20 Short Reviews of 20 Steam Next Fest Demos — Fall 2025 Edition

On this Hallow’s Eve, Next Fest is haunted by a monstrous number of dreadful derivatives, AI slop games, and dreadfully derivative AI slop games. But are there still treats amongst the tricks? Step inside, if you dare…

ALARIC

ALARIC is an ostensibly troidlike FPS overtly remiscent of Castlevania. It has some badass art, but is unfortunately unremarkable otherwise. The level design is very straightfoward and uninteresting, being mostly comprised of big, empty rooms with occasional simple platforming. Within the scope of the demo, I wouldn’t say it even really qualifies as a troidlike due to there being only one path you can go down at any time. Enemy design is dreadfully simple; either they run at you and swing at you when they get in range, or they sit perfectly still and periodically shoot at you. Melee enemies can be parried by kicking them, which has a very generous timing window and turns them into bullets. Speaking of bullets, in the demo you only have a pair of revolvers, which do exactly what you’d expect them to, except reload, as there is no reloading in this game. You also have a whip, which really only feels useful for if you run out of ammo, in which case you should be kicking enemies anyway since that’s what gives you more ammo. There are a couple of bosses in the demo, but they’re nothing to write home about either. ALARIC isn’t bad, but didn’t show me anything that made it seem particularly worth playing.

Astro Burn

Astro Burn is a horizontal shmup where you play as a silly cat in a spaceship. More specifically, it’s a euroshmup, and falls into all the pitfalls you’d expect a euroshmup to. The game features analog movement and inertia, rather than having the player move at a fixed speed in eight directions. Instead of dying in one hit, you have a health bar, and you’ll need it because hitboxes are very unclear and inconsistent; usually, when I got hit, I didn’t even know what hit me. Getting hit will also cause significant knockback, often into another hitbox which will then propel you into another hitbox or maybe even the same one you just got hit by, so sometimes that health bar doesn’t even matter, as getting hit once can cause you to rapidly bounce around and melt your health bar instantly. Visuals are uncharismatic and unclear. There’s a pickup that activates a “catnip mode” that causes the game to slow down significantly and it feels like you get it arbitrarily. The game’s main feature is that you can pick up a bunch of guns and fire them all at once, and maybe there’s something going on there, but mostly I was just getting confused about all the guns I couldn’t pick up. I have more unkind things to say about this game but you get the point by now. I guess the music’s alright.

Constance

Constance is a troidlike with smooth controls, charming aesthetics, and just a little bit of knight. It’s hard to evaluate a game like this by its demo when that demo is a very early vertical slice and you have only a small fraction of the tools you see in the trailer on the Steam page, but I’ll try. Within the scope of the demo, your movement options are running (not to be confused with sprinting or dashing), jumping, and an invincible ground/air dash; not a lot to work with, but enough to create some good platforming segments, including an optional one that was really surprisingly difficult for where it appears in the game! Complicating the platforming is your secondary attack, which can be aimed horizontally or vertically and temporarily clears corruption, which is a thing that hurts you and you don’t want to touch it, even with your invincible dash. Corruption will frequently get in your way while platforming, and dealing with it while trying not to fall off of moving platforms can be tough. While this all works for the platforming, as is often the case, having an invincible dodge roll results in the combat being pretty reductive, with “just dodge through them and slap their ass lol” being the answer to most enemy attacks. But wait. Upon death, you are given the option to return to the last checkpoint, or to continue much closer to where you died at the cost of accepting a curse that makes the enemies stronger. In this state, you will still take damage if you dodge through them! Wow! The curse fixed my biggest problem with the game! I’m hoping the game will have a hard mode or something that leaves the curse on at all times; if it does, then I’ll have no significant complaints, judging by the demo at least.

With the core out of the way, I want to shout out two things the game does that I really like. First, when you start the demo, the demo starts. No cutscenes or scripted walking sequences or anything; you are instantly dropped into gameplay. Second, a lot of troidlikes have map markers; when you run into a thing you can’t do yet, you’d place a map marker down to remind you to come back later. Unfortunately, map markers in pretty much every game have the issue of “wait, what did I place this down for?” Constance avoids this pitfall by having your map markers also take a screenshot, so you know exactly what it is that you’ll need to come back to! All in all, Constance didn’t blow me away (and to be fair, any troidlike henceforth is forced to exist in the same world as Silksong), but it seems quite solid and I’ll probably play it sooner or later.

Green Ember: Helmer in the Dragon Tomb

Green Ember: Helmer in the Dragon tomb is a game based on the ostensibly best selling series Green Ember, which I haven’t heard of. You play as Helmer, who gets captured and taken to the Dragon Tomb. If I had to describe this game in a word, it would be “lethargic.” It’s an isometric action adventure game where you run, jump, push crates around, and fight enemies, and none of that feels particularly good to do or is ever presented to you in a novel or challenging way. Combat is stamina-based, with light attacks, heavy attacks, special attacks (or at least one special attack which is just a spin), dodging, and blocking. You can just run at enemies and press light attack until they die; there doesn’t really seem to be much reason to use your different attacks. Level design seems very linear, and you can just lazily run through it until you get to one of several extremely simple block pushing puzzles. Later in the demo there’s a “stealth” segment where you can easily run past all the enemies without caring if they see you because they, too, are lethargic. It’s a nice enough game to look at, and it runs well, and that’s all the good I have to say about it. This one’s for the Green Ember diehards only.

Halchemist

Halchemist is a character-switching troidlike where you play as a girl who runs and jumps and swings a book around and a floating hand that flies around freely and punches and grabs things. You can switch between the two characters at any time, with the one not currently being controlled becoming immobile and invincible. This lets you do a lot of neat things in both platforming and in combat. The options you have at the very start of the game are pretty diverse, so there’s a lot to learn right off the bat, which I think is pretty cool. The result of all this is a game that ends up feeling more like a puzzle platformer than a troidlike, which certainly helps it stand out amongst its peers, albeit in a way some players might not like. It’s got issues, though. Movement in this game doesn’t feel particularly good, especially while playing as the hand due to the large amount of inertia it has (EUROSHMUPS!!!!!!!! But this might be an intentional balancing decision, albeit one I don’t like). Combat feels rigid and enemies feel unreactive, and the aforementioned bad-feeling movement will likely lead to you taking a good amount of contact damage, especially as the hand. It also seems prone to softlocking, but that’s a very fixable issue, I hope.

Despite my grievances, it’s one of the most mechanically interesting troidlikes I’ve played in a while. Definitely try this demo if you’re curious; it’s too weird and complex to adequately explain it here, and it might click with you more than it did with me. Also it does the thing Constance does where your map markers also take a screenshot. Is this a trend now?

Hermit and Pig

Hermit and Pig appears to be a quirky Earthbound-inspired JRPG, and I’m not gonna say it isn’t, but it’s also a lot more than that. I won’t go into all of its mechanics, but its battle system revolves around sniffing out enemy weaknesses and exploiting them with attacks that are executed via a sequence of button presses (optionally. You can instead enable a setting that causes you to have a menu with all your attacks in it, and honestly I don’t really know what the sequences are supposed to accomplish aside from being mildly satisfying to input quickly), while timing blocks to mitigate incoming damage. Your items take a turn from what you’d usually expect; in this game they’re all mushrooms, all of which you have to personally forage for and which serve a wide variety of purposes; healing, curing status effects, providing buffs, or just thrown at enemies to deal damage. You can also execute powerful special attacks, which have you playing decently lengthy minigames, which was a bit concerning until it became clear that your special attacks take a LONG time to recharge, so it’s probably fine. All of that is secondary, though, to the amount of charm this game oozes out. I go into quirky Earthbound-inspired JRPGs with middling expectations, but damn, this one made me smile! Looking forward to it.

Light Odyssey

Light Odyssey is a top-down boss rush action game aesthetically reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, but instead of climbing the colossi, you slash at their feet until they die. It describes itself as a “soulslike” to which I would say that it really isn’t, beyond you having to manage stamina and having an invincible dodge. The stamina management is actually more engaging than I’d expect; you can attack very fast, and chain dodges really fast, and consequently burn through your stamina really fast. It turns it into a game of chicken where you burn as much stamina as you safely can within an opening, then use the rest to evade for the next one. It also rewards you for finding ways to walk out of enemy attacks rather than dodging. Over time, you’ll build up an overdrive meter, which can be activated to temporarily grant you infinite stamina so you can really go nuts. What throws a wrench into this is the addition of a parry, which costs no stamina and fills your overdrive meter, creating a clear Correct Thing To Do in a lot of situations.

As for the bosses themselves? There’s three in the demo and they’re…okay. Mostly very simple slamming their hands in front of them in big, clearly-telegraphed circular AOEs, which sometimes create smaller AOEs on top of you so that you can’t safely stand behind them and hit their feet while they fail to attack in your direction. I want to like this one more than I do, but it just doesn’t seem especially interesting.

Lost Vulcan

Lost Vulcan is an arcade platformer with Yoshi’s Island-style bouncing projectiles as its most prominent mechanic. Your goal in each level is to collect all the coins to open the exit, and with bonus points being awarded for collecting optional treasures and defeating enemies. It’s a very simple game, but pretty fun! It also bills itself as a roguelite, which it just barely is. All of the levels are handcrafted, but which ones you actually get in a given run seems to be random. You also get a permanent mobility power-up after each boss, but which one you get is randomized as well. That seems to be it as far as random elements go, and I don’t think there’s any meta progression. The most glaring omission is that of a time limit, and associated bonuses for clearing a level quickly, or any other sort of dynamic scoring mechanics that I could see; as long as you take your time, collect everything, and defeat every enemy, you’ll apparently get the maximum possible score in a given level. I think it would be a lot more fun and interesting with better scoring mechanics, and I really find it strange that it does not have those, given what it seems to be going for.

Million Depth

Million Depth is a side-scrolling semi-action roguelite about exploring a million-foot-deep hole, and it plays like nothing I’ve ever seen. Your primary means of combating your foes is a custom-made weapon created piece by piece with blocks you find during your run; rather than swinging it, it floats around, controlled with the right stick, and you must poke enemies with the pointy bit while avoiding enemy attacks on your own character with the left stick. When your weapon strikes an enemy, it bounces a significant distance away, and can hit other enemies during the bounce, allowing for devastating combos with the right weapon and positioning. Time only moves while you or your weapon are moving, which means you need to learn to control both at once, but you have all the time in the world to plan how you’re going to do so. It is very strange and complex. The amount of words I’m planning to use per demo cannot adequately describe it. Just go try it yourself.

MISERY

MISERY is a co-op roguelite Stalkerlike. You and your friends must venture out into the zone and gather as much useful junk as you can, then return to your bunker before an emission hits. You have to manage your hunger, thirst, radiation levels, and, unlike Stalker, your sanity. There’s a lot going on here; a lot more than I was able to explore in the time I’ve spent with it so far. We didn’t find anything that affects sanity, for example. We did find a lot of promise, though. A game like this lives and dies based on how compelling its zone is, and this is a very compelling zone. With every emission, the zone changes, becoming more dangerous and mysterious. I was hooked after just one. I really don’t want to give away too many details here, as the thrill of discovery is a big part of it. This is a game that knows its audience, and its audience probably knows it. Strong recommendation.

Mr. Sleepy Man

Mr. Sleepy Man is an objective-based 3D platformer where you, as the titular Man, are let loose into a small open world to complete a variety of tasks, many of which will anger the residents of said world. Maybe it’s because I, myself, am a sleepy man, but I don’t have a lot to say about this one. The demo feels very limited; you only have a few people to piss off, and while the store page claims that everyone gets pissed off in a unique way, in the scope of the demo it’s limited to stealing things and then getting chased. You have a small set of movement options, most of which don’t feel very strong, yet are still limited by stamina, presumably to make getting chased more threatening. Most objectives are accomplished just by casually exploring the map. I dunno. Maybe the full game will be more diverse and interesting, but I walked away from the demo a bit disappointed. Excellent music though!

NEUROXUS

NEUROXUS is a third-person mech shooter, and I wish I had more nice things to say about it than I do. I’ll start with this: for what seems like the first work of a small team on a small budget, it’s not bad! I had an alright time with it! The movement’s okay and it’s fun to hit things with the blade. Unfortunately, it has a lot of issues that I don’t think can be attributed to team size or budget. To quickly run down the game’s mechanics, you’ve got your basic mech dashing and hovering, which cost energy that refills when not in use. You’ve got an assault rifle, a blade (which needs stocks to use, and those stocks have cooldowns), and a homing missile launcher. You’ve got a Halo shield that protects your “real” health until it runs out, and regenerates from not getting hit for a while, or by hitting things with the blade. All of this feels alright to use, but I will say that it doesn’t feel like a mech game; you could swap out the mech for a guy with a jetpack and I wouldn’t question it.

My subjective biggest issue with the game is that it seems to be a game with a lot of prescribed solutions. Snipers are common, and they will hard lock onto you with unavoidable shots, so you’re supposed to used rockets on them to kill them ASAP. Enemies will have color-coded shields that you need to break with specific weapons. This is a matter of taste, somewhat, but I don’t think this kind of rigid design lends itself to a game that is interesting to play, learn, or otherwise think about long-term. My objective biggest issue with the game is that it’s a roguelite. I have no idea why it’s a roguelite. It does not seem to benefit from being a roguelite. When you hit me with the Hades “pick one of three upgrades” and the most interesting and appealing thing you can offer me is “you reflect 8% of damage while your shield is up, but enemies do 4% more damage” then it might be time to rethink your choice of subgenre. I only did one run (of one level, of which there are many, making the roguelite aspect even more baffling), so I’m not sure what all changes from run to run, but I did not see much in the way of potential for meaningful variation between runs. I have numerous other, smaller issues as well, like getting hit with wordy tutorial pop-ups that don’t pause the game while I’m being shot at, or the inclusion of “pull one lever and other levers get pulled” style puzzles, the inclusion of which doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s potential here. Will the developer realize it in some future project? Maybe. In this one? Unfortunately, I doubt it.

No Need for Flowers

No Need for Flowers is a vertical NON-EURO shmup where you DON’T have inertia. It’s very reminiscent of Touhou, or so I’ve surmised and been told, having never actually played a Touhou game (besides Luna Nights). Not that I’m a great critic for a genre I have very little experience in, but I have few notes on this one. The controls are good. The music’s good. The bullet patterns are readable, diverse, and fun. Everything about it seems just plain good. Easy recommendation for genre fans.

SCHROTT

SCHROTT is a roguelite driving extraction game, which is a combination of words that I don’t like using. There is no gas. There are no brakes. Your car drives automatically, and proceed along a procedurally generated course while crashing into destructible objects and not crashing into objects that destroy you. Over the course of the course, you’ll acquire skills that can be used mainly to avoid or destroy dangerous obstacles, as well as parts to customize your car’s attributes. You’ll keep the car parts if you finish the run, or choose to abandon it at a pit stop, but if you perish you’ll lose everything. This one’s…kind of boring. The controls are very smooth and very limited, so I didn’t find it much fun to drive the car. The courses got repetitive fast, being more or less straight lines with a handful of repeating obstacles. The aesthetics are nothing to write home about. Other people seem to like this one more than I did, but I’m not a fan.

Scrabdackle

Scrabdackle is a Zeldesque top-down action adventure game where you play as a defenestrated wizard on a journey home. I didn’t play enough of the demo to really get a feel for its mechanical complexity, but that’s because I was sold on this one very quickly. This is another “no notes, everything seems good” game. The aesthetics are delightful. Everything has robust examine text accompanied by little drawings. Enemies have varied and interesting behaviors from the very start of the game. In 15 minutes I had already found so much to like here. My only issue is that performance gets choppy on cluttered screens, but that can probably get sorted out. Wonderful game. Keep an eye on this one.

Sisyphus Is a Bug

Sisyphus Is a Bug. As Bug Sisyphus, you’ll have to roll your ball of dung to the summit of Bug Mount Olympus within 60 bug seconds. In order to do so, you’ll need to explore the mountain to discover new movement techniques that you’ve actually had all along. It’s a bug-sized “Metroidbrainia” or brainlike as I like to call them. This one stems from a game jam game, and the scope of the demo is, I think, just that game jam game; you are free to get your ball of dung all the way up Bug Mount Olympus, and the full release will include an additional map where Bug Sisyphus must escape from Bug Hades. Anyway, I liked this one quite a bit, and might try to figure out how to secure a top 10 time on the leaderboards. You really might as well play it yourself; the “demo” is a finished game, and a pretty fun one that probably won’t take up more than 20 minutes of your time.

Steel Century Groove

Steel Century Groove is a Pokemon-style rhythm JRPG about giant robot dance battles, and what it took me a while to realize is that the emphasis here is on the JRPG. The rhythm game part is extremely simple; a marker moves along a line, and you press (or sometimes hold) a button at the right time. What button you press is where the JRPG part comes in; to play effectively you’ll need to plan around your moves’ cooldowns and energy costs, what mods you’ve equipped your robot with, and what moves your opponent will do on each note, which is telegraphed at the start of each line. I started to enjoy it a lot more once I understood what exactly it was going for; a turn-based JRPG where the turns are rhythmic. If you’re looking for a rhythm game with JRPG mechanics, look elsewhere (specifically, look to CHORDIOID). But if you’re looking for a JRPG with rhythm mechanics, then this might be it.

Tearscape

Tearscape is a GBC Zeldesque soulslike. Play as GBC John Bloodborne on an ambiguous quest through Halloween World, battling ghastly foes and avoiding traps. I have never once thought “you know what this Zeldesque game needs? A stamina bar and soulslike leveling mechanics.” Now that I have played the demo of Tearscape, I still have never thought that. The game seemingly relegating upgrades to level ups makes the game world feel very sparse and unrewarding to explore, and it’s not aesthetically interesting enough to emotionally reward exploration either. That’s about it for what I don’t like. Enemy design is varied, and any combination of two different enemies will create an interesting situation to deal with. The dungeon design, in the one dungeon I did, wasn’t bad either; most rooms served a clear purpose and offered a distinct challenge. All in all, the game seems solid, albeit not especially inspired.

Turnip Mountain

Turnip Mountain is a 2D twin-stick climbing game. Your hands are positioned by using the analog sticks, and you grab and release by using the shoulder buttons. That’s about it. It’s excellent. The controls are simple and intuitive, and yet still very difficult to use effectively, which is presumably the whole point of the game. The fun really starts when you realize you can do a quick pull and release to fling yourself in whatever direction you’d like. Not a lot to say about this one; the concept is fresh and fun, the aesthetics are great, and I’m looking forward to the full game.

Yellow Trouble

Yellow Trouble is a scrolling (not in any particular direction) shmup where two kids and a dog battle an army of rubber ducks. As far as shmups I’ve played go, this one’s pretty unique. Your firing direction isn’t locked to the direction the action is moving in; instead, you can fire in eight directions, with your facing direction being locked while holding fire. This allows you to approach enemies from a variety of angles, which is important because this game rewards you for staying close to enemies. You have a pulse meter that fills up by doing damage or picking up items dropped by enemies when they are defeated. You can use this meter on a charge shot that does heavy damage and deletes bullets, or to create a circle around you that slows down bullets, makes your hurtbox visible, and significantly increases damage to enemies within the circle. The pulse mechanics feed into themselves; they make it easier and more rewarding to stay close to enemies, which in turn lets you kill more of them and pick up more of their drops so you can keep using pulse. Overall, a pretty solid and fun system. But that’s just the arcade mode! The game also features a “quest mode” where, rather than being confined to a scrolling screen, you freely run around, kill enemies, and level up. It emphasizes going for a speedy clear to disincentivize grinding, at least for non-casual players. The controls, systems, and enemies are largely the same as arcade mode, and arcade mode really feels like the main focus here, but quest mode is still a neat addition and a clever reuse of existing assets. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this one, but it’s pretty fun.

A word of warning: when I launched this game, it turned my screen completely blue, which made me think my PC crashed, but actually the game just launched in fullscreen and was blue. Beware this Halloween scare!

Well, well, well. It appears we found more light within the darkness than anticipated. But will that light continue to shine, or will it be smothered in these dark days yet to come? Only time can tell…