Prelude

Demos! I quite enjoy going through them all, usually live on stream. Unfortunately, real life prevented me from partaking in the final Steam Next Fest of 2025, which I was more upset by than I realistically should be, so I opted to play catch-up as hard as I could for the first Next Fest of 2026. And yes, I'm aware this write-up is a bit late, but pretty much all the demos are still online at time of writing so it's whatever.

As with my previous post, I've put together a bit of a scorecard, categorizing every demo under three all-encompassing categories, then jotting down my thoughts on them with varying brevity after the fact. These merely describe my first-impressions as of the end of February 2026. They may have gotten better since then. Or worse! Or even been shitcanned entirely! Only the future knows, and I ain't there quite yet.

The Good Stuff

Bad Pixels: A simple, arcadey FPS that leans very, very heavily on its Commdore 64-inspired art style. Honestly, this is mostly an art and technology piece. It does an incredible job of recreating the visual style of the C64 as a 3D FPS, but the gameplay is browser-game levels of simple in a very static world. Still kinda fun, but will it still be fun with a price tag?

Cursed Words: Bookworm-atro, with your various earned tiles and upgrades gradually leading to your gleefully submitting gibberish, much to the ire of the game's Grover-esque mascot. Quite fun.

Dungeons of DUSK: A tribute to the Id Mobile games (Doom RPG, Wolfenstein RPG, Orcs & Elves). Perfectly hits the style and tone of those games, so if you like those this is more of that. Really into this one, can't wait for more.

Freefall '95: Pull tricks and complete missions as you fall to your death after your plane explodes! Basically the kind of thing you'd play on Newgrounds in-between classes. Not that that's a bad thing, per-se, but I have to wonder how well it stretches into a paid game.

Future Knight: Run-and-gun platformer with a faux-Game-and-Watch aesthetic by the creators of Narita Boy and Haneda Girl. Pretty fun with some real ear-worm music, but I'm not a big fan of the seeming lack of checkpoints. Definitely one to watch.

The Last Salvage Squad: Horde-mode FPS where building-sized robot girls shoot the squid mechs from War of the Worlds. As one does. More Robotron than Doom, and has a couple of neat ideas within its short, tiny doses of action. The demo's choice to skip from Mission 4 to Mission 22 to show a very different type of level later on is a really clever trick!

Pro Jank Footy: An arcade-y take on Australian Rules Football, with a fun twist: Whenever a goal is scored, the other team gets to pick one of three very silly mutators to add to the mix, until the game has been rendered a slurry of aggressive seagulls, bouncing DVD icons, armless giants and pitch invaders. Very fun, but also very buggy, and with some impressively-domineering CPU AI. I'm interested in this!

Raccoin: Coin-pusher-atro. In two minds about this one, as half the time it feels pretty flaccid but once you get some coins or items that make use of the physics system it feels great. It had my attention long enough that I'll put it in the Good pile, but only just.

Starship Troopers - Ultimate Bug War: Another boomer-shooter by the Warhammer 40k Boltgun devs. This one's fairly different in style though - if Boltgun was Doom or Quake, this one's going more for Halo. I quite liked the wide-open level with multiple objectives to tackle in seemingly any order. Well worth a look. Definitely better than past Starship Troopers FPSes, anyway.

Wild Blue Skies: Starfox 64 2, by one of the original developers behind Starfox SNES. Looks great and gets the cheesy tone right, but for some reason I struggled with having the rapid-fire blaster and the lock-on charge shot on different buttons.

Denshattack: Incredibly stylish set of prolonged QTEs with Dreamcast aesthetics. Pretty linear (as I suppose you'd expect from a game about trains - my self control in not calling it "on rails" has to be commended) but I honestly dug it quite a bit more than I thought I would.

Dinoblade: Dark Souls, but everyone's a dinosaur. Of course. It's very jank (I think it's a solo dev?) and the level/environment design is very repetitive (basically a canyon built out of the same three rock models), but it's quite entertaining. Missed a beat by not calling it Dinosword, though.

The Eternal Life of Goldman: Absolutely gorgeous hand-animated platforming adventure. Not really sure the whole meta-story thing where the whole story is being told by a mother to her sick son, though - the game's weird world feels strong enough to stand on its own two feet without any such contrivances - but well worth a play.

Vampire Crawlers: Charming little roguelite deckbuilder blobber thing. Probably for way bigger Deckbuilder Sickos than I am, though, as it leans towards combos with a terrifying, clinical efficiency.

Islantiles: Map-atro? Whatever, I've ran out of ways to describe these things. Little card-based resource-gathering thing. Kinda chill, but not really my thing. Putting it in Good instead of Meh because it's inoffensive and I'm feeling generous.

FFFF YOU MACHINE: A balls-out aggressive FPS combining Post Void-style time-limit racing, Tony Hawk-style goals and glass-shatteringly blaring electronica into an experience that's LOUD on every level. Eager to explore this further.

Gambonanza: Chess-atro. Fun gameplay, if a little unrefined. Extremely MS Paint boss designs, but in an oddly charming way.

REPLACED: Fascinatingly cinematic Cyberpunk platformer with Batman Arkham-esque combat and some magnificent pixel art. This is gonna make an impact when it lands.

AUDIOMECH: Fantastic Stereo Mix-driven rhythm platform arena THING that tickles all the right parts of my brain. Taking on a boss as your favorite music reaches its climax is goddamn cathartic.

The Bad Stuff

Super Meat Boy 3D: A pretty poor adaption of the original game's twitchy precision-platforming to a third dimension that's very poorly suited to it - even with the analog movement gated to 8 directions by default, it's a coin flip as to whether you'll actually magnetize to the wall you're trying to wall-jump off of or shoot clean past it. Noisy, distracting backdrops and a pretty gnarly Unreal Engine implementation doesn't help.

Poly Fighter: I really, really wanted to like this because I think the idea - a single-player only roguelite take on one-on-one fighting games where you get more and more powerful than a competitive multiplayer game would allow - is really cool. Sadly, between the mediocre gameplay design and barely-there audio, there's very little meat on the bones. Sad.

Royalty Free-For-All: Impressively flaccid Smash Bros. clone with all the personality of a Christian animated movie you found a VHS copy of down the $2 shop.

The "Ehhhhh..." Stuff

Everything is Crab: I'm not much for Survivors-likes but this one's kinda neat I guess. The art style's cute and I like how your Little Guy gradually becomes more and more of an affront to God as the run goes on.

Airframe Ultra: Excellently grungy low-poly visuals and some fun vehicle controls, but the demo was multiplayer only and all of the remaining servers when I played were on the other side of the planet, which didn't seem like a good idea for a high-reflex game.

DiceVaders: A follow-up to the excellent StarVaders that puts you on the other side of the war. Unfortunately, it's quite a bit worse, with very little in the way of visual impact to keep you invested. Not without merit, but a massive step down.

Galactic Vault: Fun little roguelite FPS brought down by being less refined than the competitors in its already-crowded field while being the same price. It's got quite a fight ahead of it, I hope it doesn't back down...

GUN. DOG. REVENGE: John Wick-themed Rolling Thunder clone. There are better Rolling Thunder clones out there that feel better and cost zero dollars.

Spy Drops Gaiden: Aggressively mediocre tribute to Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel that fails to get within the same postcode as its inspiration. Some neat little stylistic touches here and there, though.

Archives

Previous Post

To the Top

Get in Touch