The Steam Next Fest June 2026 Roundup

Another Next Fest has come and gone, so here are some demo reviews:

Very Good

My Beautiful Faraway, Please Don't Be Cruel To Me - This game, more than any other that I've played maybe, makes me feel like I'm having a weird dream. There's the posterized look with the forced 4:3 aspect ratio for one, which makes every frame look like a pre-render from an old CD-ROM game. Then there's the way everyone speaks and acts. People seem stuck in time and every dialogue feels like you're catching the the middle of a longer conversation. Most of the demo involves walking between desolate locations, always followed by those enormous satellite dishes in the distance. Does this make it sound like I enjoyed the demo? Because I really, really did.

Green Mist Over Portland - There's a pattern emerging where I discover one really good database thriller per Next Fest. This pleases me. What's exciting about this one is that you're playing a kind of psychic that can hear conversations of the past, but only if she knows the exact time, location, and who was present. The gameplay shakes out like this: you listen in on an exchange, usually containing a few scraps of information, a license plate number for example. Next is the traditional sleuthing step, where you might look up that number in the MI5 database and find out the owner got a ticket in another town a week earlier. Find out who they were there with, listen in, and so on. Having to know the location, people, and time really explodes the possibilities and makes it less likely to just stumble into information. It also breaks up the usual text search gameplay these things usually have, as much as I love it. The story seems highly exciting so far.

About Fishing - You probably saw this during a showcase last week. The atmosphere is incredibly dense. The little town you're in contains the absolute minimum amount of buildings to work, and even so things are crammed together, on top of each other, or combined arbitrarily. The church is also a prison. The fishing has more to it than I expected, specifically the casting. You get a fair amount of "aftertouch" while your hook is in flight, which you have to use to get into little nooks and crannies. As such, the fishing locations are small but complex. There's also a big element of secret finding, like locating details in the environment and throwing your hook at it just to see what happens. The story is bizarre, at least for now. It'll for sure be a scary game. Maybe not "skeleton jumps out" scary, but more "finding a decade old corpse in a lake" scary.

Bombanana - This one is just plain hilarious. The base concept is this: three monkeys defuse a bomb. One is blind, one is deaf, one is mute. Together you solve Keep Talking-style puzzles. Really makes you rethink how you communicate. I do hope the full version includes more complex modules. For now, once you've solved a module once or twice, everyone knows how to do it and the chatter gets overly "efficient". I want the mute monkey to have more reason to use their emotes.

Quite Good

RetroSpace - Boy am I glad I decided to check this out. At first blush I thought the game would be more like Bioshock, but nah, this is an ImSim. Specifically I sense a lot of Prey inspiration. If you don't know, Prey is one of my favorite games ever, so I'm quite excited. It pulls off the basics very well so far. You can use a spray bottle to both electrocute enemies and clean blood off a wall to reveal a code, which is a great early sign with regards to creative problem solving. I was tempted to bump this up to the top category, but during the demo I haven't quite seen the levels open up in the way these games need to imo. Or maybe it did, I had to quit a little early. Excited for the full release.

Speak - In a way it's just Tabletop Simulator with less convenient voice chat, but there's something about it. Basically you're playing Diplomacy (but with gangsters) with the option of calling your opponents on the phone. Turning communication into a little ritual adds a certain drama to the board game experience. I love imagining myself brooding in a big leather chair and shouting "Get me that bastard Jenkins on the phone!" at a nearby goon.

The Message from Deep Space - It's a game about deciphering an alien signal. Most of it is a simple call-and-response game, slowly learning what different inputs mean. What makes it interesting is the narrative around in. There's four other experts from various fields around you, who occasionally add their thoughts and give you ideas. Looks to be very fun on release.

Sniper Dan - This is certainly one of the more creative takes on the hidden object genre I've seen. You don't actually shoot anybody, but solve people's problems by shooting stuff around them. The levels are full of fun little scenes like in Hidden Folks or Katamari Damacy. Very charming.

over the hill - Super chill off-road driving game. I had a nice time with it, though that may be down to the lovely company (it's got co-op). I don't know if the driving mechanics and the sights are enough to motivate me personally to play this for a longer time, but it absolutely does what it's promising.

Divine Frequency - This game hits some genuine psychological horror beats, all the more impressive for a GZDoom game. Besides that is combines RPG elements with weighty, survival horror-ish FPS action. Again, impressive stuff done with this engine. I believe this game is going to be very good, but I may never find out, because I already fear-quit the demo (lmao).

We Were Here Tomorrow - It's another one of these \o/. The demo is fairly short, but there seems to be more of a focus on solving puzzles in the same room together with emphasis on using your abilities. Both players have now have different abilities that boil down to "place block" and "pull thing". So far the puzzles haven't blown me away, but the environments this time around are much more detailed and evocative, plus the music is bumpin.

Brigador Killers - I wish I had more time to explore this one. Mind you I haven't played the original. The pre-rendered style of it all speaks to me so much. So basically, it's a top-down shooter with a mission-based structure. After the intro missions the game transitions into a much more freestyle mode, where you can pick your own expeditions with persistent equipment and funds. I could see myself putting a ton of time into that.

Database Detective - Database thriller, but literally! You write SQL to solve petty crimes. I have no words in my arsenal to make that sound more fun. But it is kinda fun, it's a process of elimination on an enormous and automated scale. You do work for the police, but the game is extremely sarcastic about it, like they are so obviously pieces of shit.

Mym's Sword - This is possibly the first twin-stick zelda-like I've ever seen. You're a little critter with a sword and the sword is controller with the right stick. What's a bit of a bummer is you don't really swing the sword. It's closer to tapping the baddies with the sword and then the character performs the actual swing automatically. Besides that I haven't seen the twin-stick mechanic used for much. What actually worked for me is the exploration and the whimsy of it.

Good Enough

Hypnagogia: Broken Dreams - This is a low-poly walking sim with very, very light platforming elements. Walk around, talk to a guy, walk around, pick that up, talk to another guy. To be clear, the original game was like that too. The main appeal is the atmosphere, which is quite nice. I don't know why the aesthetic didn't carry it further for me, it's usually my thing.

Utopia: Haven - It be a metroidvania. I struggle to expand on that. Just look at it. It's a metroidvania.

Vholume - Parkour through the megastructure! You can tell one of the Babbdi/Straftat guys worked on this, the style is unmistakable and distinct from other megastructure stuff. I'm just not sure if "rush through at break-neck speed" is what I wanna do with these beautiful levels. Maybe I just want a Lorn's Lure set in a world made by these people.

4x4 in a Furniture Store - What if you drove a big truck through an Ikea? I'd probably run out of ideas after trying to climb up some cabinets, and so did the devs I think. Still pretty fun and the precision driving controls are well thought out.

Not Good

Aghia - I feel terrible putting this in its own category after everything else was mostly positive. When I imagine the map layouts of this game my brain automatically overlays it with wordart saying "level design is my passion." It's all so corner-y. You're constantly lead into pointless dead-ends. Really makes you appreciate how much effort goes into guiding a player through a level. The rest seems fine? Not enough to keep me playing.

The Category for Multiplayer Games that Are Just Okay to Quite Bad

Deep Dish Dungeon - This game slid off my brain like E gel slides off my arm when I space out while putting it on.

Salvation Denied - You're trying to build the tallest tower possible with the least convenient building blocks possible and the occasional meteor shower. We got some genuine laughs out of this one, but I don't see myself playing it for a long time.

WheelMates - Driving a tiny car around a big house sounds like so much fun, but they fumbled pretty bad. Much of the gameplay is just getting from A to B and collecting random stuff. The biggest flaw in my opinion is that, despite being a mandatory 2 player game, it might as well be singleplayer. I can think of one puzzle that genuinely felt like a co-op challenge, besides that it's a lot of arbitrary "all players must be present" checkpoints.

EngineFall - On retrospect I didn't even hate this game. The central block that keeps me from ever playing this is that it wants to be a forever-game, so it slows itself down to a crawl in many places and it's chock-a-block with materials and currencies and workstations and resources, et cetera, et cetera. Makes my head spin.

Oh Ship - I think at the time I described it as "Jump Space but less game".

Sunset Summit - It's Peak without most of what made Peak fun. It's all checkpoint to checkpoint, which means nobody gets left behind, but also there's no stakes. Get to checkpoint. Go to next checkpoint. Waow. I don't think I ever needed to use any items, I just used them for shits. No fun ragdoll physics either. It's all very Unreal looking environments with a single path forwards. The single comedic element is that the characters are Very Old. I'm cracking up over here. Straight up chortling.

MayDay MayDie - Game Bad

Closing Thoughts

This is the first time I tried browsing demos via SteamDB instead of Steam itself. The upsides are that it lets me filter out games with AI declarations or certain genres that I'm not interested in (no hate to roguelike enjoyers, I've just had enough of them). Also I can actually look at them in a sorted list instead of whatever fae logic Steam orders stuff by. The downsides are that devs now just use AI without declaring it. They realized that people hate this shit and drew the completely wrong conclusion. Plus, SteamDB's interface tends to break with too many pages and the navigation is atrocious. For next time I need to think of better ways to slice the selection into smaller chunks.

Next Fest is always an interesting vibe-check on where indie games are at. There are a lot of teams out there that apparently think that anything is fun if you do it with friends, and they're almost right. But how much fun for how long? I would genuinely prefer playing 20 questions or throwing a ball around to some of these games, even if they're not terrible. I've also seen a baffling amount of trailers where the first or second thing shown is a skill tree. Is that enough of a draw to prioritize like that? Next time I will also have to filter out incremental games I think.

Babysitting in the middle of the event didn't help, but I think the biggest reason I didn't get to as many demos as I wanted is that I spent too much time browsing the list. I will need to accept that I can't go over every single potentially interesting game and pare down my scope of consideration more aggressively. Maybe I'll switch to browsing specific genres only. And no more Metroid clones. They're not even bad, just deeply okay.

I'm sounding negative right now, so I need to reiterate that I had a highly positive experience with the demos themselves. It's everything else that's bringing me down. Valve seems disinterested in addressing the flood of undeclared AI usage, or that their UI is wholly unsuited for the amount of demos available. I'd take a CSV export at this point, I'll write this shit myself. I also feel a creeping dread at the vibes of it all. Everyone is trying to make the Next Big Game. Everyone is struggling, so there's no incentive to make anything if it's not going to make you a pile of money. My gamedev feed is buzzing with indies doing clumsy engagement farming, and as soon as the event is over it goes dead again. I'm afraid Next Fest is becoming a humiliation ritual for all the desperate developers out there and people just trying to make the game they wanna make are getting lost in the crowd.

I have no transition out of this. Go wishlist My Beautiful Faraway.