I love trawling through the Steam NextFest, scanning countless trailers, sifting for the shiny special games. Like rummaging through the shelves of a secondhand bookshop, or flicking through vinyl in a record shop, much of the joy is in the search. Of course, finding a gem is the ultimate aim of the game, and I think I’ve found a few in the October 2025 NextFest – ten, to be precise (well, I’ve scaled it down to that beloved round number). I hope you, too, find something for your wishlist below.
The Tragedy at Deer Creek
The first thing to strike me about this wonderful game was the art style. The animated cinematic cut scenes are stunning: the strikingly beautiful artwork, the camera angles, the lighting, everything. And this cinematic feel is carried over into the visual design of the gameplay sections, which are likewise dripping with atmosphere and detail. The voice acting and writing are similarly top-drawer. Taken together, the art design is some of the best I’ve seen in a video game in a long time.
The game also deploys a fascinating mix of genres. It is perhaps best described as a first-person point-and-click game (the collection, use, and combination of items is a key component of the gameplay). But it also feels like a walking simulator. You play as photographer Charlotte Gray (taking and analysing photos is another main mechanic in the game), who is researching a book about frontier towns, in this case Deer Creek, a long-abandoned logging camp in snowy Alaska. The game seems to operate primarily in two time frames: the late 1990s of Charlotte and the late 19th century of the people whose lives she is slowly uncovering. I was utterly absorbed. People who enjoyed What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch or Return of the Obra Dinn should check out this demo. It felt like a special piece of video game narrative art.
The Tragedy at Deer Lake, Steam Store Page
Fail Fail Succeed
What a delightful puzzle-platformer this is! Featuring Fez-like vibes, you play as a cute robot trying to reunite with their even cuter dog over increasingly difficult levels. The big twist is that you can transform into different forms of platforms, and when you die, these platforms remain at the point of your death for you to use on your next attempt. As such, each failure literally leads to success, and deaths become a fundamental part of the puzzle-solving process. In short, theme and gameplay coalesce in a most pleasing way. (This sense of ludonarrative resonance is a beautiful reflection of the mental health lows and subsequent highs experienced by the solo developer, Martin Zetterman).
The game has a beautiful minimalist art style, featuring gorgeous little animations, and each level of the demo is meticulously designed. It’s clear that a lot of love and thought has been poured into this. It’s shaping up to be a charmingly brilliant little puzzle game.
Fail Fail Succeed, Steam Store Page
Constance
I had a nice time with this beautifully designed, if somewhat unoriginal, metroidvania. The eponymous protagonist is an artist who uses their brush as a weapon and a movement tool. The moveset is fluid and fun; indeed, flow seems to be a main theme of the game, which I certainly achieved now and again when stringing a series of jumps and dashes together.
It looks quite lovely – the art is reminiscent of Hollow Knight, only much brighter. The platforming and combat are solid and enjoyable, albeit not especially innovative. However, the artist-themed coat of paint helps to keep things fresh. I had a fun half-hour or so with this, and I suspect it will do well.
Motorslice
This demo felt pleasingly idiosyncratic, a little bit janky and slightly bonkers. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A 3D parkour-style platformer with combat elements, you play as chainsaw-wielding ‘P’, who is scaling a megastructure, slicing up rogue machines along the way. The movement is exhilarating, though it might take some mastering, and the combat feels elemental, perhaps a bit clunky, but utterly intoxicating. Instead of being splashed with blood, you are covered in oil as you crunchingly dispatch rogue construction site machinery, all to the beat of a pulsating soundtrack.
Benches dotted amongst the stark architectural environment provide respite from the frantic action and a chance to chat to your drone work buddy. These conversations felt incongruous at first (P is fully voice acted), but by the end of my time with the demo, I rather looked forward to them (P is engagingly laidback and sardonic). This is a thrilling ride of a demo, and the store page hints at Shadow of the Colossus-type bosses to come (I haven’t yet encountered a boss in the demo). Need I say more?
The Séance of Blake Manor
Featuring an impeccable comic-book art style and excellent voice acting, this first-person detective folk-horror game releases just in time for Halloween (October 27th). It’s set in late 19th-century West Ireland, in a spooky hotel, which is haunted by the spectre of English colonialism and soaked in Irish folklore. You play as private investigator Declan Ward, who is investigating the (possibly) supernatural disappearance of a guest. Time management is key, as you only have a specific amount in which to solve each part of the mystery, and every time you interact with a person or an object, this precious time ticks away.
I loved the spooky, as opposed to scary, vibes of this game. Admittedly, my poor detection skills led to a fail state towards the end of my nearly one hour with the demo, so this might be one to play with my wife, who does the bulk of video game detective work in our family. Developed by the team behind the excellent point-and-click adventure The Darkside Detective and published by Raw Fury, this could be just what you need for the long, dark nights of autumn.
The Seance of Blake Manor, Steam Store Page
Love Eternal
One of my favourite games is Celeste, a game that combines precision platforming with meaningful storytelling to create a sense of ludonarrative harmony I’ve rarely experienced since in any video game, let alone in a precision platformer. Love Eternal might be about to change that.
A mix of gravity-defying platforming (think VVVVV) and surreal psychological-horror storytelling, I was hooked from the creepy opening scene. The controls are very tight, and the movement feels wonderful. The pixel art is excellent, dreamlike and uncanny, and the sound design is eerie and echoey. Like Celeste, it feels like it’s going to be a difficult game – this design choice reflecting the difficult subject matter – but one that I’m eager to rise to the challenge of when the full game releases. It’s a relatively short demo, lasting about 15-20 minutes. Fellow lovers of Celeste should wishlist this immediately.
Love Eternal, Steam Store Page
Father
This is another psychological horror game I stumbled across in my wanderings through the NextFest. It’s a story-focused first-person walking simulator with the aesthetic and tone of an arthouse film. The protagonist is a father, Caleb, whose peculiarly Calvinistic form of religious extremism has led him to take his family to live deep in the woods, isolated from the wicked world of sin and temptation. Themes of patriarchal power, guilt, toxic masculinity, mental illness and religious hypocrisy are economically established through a combination of everyday family scenes, in which the tyranny and cruelty of Caleb are chillingly depicted, and the surreal nightmares he experiences, which are rich in grotesque symbolism. This counterpoint method of storytelling works brilliantly, especially in terms of depicting Caleb’s cosmic sense of guilt and his tightly wound psychological repression.
The art is uncanny and strange, and the sound design muted and unsettling. It is certainly a disturbing game, especially so as you play as Caleb, and the narrative is very much on the rails, meaning that you can’t choose to be kinder (at least, not in the demo). The question is: can you feel empathy for someone like Caleb by walking in his shoes? It’s a question that, of all the artistic mediums, video games are perhaps best suited to answer. The demo has a huge twist at the end, by the way, which made me even more eager to return to that sinister cabin in the woods.
Monumentum
When I clicked onto the store page of this particular game, Steam told me that I’d played a similar one before, called Getting Over it With Bennett Foddy. They weren’t wrong. Described by the developers as a ‘metroidvania-rage-puzzle-platformer-pinball-like’, with the key word there being ‘rage’, this is a very demanding game, which doesn’t share Fail Fail Succeed’s rather kinder take on failure. Checkpoints are scarce, safe platforms rare, and a mistimed input often means a big fall down many screens that you’ll have to traverse again. And again.
You control both the player character, a kind of square-shaped entity, and parts of the environment, which act as pinball-like bumpers. However, each of the neon-lit trajectory devices has a different function (for instance, one allows you to levitate up and along it) or sends you off in a different direction. The game requires quick reflexes and a good memory for the button inputs required. The black-and-white line art, lit up by the neon lights of the trajectory mechanisms, is minimalist, refined and elegant. It’s certainly a mesmerising experience, bouncing about up and down those screens, which I fear I’ll be drawn back into by my masochistic platforming brain.
Whispers Among the Poppies
This heartrending game about a boy caught up in a brutal military invasion is made by a small team of Ukrainian developers. (The lead developer, Pavlo Podberezko, has first-hand knowledge of such things, having had to flee from his home region of Zaporizhia in order to complete his game). Playing as the unnamed boy, you encounter light 2D platforming and simple puzzles as you wander through the shattered landscape. The boy has some form of spiritual power, which he uses to help bereaved people deal with their loss and trauma. It seems to be a game about closure, about saying goodbye to the people who’ve lost their lives in the conflict.
The beautiful hand-drawn picture-book art style is used as a contrast against the bleak background of the war-torn country, and the game tells its heartbreaking stories without text or speech. This wordless storytelling, along with the excellent sound design (the incessant drone of warplanes permeates the air), makes for a highly immersive and emotional experience. It is a bleak but vital game, with its own sense of melancholic beauty.
Whispers Among the Poppies, Steam Store Page
Sector Zero
This first-person physics-based 3D adventure-horror game is a fascinating piece of work. An offshoot of solo developer Ondrej Angelovic’s larger project Artificial, which is also still in development (and also has a very impressive demo), you play as some kind of ancient entity awakened by human mining operations deep within an asteroid. It’s a classic science fiction story of humans overstepping their mark. You must navigate your way through swamp-like space-age industrial debris (sometimes it feels like you’re in the garbage compactor from Star Wars: A New Hope) and crawl through claustrophobic air vents (which reminded me of Alien).
The gameplay consists of platforming, solving environmental puzzles and avoiding hazards. You gain new abilities as you progress – such as the ability to move objects – and you can also stealth your way through some sections. However, it’s the movement and the environment itself that I found most engrossing. The minimalist art is superb: crisp white lines sharply delineating the dark debris and the stark black-and-white colour scheme punctuated by bright red lasers, which you must avoid or destroy. The signposting is subtle, unobtrusive and yet clear: I never got lost amidst all that miscellaneous space junk. I look forward to returning to Asteroid 2031 XT when the full game releases in January.
It’s a time-consuming business, searching for gems on the electronic festival floor that is NextFest. There are so many wonderfully inventive, idiosyncratic developers making fascinating games. Unfortunately, some get lost in all the hubbub and noise. There wasn’t room above to include Forestrike, The Berlin Apartment, Winter Burrow or Cairn (all of which had demos at the previous NextFest, in Summer 2025); or Tears of Metal, or Origament: A Paper Adventure, or Regions of Ruin: Runegate (all of which appeared first at this current October 2025 NextFest). All excellent demos that you should try out. Sure, the sheer amount of games vying for one’s attention can be overwhelming, but I’m already looking forward to my next search for exciting new games. Here’s to the next Steam NextFest and all the wonders it will bring.
