From Metroidvanias to roguelikes, survival games to strategy games, here are the best things we played during Steam Next Fest
Feb. 13, 2024Here are the indie games to keep an eye on
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AnotherSteam Next Festis over, meaning another collection of indie game demos have vanished into the ether. As ever, with so many options at your fingertips, it can be hard to know what to play, but now that the dust has settled, we’ve collated our Steam Next Fest coverage to point you towards the games we loved that deserve a spot on your wishlist.
I’d be remiss to start anywhere but Dungeonborne,the PvPvE RPG that plays like the second coming of extraction fantasy frontrunner Dark and Darker. Throughout the week, Dungeonborne’s presence at the top of pretty much every Next Fest chart spoke to its ability to successfully fill the gap in the market left by its progenitor’s continuing absence from Steam. Easilythebreakout hit of this festival, it’ll be interesting to see if it can maintain that hot streak into a full release in a notoriously tricky genre.
Dungeonborne might have dominated, but that still left plenty of space for other games to infiltrate the Next Fest charts. One of those wasDread Dawn, an open-world zombie survival gamethat got off to a slow start but built plenty of hype over the week. There’s a touch of games like Project Zomboid here, but Dread Dawn is much more interested in its narrative than many survival games, with an element of slice-of-life genre stalwarts like Shaun of the Dead or All of Us Are Dead. It’s a slow burn, but likely to keep dedicated fans busy for a long time.
It came as no surprise that among the many, many demos, two genres in particular caught our attention. The Metroidvania is at the peak of its power right now, with the roguelike not far behind;the impossibly colorful Ultros caught our eyewith its “prismatic assault on the senses”; the Don’t Starve devs haveanother hit on their hands with co-op roguelike Rotwood; Bore Blasterssmelts together Vampire Survivors and Deep Rock Galactic in its mining roguelike; and Palworld developer Pocketpair smashes it all together with aMetroidvania roguelike that wears its Hollow Knight inspiration on its sleeve.
Impressively, the list above only features around half the games we managed to write about, and it’s an even smaller fraction of the demos we tried, let alone the demos that actually featured in Next Fest. From blockbusters like Stormgate and Homeworld 3, to breakout hits like Poker deckbuilder Balatro andinventory management autobattler Backpack Battles, every Next Fest offers its own seemingly-inexhaustible list of games. The next event drops in June, so if you missed out this time, keep an eye out in the summer.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Alternatively, help us keep an eye out for you with our list ofupcoming indie games.
I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
Best Path of Exile 2 Monk build
Borderlands 4’s reveal this week includes “a lot of in-game footage” and “a sick, never-before-seen original cinematic sequence” that’ll bridge the gap between Borderlands 3
Secret Level’s Pac-Man episode had one big request from developers: “We would like the audiences to wonder, ‘What the f*ck did they do to Pac-Man?'”
