Steam Next Fest (June 2025) — Day 1

2025-06-10

Steam Next Fest has started once again. This week, many games are offering demos, and I built myself a tall list of 26 games to try out. Here are my opinions on them.

I'm playing on a desktop PC running Fedora 42. I have enough faith in Valve's Proton that I don't check for compatibility before trying games.

Bits & Bops

Collection of cute rhythm minigames (think Rhythm Heaven)

Bits & Bops has had a demo in some form for many months now, but for this Next Fest, there's now a new minigame available. Also, I backed this game on Kickstarter, so I’m obviously interested in seeing this game be good. And I think it is.

It captures the playful feel of Rhythm Heaven, while also challenging you on your ability to feel rhythm. It plays tricks on you, like distracting you with visual gags or disrupting your view of the game with objects or sudden camera changes. It's all to get you in that flow state where you're only feeling the rhythm.

I already wishlisted this game.

Orbyss

3D puzzles with spheres

Thoughts before playing: Pretty, abstract 3D puzzle game. But what's the killer feature? Like the portal gun from Portal or the camera from Viewfinder?

This is what it would be like to play the PlayStation 2 boot sequence as a puzzle game, with floating cubes and coloured sparks whizzing around in an abstract void. You get to control some balls, rolling them around the level to press buttons and zoom through pipes.

This demo shows some early levels, featuring some fairly stimulating puzzles, but it failed to really grab me. The slow pacing and pure abstractness of the game's setting aren't getting me excited to play more. I just never got to that "aha" point where I realized what made the game special. In comparison, another puzzle game demo I played in a past Next Fest, The Art of Reflection, didn't waste any time showing off its key feature of jumping through mirrors.

I'm going to pass on this game, but I know someone is going to like it.

Panta Rhei

Atmospheric top-down adventure with time manipulation

The game produced an error when launching it, which I fixed by forcing Steam to run it with Proton Experimental.

2D animated cutscenes? Hell yeah, I love that kind of effort. The in-game 3D art also does a good job capturing that illustrative feel of the cutscenes. Atmospheric top-down adventure with cool art and light RPG elements? I liked Bastion and Tunic, so maybe this could be up my alley, too. The game's premise and worldbuilding interest me. You play as a young guardian of time and use your time powers to fight the monsters ravaging the world.

But gameplay-wise, this demo is rough. I found the melee combat to be unsatisfyingly sluggish. There's a bug where falling off the world makes you permanently faster when you respawn, and I was definitely running way too fast by the end of the demo. The game is tagged as a roguelike (aka "choose some randomly drawn upgrades") on its store page, but there wasn't much time in the demo to really appreciate any of those upgrades in action.

I'll pass. It's really unfortunate that this demo disappointed me, since this game still might grab me if it gets in better shape.

Wander Stars

Turn-based combat anime

The key selling points for Wander Stars are its loud inspiration by anime and its word-slinging combat mechanic, the latter of which got me to try this demo. I thought it was an interesting take on turn-based combat to line up words that customize an attack, and that old anime style presentation is indeed charming.

Wander Stars is also very heavy on the visual novel-style dialogue and cinematics, which is probably necessary to evoke that anime feel. It felt more like a visual novel in disguise than the more mechanically involved turn-based RPG that I was hoping for. I'm just lacking the patience to read so much between active gameplay, though the gameplay near the end of the demo does show potential for depth in the turn-based combat.

I'll pass.

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