Discovering Top Steam Game Demos Following Next Fest

Scrolling through last month’s Steam Next Fest was like visiting the local ice cream shop to taste the seasonal sweets — only to discover that the tubs of new flavors now extend so far into the distance that you can’t distinguish where the freezer ends and the horizon begins. Worse, four of every five flavors tasted like sawdust.

For the average, relatively curious gamer, there’s a perfect solution to the dilemma of “too much.” Wait.

Quick catch-up: Steam Next Fest takes place three times a year. Over just a few days, dozens of video game studios release demos for their upcoming games. Wares range from ultra-polished future masterpieces to mediocre time fillers, the former often lost amongst an abundance of the latter.

If you remember one thing from this story, may it be that most of these Steam Next Fest demos remain on Steam long after the festivals wraps. The ticking clock of a “limited-time” festival? Little happens when the countdown flips to zero. So don’t stress.

Good things come to those who wait… for others to do the work. Let the video game media processing machine do its job by burning the hundreds of hours and terabytes of hard drive space necessary to try everything. Maybe your favorite podcast personality makes a compelling case for the 1950s delivery truck simulator. Or a developer, who you follow on BlueSky, promotes their new TMNT project. Or you’re just a pro at this stuff, and you know to use the Steam Next Fest charts to monitor what’s getting the most downloads.

Waiting didn’t just save me time during Next Fest, narrowing my options; it improved the demos that I did play. Hell, I couldn’t have even navigated the crummy menus of The House of the Dead 2 Remake without a lengthy Reddit thread that had turned into collective IT labor. Siegecaster, a clever combination of tower defense and Vampire Survivors, includes a superficial tutorial, but the game’s complexities only resonated after I watched a YouTube video that explained how to play the damned thing.

So, maybe you missed Next Fest. Maybe you scrolled and got overwhelmed. Most likely, if you’re reading Polygon, you tried some demos and left a bit unsatisfied. No prob. The video game media machine is here to help — Polygon included!

And hey, once you’ve enjoyed some of the most praised picks, then dive into the full chaos. Because let’s be real, there’s still a certain pleasure to be had in an ice cream parlor with near-infinite flavors. And you never know what tub you’ll love.