you enter them your character takes defensive stat debuffs as they're now dodging bullet hell patterns. To combat that you can enter Focus Mode, which restores your stats and can improve others, but now you cannot flawlessly dodge attacks for no damage, your character grazes all attacks like you'd graze bullets for score in Touhou. You take guaranteed minor damage but your accuracy isn't afflicted so your attacks back will be vicious.
There are piles of dialogue scenes between fights, too, it's not going light on any of this. It seems to be recreating various mainline Touhou plots as arcs (the demo is early bits of the "Scarlet Arc", for example). This is a big and meaty one.
About my only issue is a frequent, recurring one with demos in these events; I couldn't get access to a game config/settings screen, and thus couldn't set the game to full screen. I could have missed it, I suppose, but c'mon people just do this shit by default. I know not everyone is an OLED-toting freak but even so.
Homura Hime
An advisory, to start: if you have a Nvidia GPU and the game is booting to a black screen that makes noises when you hit buttons, go to the Nvidia Control Panel and set Vsync to "On" specifically, not "Fast" or "Matches 3D Settings". The game can't boot properly with it on Fast because Unity is a fucking blight.
Despite that, Homura Hime is the star of this October's show. I've been waiting on it for a few years now since its debut trailers. It's one of those indies deeply inspired by a very specific game and wanting to recreate its gameplay their own way, and in this instance that gameplay is Nier Automata. And kind of Platinum games generally, but very specifically Nier Automata. I mean, shit, look at that screenshot, it even has the Nier bullet orbs. Homura's swords hover at her back like 2B's do and her little onmyo priestess partner turns into a weird chibi of her own head which just behaves exactly like 2B's pod, machine-gun laser bullets and all.
It's a character action game with enemies that do bullet hell patterns every now and then. It nails the feel it needs to far more than any other character action game demo I've played in these fests, like Genokids or that godawful sentai one from the June fest, letting you cancel out of any animation at basically any point, which pairs with a luxurious moveset of different utilities and button combinations to let you get fucking crazy real fast. Importantly, this also lets enemies get aggressive and lets boss attacks get a bit crazy, and it's all fine because you don't get locked down for having the audacity to try and play the game.
It's not as generous as Automata's parry/evade could be, either, if that's a concern; the timing is tighter so you do have to try, and Homura mostly doesn't move as fast as 2B could (barring any upgrades in the final game for that), but it feels great all the same. It is on the easy side once you get the feel for timing and such down, and the ranking system for fights is generous, but I'll take easy but competent over most other action games I've been exposed to in these fests.
It also has an inspired take on the mechanic every one of these indie action devs love: Homura has a set of big special attacks on cooldowns. But, instead of being on timers, Homura's are hit-based, coming online again when you land the right amount of hits. So if you know your moveset and what you're doing, you can get them back extremely fast and string them back in, adding a pacing element to ripping enemies apart and looping around your moveset.
Also you'll notice the trend here but goddamn I love the art style. The character designs are all fucking top tier stuff, artwork CGs and images in cutscenes are great, Homura's animations are great, the works.
I'm glad it suddenly came back to life this year, I hope it's coming soon!
Majogami
Inti Creates steps up to the bat with a very different art style from their usual ones. The main artist and director is Yuji Natsume, art director on Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I am most reminded of the art of Giga Wrecker Alt, a Game Freak game that I and maybe five other people played (I'm quite fond of it). This is much smoother in animation, though; it emulates a paper-craft look a bit but it isn't the "tweening" paper-doll stuff where limbs basically spin on wheels, which turns me off horribly in a lot of indie or small games.
It's a character action platformer, they say, which tracks; you tear ass across screens splitting enemies in two with extremely fast, stylish and flashy animations, though it is all very simple in execution. Basic attacks fill your magic meter, which is spent with RT/R2 to use "Setsuna", an attack that makes your character Shiroha teleport to and nothing-personnel her enemies instantly. An occasional wrench is thrown at you in the form of enemies that need multiple Setsunas (Setsunae, if you will) to die or need to be Setsuna'd from a specific direction, indicated by a coloured line on the required vector. The Setsuna has a different bright colour depending on if you do it at horizontal, vertical or diagonal vectors, so it's all pretty readable and easily understandable despite it all.
The boss fight in the demo is a bit of a clusterfuck of just Setsuna-ing the living shit out of it and going back to normal attacks for the moments where you run out of magic meter. The game is exceptionally pretty and stylish - the art style and character designs are fucking great, there's lots of cutscene CG art and whole special weapon and form transformation sequences to do in levels, the boss has a big button-mash attack-clash spectacle sequence, the works. It's a visual treat and it's high on my list to get to when I'm free. Fast, vicious, pretty, it's all some games need to be.
Yunyun Syndrome: Rhythm Psychosis!
A rhythm game focusing on denpa music, framed by and interspersed with segments of plot about a mentally ill (funny) girl in a bad household with an abusive mum spreading cult-like fanaticism for the anime character she's fixated on. Needy Streamer Overdose but you don't manage the character, you play rhythm game beatmaps to Marisa Stole The Precious Thing and rifle around her room for new songs and textboxes about her parents' divorce. Cheery!
It's real good, and it is massively stylish; I initially thought it was opening to a window and would have no fullscreen, only for an animation of Yunyun (the anime character the girl is fixated on) to stride across the screen to it and get in, whereupon it went fullscreen. Yunyun has piles of detailed animations and flourishes all over, as does the girl (Qtie, her handle is).
It seems to mandate keyboard control but that's fine for a rhythm game, though its default of SDKL was a bit odd for me (one button for each lane, 4 lanes of notes across all songs/difficulties that I saw). It fits well, besides, as the framing device is Qtie just vomiting text onto social media, repeating copypastas (like the "if x has 1000 fans I am one, if x has 1 fan I am it" one) and babbling obsessive lines as the music blares in her headphones. You're keeping rhythm to keep up her flow state.
Presentation masterwork, music choices are generally great (There's an aiobahn track in there, fuck yeah), it's good fun. Looking forward to seeing if she kills her mum for her anime waifu.
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That's the golds, the top tier. Now into the silvers, the fine but not mindblowing, great with minor issues, or ones that didn't enthuse as much as the above but were still good.
Alruna: End of History
A Metroidvania doing the NES/Famicom graphic style, and it has a hell of a way with words. When it isn't pulling from My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park lyrics for lines, it's coming up with fantastic terms and imagery like "Necro-Industrialists" or the above image. I did google to see if that was a lyric but nothing came up and that's in my search history now.
Alraune people enter the temples of the necro-industrialists, either seeking to undo their terrible work done in pursuit of a paradise, or undergo their own religious nightmare, it seems to vary by who you speak to. Either way, get in there and kill they ass.
It's pretty good, it looks and controls great. It has a particularly heavy puzzle focus that incorporates multiple rooms and sometimes whole areas. It's here in silver because I hit a conundrum with it; the core puzzle blocking access to the boss key for the demo boss room involves using orange-green switches that flip if orange or green blocks are tangible to get access to a powerup that temporarily gives you fire-elemental attacks to light a torch to get where you're going. The solution I found doesn't feel like a real solution, even though I could see it somehow being one. In fact, it feels like I stumbled ass-first into a glitch, but it's so consistent and easy I almost feel it's intentional.
ROT13 to hide it: Va na nqwnprag ebbz, univat ybbcrq nebhaq gur nern jvgu gur terra-benatr fjvgpurf frg gb terra gb bcra gur jnl gb gur sver cbjrehc, V qvq n fyvqr juvyr va n ovg bs jngre naq whfg jrag fgenvtug guebhtu gur jnyy. Thus I didn't need to find a path around the now orange-sealed rooms, which I was having distinct trouble finding.
Thus the conundrum; was that intentional or was it a glitch? It's not the best of feelings to come away with. There is a lot of nuance to your movement and attack mechanics it doesn't tell you about, so maybe?
This is a sequel to another game, the fantastically named Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists, so I'm going to grab that at some point for taste. Worth a look, certainly.
Bubsy 4D
Bubsy's path through industry history is an oddly poetic fit for the various firms and publishers who've held and tried to use his rights over the years. Like the dipshit himself, it's a series of once-successes turning into distinct failures, going into a series of attempted revivals leading us to now. Hell, the publisher here is the third incarnation of Atari by my count, and this is revival attempt 4 for the stupid bastard:
2015, publisher Tommo dropped extremely cheap ROM-dumps of the two SNES games onto modern platforms.
2017, holding firm Billionsoft through the name Accolade attempted an extremely cheap and fucking terrible new game, The Woolies Strike Back, trying to lean into "haha Bubsy is annoying and we get it".
2019, Accolade again trying with Paws On Fire, an auto-runner by the Bit.Trip Runner devs. It's shit and cheap as well.
2026, Bubsy 4D.
This isn't even the first "hand the licence to a semi-prominent indie with a good rep" attempt, either! This time, however, they landed on an actually good pick and put actual money into it, as far as can be seen. To their credit, this newest Atari has been doing that a fair bit, I still need to get back to that Yars Metroidvania by Wayforward, its SNF demo was decent.
Bubsy 4D comes from Fabraz, developers of Demon Turf and more critically Demon Tides, an open-world 3D platformer whose demo I swear I played in a Steam Next Fest but can't find record of. Bubsy 4D is basically Demon Tides but not open-world, and thus is pretty good.
You have a rather elaborate moveset for a 3D platformer, as Fabraz like their schmovement, with a flutterjump after normal jumping, a pounce dive that can home in on specific things, Bubsy's traditional glide, wall-clinging and jumping, a fat ball form to go rolling at high speeds with and many more unlockable moves, like a spin jump activated by jumping after running in a circle in place. Levels have a lot of room to let you experiment with this to get mad fast times, but also piles of collectible shit around to go for if you want to do normal platforming. In and around this, you get Bubsy's new performance by Sean Chiplock, depicting him asa desperate and terrible fail-man who is rightly disrespected by everyone around him, whining and trying to lie to himself about it as he goes. The characterisation works well and is sold by Chiplock's performance, which includes multiple takes on Bubsy's quips like the dipshit cat isn't sure how to sell it best himself.
It controls and feels great, looks nice, has a lot of jokes and humourous things that actually work like censoring Bubsy's crotch when he isn't wearing anything up top as if he is only then naked, the works. I saw people giving a trailer of it shit for "being all schmovement and no levels" but not only does this demo paid put to that, I guarantee the same people would still call similar footage proof of virtue if you did it in Mario Odyssey or the like instead.
Poor fuck can't win but hell, maybe he can pull it off yet. Time will tell but it's a promising start.
Charoite Into The Deep
Minesweeper (sort of, if you could see where the mines are) with a dungeon crawler, where you're a little girl riding a golem and defusing the mines by punching them. Or a melee-only strictly grid-based Bomberman, if you prefer.
Each level is a small grid with a few enemies, some hidden traps, currency and rocks about. You punch enemies to kill them for powerups or keys, you can punch tiles to unearth what's under them, destroying traps, destroying currency or unearthing the stairs to the next floor. You have an MP bar you can spend to "dowse" and see what's under the tiles in a radius around you so you don't destroy any currency/can see where traps are for a split second.
It's neat enough, and I'm intrigued by what it might do with its story. It seems easy to just go into a zen state with, so I hope it has Steam Deck support sooner or later.
Into The Dataswarm
This one caught my eye because ooh, lil puzzle game, but also the self-proclaimed aesthetic inspirations were a mix of Mega Man Battle Network and the fucking MGS 1 VR Missions. And it checks out, is the mad part!
A delightful and simple puzzle game where you need to hack guards with your blaster to steal keys (which has a limited range and ammo, so positioning is key), moving around a grid in turns to get to them and then the exit. Unhacked basic guards walk in a square pattern, and once hacked they break this pattern and start going full-length dashes to the next wall that'll stop them, becoming either bigger obstacles or useful as the case may be. Hacked guards auto-hack any normal guards they touch, so finding a way to chain them is sometimes required.
The sort of simple puzzle game that can get tricky quick, especially for perfect-clearing levels which usually require the minimum possible moves to solve them. The trailer has things like stealth levels, too, so it should have some variety. Really neat, I look forward to it.
Kotama and the Academy Citadel
A Metroidvania with the usual modern blend-in of Souls elements, which is to say runbacks to your death spot and super high damage from enemies. It's Hollow Knight-y in a way, as in the original, not Silksong; during boss fights healing opportunities are extremely rare, it seems, and healing is a long and high-commitment action you need to complete in full to heal. Thus, boss fights basically demand learning the fight to perfect it.
Kotama is pretty slow in all of her actions, her normal walk is a dainty dander and her jumps are drifty, though none of it is unresponsive by any means. It requires a very specific cadence to timing your presses, as you really don't want to miss your parries as they're essential to survival, dodging isn't much of an option outside of highly telegraphed unblockable attacks (denoted by red flashes instead of yellow). You can chain parries together pretty quickly, so it's all very deliberate. The timing is roughly when the enemy attack hits you but it's hard to judge that for every enemy - the main boss of the demo is human-sized and not much bigger than you, and telling which part of her weapon swings are for flourish and which are actual hits isn't the most clear sometimes.
The odd thing is with healing. Your heal cost comes from your money, Luminite, which comes from enemies, chests and breakable gem clusters in the world. Healing costs a 1:1 ratio of HP to luminite, and you have 30 here max, so a full heal (you do get to survive at 0 HP unless an attack goes way over in damage, seems like) costs 30 luminite. By the time I got to the main demo boss, I had, well, 1800+.
So healing and taking damage while exploring is completely incidental, don't even worry about it. There's no shop to gauge the economy with in the demo, but I can't image it ever being unmanageable or an issue. It's a curious way of doing it, but not bad, I think.
I quite like it, it has a very pleasing visual style with nice, popping and colourful Live2D portraits for dialogue. Kotama's design is great, and the choice of using a traditional Japanese-style paper umbrella as a weapon is delightful, it's all very aesthetic. Kotama also has lots of little animations like skidding to a halt, waving her tail when doing things and so on that add a lot of little character bits. I'm keeping an eye on it, myself.
RED DAWN
A turn-based strategy RPG about schoolgirls who go to a school that also does modern warfare training, and it gets besieged by another such school. Your typical Girls Und Panzer/Blue Archive type of thing, where all bullets and explosions may as well be airsoft and water balloons, i.e. delightful stuff. I quite like the simple 3D style here, it looks neat.
It's pretty Firaxis XCOM-like, you have a half/full cover system, destructible cover and have two action points to double move or move-and-shoot with, the usual. But, it has an honestly neater interface for gamepad controls than basically any other strategy or tactical game I've played in SNFs, barring perhaps Fantasy Maiden Wars which is plainly intuitive. You highlight a character, hit A, and then hit a D-pad direction to move, attack, use skills or use items.
It all works very neatly, and I'm surprised that it has no issues with getting into place, pathfinding or the like, which I've seen crop up for games like this in these Fests a fair bit. About the only issue is the English translation is pretty bad, but in an earnest way that doesn't have the hallmarks of modern machine or AI translation. The very grammar is garbled in a way that suggests extremely literal translation, and likely done personally, or by really, really old translation software at worst. It is, however, legible enough to play with perfectly fine and get the gist well enough.
I'm a sucker for this sort of shit, being a big fan of GuP/BA both, so I'm in.
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And finally, the bronzes, in the usual short fashion. The ones that are just alright or okay, sometimes ones I really liked but just didn't have much to say about.
Duskfade: Kingdom Hearts by way of Sony first-party PS2 platformers, particularly Jak 1 and Ratchet & Clank. Pretty neat but controls need tuning, it's really slippery and slide-y with movement.
Heroes of Might And Magic: Olden Era: That sure is HoMM alright. I love seeing the roots of ancient King's Bounty in a game so freshly modern, tickles me every time. On the radar as Ubisoft have wasted this series and are now handing it out to people who actually care.
Lady Dracula: Classic-vania that decides the best addition is, uh, Donkey Kong Country barrel cannon and bird transformation mechanics? It's okay but inconsistent about its commitment to the OG NES/FC Castlevania aesthetic; CRT filter and retro sound effects but entirely untouched vapourwave OST and animations far too complex and smooth for NES/FC with no attempt to disguise. Very basic simple level design and boss design.
PIXEL DASH: Toast of Destiny: Auto-runner where you jump and Shin Goku Satsu past obstacles. Simple but tricky, kind of charming, very forgiving and quick with retries. Occasionally eats inputs terribly, though. Might be worth a punt if cheap.
Rope-kun Adventure: This has been around, demo-less, for eons at the regular Tokyo Game Dungeon sales/promo events on Steam, so glad to see it. Neat little puzzle game about rope tricks and rope-work, looping around objects to activate things or garrotte enemies. Hope it's out soon.
Super Beast World: High-speed platformer about chaining jumps, attacks and so on to keep a big combo going over levels. It's decent enough, but sprites and screen width are a bit small for how fast and busy this gets. Sometimes shit just doesn't seem to work, that or the dev has an arbitrary limiter on wall-jumps. Decent enough, dev patched it to put fullscreen in so they eventually understood.
Yokai Goddess: Pocky & Rocky-like, very openly, also claims Touhou, Deltarune and Corpse Party as inspirations. Curious to see that pan out; it's decent enough an approximation of Pocky & Rocky, wish demo had a bit more to it.
Zako no Ahiru: One of the spawn of Benett Foddy's Getting Over It, only this time there's an anime girl calling you names as you play for sucking. Well, ostensibly; in practice half her lines are just idle thoughts or her getting distracted, so it's less about being teased by a bratty girl and more listening to a girl with unmedicated ADHD talk away as you play an okay game while she sometimes remembers she's supposed to be teasing you. Level-based to avoid running out of lines, I think.
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I already went over the fail-outs and the one disaster one, and the roguelike lists and all that. When you look at the amount of golds and silvers this time, and the quality of them, this SNF ended up pretty good but the ratio of roguelike swill being shown to me instead of real games was inordinately high this time, it was a bit crushing.
And hell, a bum Steam Next Fest wouldn't be too bad sometimes, my backlogs per platform are insane and I hear tell of old treasures getting translations or dumps every other week, and then there's shit like fan PC recomps of games rendering the Xbox worthless. Far too much to get to to fret about any lull.
This one took forever because I get swept up with the lads in trying (and succeeding, eventually) in slaying Omega Savage in MonHun Wilds, but these usually do end up late so alas. Quite a few devs will keep their demos up, so don't fret too much, and they'll be back around in a few months.
Now, back to my great endeavour with eating the entire Trails series.
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