The first Steam Next Fest of 2026 is just around the corner. From February 23[rd] to March 2[nd], you can play tons of free demos, interact with the developers behind them, and wish list your favorites from every genre under the sun. Steam runs Next Fest
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As someone who recommends Disco Elysium to ALL of my friends, I’m REALLY excited about Zero Parades. I know the drama around it, I know the founders are gone. But I hope to the gods the game can just give me some of the feeling I got the first time I played through Disco.
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I’m stoked. Likely going to play quite a few demos.
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That’s what I like to hear - please let me know if you find anything cool. 
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So far these are the demos I have tried and my thoughts on each one so far.
Active Matter
Genre: Extraction Shooter
- Setting seems like a modern supernatural kind of feel to it that left me wanting to learn more about the world.
- Gravity mechanics are unique there are traps, and the world bends literally kind of like the movie inception where the city kind of folds up and what look to be walls become floors as you walk into them.
- This game features some of the best visuals I have seen in extraction shooters.
- Invisible enemies and jump scares got me several times, which is a difficult acheivement when it comes to me.
- You choose 1 of 4 different starting characters called Sleeves that each have their own distinct passives making the decision matter quite a bit.
- Runs perfectly on CachyOS.
CTRL/SINK
Genre: Old School Doom Like
- I liked the old school aestetic.
- Puzzles aren’t challenging, but you have to be fast because the enemies are strong.
- The gunplay was challenging and ammunation is limited so if you panic and just spray and pray you will likely run out of ammunition and have to keep your eyes open for destroyable cases and hope they have the ammo you need.
- The game is fast paced while still being easy to understand. When you die, you can easily figure out what you did wrong.
- Manual reloading weapons seems buggy. The reload animation would play when I hit R but it didn’t reload. My work around was just to expend all of my ammo when in combat and spint around and avoid damage while the game automatically reloaded.
- Runs perfectly on CachyOS, however the cursor disappeared a few times in the ESC menu so I thought the game crashed. Alt+Tab fixed it.
Rig Riot
Genre: Mech Roguelike
- This game has probably the most intense and unforgiving 3rd person shooter combat that I have experienced in a mech game. I still have to play the most recent Armored Core.
- The premise is easy to figure out while being hard to master.
- Customization is really important allowing you to change out mech parts that you earn throughout the game, boosting stats.
- The tutorial explains everything nicely.
- The wall jump animation looks silly. Your mech just kind of just clips a little into the wall and you spam jump and the direction of the wall to get to high up places.
- The mechs look cool and the retro aestetic is a nice touch.
- Ran with no issues on CachyOS
Midair 2
Genre: Arena Shooter
- If you understand the old Tribes games and wish there were more games like them, you will appreciate this game.
- The combat is fast paced and requires a lot of skill like being able to predict where enemies are going to land your shots effectively.
- This game is super responsive.
- It doesn’t seem super demanding making high FPS easy to achieve.
- This demo made it so hard to find people playing, that I didn’t spend much time playing it.
- Like most games in the Arena Shooter genre this one is easy to pickup. Hard to master.
- Ran with no problems on CachyOS
Windrose
Genre: 3rd Person Survival Crafting Pirate Game
- The gameplay, for a survival style game, felt way more addictive than something like Ark Survival. Not to pull credit from the game it’s self, but I think it was the fact that you play as a pirate keeping me playing as long as I did. I managed to sink nearly 4 hours into this demo without even noticing.
- The combat was also challenging, and/or I just suck at video games. I died a lot. This is not a bad thing.
- There is a parrying system that I didn’t completely master, but understood.
- The off hand gun is pretty neat, and actually pretty powerful.
- Quests are simple and to the point.
- I generally don’t enjoy survival games, but I might buy this one.
- Ran great on CachyOS.
I’m loving these detailed breakdowns, man. I have it ready to go, but the latest FPS I was going to play has been STALKER 2; always nice to have others to fall back to if I’m looking for something less intense, haha.
Active Matter looks sick and I’ll probably try it with friends when it drops. The graphics are gorgeous and it’s making me think of F.E.A.R and STALKER in some ways, too.
I’m a sucker for old-school aesthetics, and CTRL/SINK looks fun. Bummer it was a bit buggy but I’m sure it’ll smooth out at lauch. The last boomer-shooter I played was Ion Fury.
The newest Armored Core is sitting in my library and I need to play that before any other mechas, but Windrose also caught my eye. I’ll be dropping more Next Fest Recaps soon, and it seems like it was a big hit with the community. I really like the idea of survival-soulslikes you can play with friends. Part of the trailer cracked me up because it had footage of someone blasting away dodos.
It’s always fun getting an idea of what games people like, so thanks again for sharing. 