15 Steam Next Fest Demos That Are Worth Your Time

Steam Next Fest is back (June 15-22), which means thousands of free demos are sitting on the storefront and you have exactly one week before most of them disappear back into "wishlist and wait" purgatory. I went through the noise so you don't have to. These are the fifteen that made me stop scrolling.

There's a Jonathan Blow puzzle game in here. There's a penguin who judges humans for a living. There's at least two metroidvanias that will probably ruin your sleep schedule. All of it small teams making things they actually care about, which is the whole point of Next Fest anyway.

Rivage

I loved this one more than I expected to. If you've played Blue Prince and felt that specific high of a house that doesn't make sense until it suddenly does, Rivage is chasing the same feeling, just dressed in different clothes. It's quieter, more contemplative, and it trusts you to sit in confusion for a while before handing you the next piece of the puzzle. The demo doesn't overstay its welcome either, which is rare for this kind of game. It gives you just enough to make you obsessive about the rest.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4465080/Rivage_Demo/

Order of the Sinking Star

Jonathan Blow's new one, and yes, the pedigree matters here. If Braid and The Witness taught us anything, it's that this is a guy who treats puzzle design like a love language. Order of the Sinking Star spans four interconnected worlds and reportedly packs over a thousand hand-built puzzles, though the demo only lets you taste a handful. What you get is enough to know the bones are good: clever, layered puzzles that make you feel smart for solving them instead of just relieved.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4597250/Order_of_the_Sinking_Star_Demo/

KAZ

Take the chaos of Vampire Survivors, shrink it down, and run it through an arcade cabinet. That's KAZ. It keeps the swarm-and-survive loop that makes the genre so easy to fall into but tightens everything for shorter, punchier sessions, where you tell yourself "one more run" and actually mean it every single time.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3633760/KAZ/

Well Dweller

This is the one I've been waiting on. Well Dweller is solo dev Kyle Thompson's follow-up to Islets and Crypt Custodian, and where those games leaned bright and bouncy, this one goes darker, a twisted fairy tale where you play a tiny bird armed with nothing but a matchstick. It's a 2D metroidvania at its core, so expect the usual ability-gated exploration and backtracking-as-reward structure, but the shift in tone from his last project is what makes this worth watching closely.

Play the Demo here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3699590/Well_Dweller/

Penguin Colony

A cozy walking sim where you play as a penguin observing humans, which is somehow exactly as charming as it sounds. There's no real threat here, no fail state breathing down your neck, just slow exploration and the quiet comedy of watching people do their weird human things from a penguin's eye view. Good for the days when everything else on this list feels like too much.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3695930/Penguin_Colony/

Silver Pines

A 2D survival horror metroidvania with shades of Twin Peaks running through it, from Wych Elm, a five-person Swedish-Norwegian studio whose team has worked on Helldivers 2 and Yoku's Island Express. You're exploring a small American town that's hiding something rotten underneath its quiet exterior, except here exploration comes with real stakes: limited inventory, scarce resources, the logic that makes you think twice before opening a door. If you want your metroidvania backtracking to come with a side of genuine dread, this is the one. Team17 is publishing, which says a lot about how this is being treated internally.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4540100/Silver_Pines_Demo/

Blood Dungeon

Spelunky's trap-laden platforming logic crashed into a Vampire Survivor's swarm, minus the stamina bar babysitting you'd expect from either genre. That absence changes the entire rhythm of the game. Without stamina management eating your attention, you're free to focus purely on movement and positioning, which makes every room feel more like a puzzle of bodies and hazards than an endurance test.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4666390/Blood_Dungeon_Demo/

Gridwalker

You're a small cube. The island you're exploring holds way more than it lets on. Gridwalker is an isometric exploration puzzler that never rushes you, never punishes curiosity, and rewards slow, observational play, the same patience Rivage fans are going to recognize immediately. If you liked the pacing of our first pick on this list, add this one right next to it.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4692720/Gridwalker/

Woodo

A cozy narrative puzzler built around handcrafted wooden dioramas that come to life piece by piece as you assemble them correctly. You're following two characters, Foxy and Ben the Frog, through scenes that start frozen in time and slowly unfreeze as the story clicks into place. It's a small, gentle idea executed with a lot of care, the type of game that's begging to be played with tea nearby.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3587740/Woodo_Demo/

Vitalis

A TTRPG-flavored roguelike dungeon crawler with a minimalist palette and an occult forest setting that gets under your skin fast. Exploration runs on dice rolls, combat runs on actual strategy, and the whole thing has that tabletop unpredictability where a bad roll can completely rewrite your run. Early in development, but the bones here are eerie in a good way.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4604300/Vitalis/

Shroom and Gloom

A dual-deck card roguelike with hand-drawn art that looks like nothing else on this list, published by Devolver Digital. You're running two separate decks at once, one for exploring dungeons and uncovering secrets, the other reserved for actually fighting the game's many fungal enemies. The first-person card-playing perspective is a small detail that ends up doing a lot of work, making every hand feel more personal than the genre usually allows. If you're tired of card roguelikes blurring together, this is a good antidote.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3602770/Shroom_and_Gloom_Demo/

GunCrypt

Enter the Gungeon is the obvious comparison, and it holds up: chaotic bullet-hell shootouts crammed into tight, claustrophobic arenas. This one's from Halfbrick Studios, the team behind Fruit Ninja. The twist is in how you build your loadout. Instead of just hunting for the next stat upgrade, you're crafting sequences of shots, fusing rounds together into combinations that change how a fight plays out entirely. Over sixty unique rounds confirmed so far, which is plenty of room to break the game in fun ways.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4745070/Guncrypt_Demo/

Junkyard Stories: Rebirth

A dystopian stealth platformer that leads with atmosphere and lets its systems reveal themselves slowly. You're a broken robot smuggling a hacker's mind toward a place called Block-07, with a floating companion drone as your only company. The stealth mechanics matter, but it's the mood, somewhere between grim and quietly hopeful, that's going to be the reason people remember this one.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4522210/Junkyard_Stories_Rebirth/

Gnome Glade

A deck-based city builder soaked in magical whimsy, for anyone who wants their strategy games stress-free and a little silly. You're playing for the vibes as much as the systems here, stacking decisions that build out a small gnome world without ever pushing you toward a punishing fail state. A good palate cleanser between heavier picks on this list.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4129980/Gnome_Glade/

Time To Wake Up

A first-person psychological thriller that traps you inside a dream, except you're not alone in there. There's a voice with you, one that seems a little too fond of your eyes for comfort, and together you're digging through fragments of a shared past tied to your old school. It's narrative-puzzle-platformer territory, surreal and unsettling in a way that's hard to shake even after you close the demo.

Play the Demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4321860/Time_To_Wake_Up_Demo/

Steam Next Fest runs through June 22, so there's still time to get through a few of these before the demos vanish. Wishlist what hits, skip what doesn't, and if you end up obsessed with one of these the way I got obsessed with Rivage, let me know in the comments below.

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