The best demos of Steam Next Fest 2024

The annual celebration of upcoming games features Russian nuns, snipers, sensual demons and sci-fi horror.

We’re living through the demo renaissance. Those of us who are old enough to remember physical media still view demo discs – peeled off magazine covers or sometimes discovered deep in cereal packets – through rose-tinted glasses. The reality, though, is that digital platforms like Steam make trialling a game easier than ever.

Every year the Steam Next Fest highlights games that are still in development, offering demos that allow players to experience a vertical slice of the full experience. This year threw up a particularly rich selection – of which I streamed 15 for around 30 mins each. 

Here are the ones I’d particularly recommend (even as it makes me extremely nervous about my financial health over the next few months).

Sorry We’re Closed

This anime-inspired survival horror was a gem I had to tear myself away from. It combines the fixed camera angles of old-school survival horror with the ability to hop into first person mode whenever you want. 

As I said during the livestream, that immediately turns one of the frustrations of those older games – enemies suddenly appearing from out of view for a cheap scare – into a fully realised, unique gameplay feature. Marry that to the game’s central conceit of flipping the area round your character between the mundane and spirit worlds at the push of a button, and you have a fun approach to first-person combat. Luring an enemy into the ‘real’ world exposes its weak point for extra damage, but limits your ability to shoot beyond that area. 

It’s a rare, tactical approach to survival horror gameplay which often boils down to shooting an enemy until it’s time to dodge, then repeating the process until you or the enemy dies.

But where the game really shines is in the character and world design. It’s an intoxicating mix of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure-esque sensual character designs and the overlapping worlds of Silent Hill, with a tone that the developers nail right from the beginning. Little, surreal touches like the pistol barking indicate that developer à la mode games have an inimitable vision for the world – and it’s one I’m definitely going to explore in full when it becomes available.

Children of the Sun

Of all the games on this list, Children of the Sun has the least indicative title. I couldn’t tell you what its name – evocative as it is – has to do with the story or gameplay. You play as a sniper whose proclivities are questionable in the extreme, turned loose in levels where you have to hit every enemy with a single bullet.

Initially, movement seems limited to a set path around the area in which the enemies patrol, but it quickly becomes clear you are playing as the bullet as much as the sniper. Where it shines is in the way that the bullet's trajectory can be altered mid-flight.

Every enemy you hit allows you to redirect its flight, turning each level into a puzzle to find the most efficient path to each target. Later abilities allow you to curve the bullet as it flies, and as the game progresses targets like petrol tanks become viable options for banking the bullet to its next victim.

The game is also stylish as all fuck. Character designs and colour palettes are reminiscent of some of Suda 51’s games, and the UI is a disconcerting and bewildering mix of ornate, archaic script and hyper-modern linework. The inclusion of leaderboards that track everything from speed of level completion to the number of times you had to redirect the bullet ensures this is going to be compulsive gaming when it finally releases.

Indika

If I had a penny for every game I played this Next Fest where the main character had a ‘prayer’ button that changed the world around them… I’d have two pennies.

While The Inquisitor’s prayer command is used solely for navigation, in Indika it physically warps the world around the titular nun. It’s a strange moment in a demo that starts with her rescuing a wounded soldier in the snow, but it embodies the weirdness that runs through the game like veins. You explore the environment – a snowy, 18th Century Russian village – in a way that feels a little like a slow-paced Uncharted or Tomb Raider. 

That familiarity is ripped violently away with the introduction of a mocking, male-sounding internal voices that encourages our nun to sin, and an entirely modern UI and soundtrack that feels so out of place that it destabilises your understanding of the world whenever it appears.

The appearance of a huge wolfhound that pursues Indika and her wounded companion through a disused paint factory compounds the strangeness – and I’m itching to find out what ties it altogether.

The trailer gives away more of the game, with winking, lascivious nuns and monks promising an appearance. It’s fair to say that, after running right past my imposed 30 minute time limit, I have absolutely zero understanding of what the final game will be about. However, as I learned from the stream, the developers have explicitly said it has been influenced in some way by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so this is absolutely worth keeping an eye on.

Mouthwashing

Of all the demos I played, this one stuck with me the longest. It’s hauntingly visceral, despite the low-poly models, and there’s a sickening sense of wrongness and despair that pervades it. I loved it!

Mouthwashing is set on a stranded spaceship, which is drifting aimlessly following a crash. With no realistic means of rescue, the crew of five deal with their impending demise in a variety of ways. The narrative switches between the days before the impact and the weeks that follow as learn more about the crew.

The horror element comes from learning what became of Curly, the captain, and the grotesque state in which he has been left after causing the crash. It is unsparing in how it demonstrates nothing can be done to lessen his suffering – and there are some members of the crew who actively seek to prolong it. 

Even immobilised and wrapped in stained and rotting bandages, Curly is the centrepiece of the narrative. Sections of the demo appear to take part in his Jacob’s Ladder-inspired mindscape, where we explore his psyche. I wasn’t especially in love with the more obviously ‘horror’ sections, such as when you get pursued through endless corridors by twisted versions of the ship’s mascot, but the rest was purest psychological torment. 

Honourable mentions

Crow Country: this demo got a lot of attention ahead of Next Fest for its mix of dense Resident Evil gameplay and PS1-era graphics. I really enjoyed what I played of it: it has excellent puzzle design and a vivid, intriguing world. 

The Inquisitor: I mentioned this earlier, saying that the world isn’t as strange as that of Indika. While that’s true in terms of gameplay – which is delightfully, joyously janky in the best way – the premise is amazing. The world of The Inquisitor is dominated by an (even-more) aggressive form of Christianity, born from Jesus Christ smashing his way off the cross and kicking the shit out of his executioners. I don’t know how better to sell this game than just to repeat that sentence again and again.

Axiom of Maria: I said during the stream that this felt like a distillation of every work of cyberpunk fiction of the past ten years. It’s a little linear, at least in the demo, and the combat is a little simplistic – though it has unbelievable style that more than makes up for it. 

Star Trucker: If you’ve read the title, you know what it’s about. This might well become my go-to relaxation game, carting deliveries through jumpgates in space while listening to golden oldies and chatting on the CB Radio. A joy to play.

News Tower: The only reason I didn’t include this business management sim in the main list is that I’m interviewing the team behind it, and it deserves greater examination than a 300 word blurb. You play as the proprietor of a failing newspaper in 1930s New York, and have to turn your fortune around by investing in reporters, coverage, and the infrastructure of building a publishing business. I’m going to play this one to death when it comes out.