Steam Next Fest ended on Monday, but these games’ demos are still up. So, I would like you to spend your evenings on them instead of whatever that filthy algorithm served you today.
After all, I played more demos than my wrists approve of, and I’ve got to do something to feel productive about the time spent… so, you are about to watch my mood travel from a grandmother’s birthday party to a disembodied arm. Consider it a smorgasbord of games to watch for the rest of the year and well into the next.
Apple Crumble
TL;DR
Pull open every drawer at Nan’s 84th birthday and you’ll find a family mystery hiding behind the cake, the cardigans and one deeply suspicious uncle.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Happy Broccoli Games
- Platforms: Steam (Windows, Mac, Linux)
- Release date: December 3, 2026
My Next Fest began with an invitation to Nan’s 84th birthday, where the cake is lovely, the guests include a stressed-out mum, a midlife-crisis uncle, and a strange man occupying your bedroom, and one of them has decided this will be her last party. Looks like figuring out who the culprit is falls to you.
That’s Apple Crumble, from the team behind Duck Detective. It’s a nod to Mouthwashing and Knives Out, and my thirty minutes were spent pulling open drawers and collecting whatever was inside, which is Gone Home if the house had people in it.
Very little happens, and you can still feel something awful waiting at the edge of every scene. The very British voice acting, the oddness of a family that behaves exactly like a real one, and the charmingly simple animations told me everything about the humor and mood to come.
Mr. Records
TL;DR
A retired hero reopens his record shop and somehow convinces you a made-up Beatles-adjacent B-side is the best song you’ve heard all year.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Glee-Cheese Studio
- Publisher: Wired Productions and Gamersky Games
- Platforms: Steam | PS5 | Xbox Series | Switch 2
- Release date: Q1 2027
Fresh from trying to keep one old person alive, I gravitated to another: George, the semi-retired hero of Mr. Records, who has finally opened the record shop he always wanted.
I did not expect a record shop to be where I got my love of music back, but here we are.
Mr. Records is a rhythm game and a shopkeeping game wearing one very funky coat. At night, George puts on a record while the game turns it into a level of jumping, kicking, and sliding that feels great and looks even better. By day, he sells that same record to a customer, which works because you lived inside the song hours earlier.
The songs are originals that sound like the Beatles hanging out with San Andreas radio, so convincing that I googled whether they were real, and each album comes with a made-up history, told in so few words that I cared anyway.
Between AI music and the TikTokification of everything, I’d been drifting toward podcasts and audiobooks this year, but after forty minutes with George I’ve been reminded of the obvious fact that music is really, really cool.
Dungeon Automata
TL;DR
Program every decision your PARTY will make, then step back like a nervous parent watching the whole dungeon run live without you.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Medium-Rare Games
- Publisher: Kakehashi Games and Raw Fury
- Platforms: Steam (Windows)
- Release date: 2026 (TBA)
Then my brain demanded homework, and Lucy James, who writes the lookingfor.game newsletter, had the perfect assignment: Dungeon Automata, which she recommended to anyone who loves Final Fantasy 12’s Gambit system — all three of us.
I am here to report that she was devastatingly right. I am the Gambit system’s biggest fan, so you can imagine how it felt to find a game that strips away everything else and keeps only the programming.
Before each run, you set every action and every condition for your golems: if this, do that, if not, do the other thing, retreat at this point, heal anyone below that much health. Then you hit go and watch your plan thrive or collapse like a nervous parent at a school play.
There’s real variety, too, with plenty of floors, tougher enemies, and archetypes like the knight tank, quick thief, spell-slinging mage, and healing priest, plus custom characters you earn from the enemies you defeat.
It’s stark black and white with slashes of red, and the blueprint tutorial hands you ideas so gently I never felt overwhelmed. I know this is for a specific kind of person: ME!
Hillthorn
TL;DR
A wordless mountain village and a missing child interrogate you through clue cards alone
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Fool Moon and Finnegan Motors
- Publisher: Raw Fury
- Platforms: Steam (Windows, Mac, SteamOS/Linux)
- Release date: November 10, 2026
Raw Fury keeps green-lighting weird little projects, and I keep loving them for it. Now, Hillthorn might be the weirdest yet.
It’s a detective game boiled down to cards: action cards like investigate, talk, and explore, and other cards you point them at, all in the service of finding a missing child.
Investigate something, and you get new cards; talk to someone, and you get a clue card pinned to them, because nobody in this wordless mountain village says a single line of dialogue. Which is how I ended up performing both halves of every interview out loud, as the detective and as the villager, because I am a loser… but also very immersed in this story.
It sounds drier than it plays, but Hillthorn is moodier and far more addictive than cards on a table have any right to be.
Book Nook
TL;DR
Build a tiny cardboard armchair, uncover a lifelong love story one shelf at a time, and never once reach for an Allen key.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Malapata Studio
- Publisher: Malapata Studio and WINGS
- Platforms: Steam | Switch (Switch 2 compatible)
- Release date: 2026
Book Nook asks the question the world has been too afraid to: what if assembling flat-pack furniture were cute, cozy and chic, and involved far fewer Allen keys?
The demo is short, but it is terribly cute. You slot cardboard pieces together into tiny furniture and decorations, then fit everything into a diorama until the nook clicks into place, which is as zen as it sounds.
There’s an expert mode I skipped, because I’m not here for that life. Still, the detail is polished to an extreme, and each finished scene gives you a glimpse of Dario and Elora, a couple followed from childhood to old age, and the life they built with their children.
So the motivation works twofold: I wanted to make cute stuff, and I wanted to find out what happened to these two.
I Shall Name the Dead
TL;DR
A one-eyed woman with a worm eating her alive wanders a cemetery-city naming the forgotten dead so gorgeously drawn you forget to be scared.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Tiago Rech (art by Lirio Ninotchka)
- Publisher: DANGEN Entertainment
- Platforms: Steam
- Release date: 2027
Mystery games have plenty of cool girls — Lorelei from Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is right there! — but I have never met a cool girl like Imaculada.
She has one working eye, a mysterious Worm consuming her from the inside, and more charisma than I will ever possess. Her dead eye lets her talk to the nameless dead of a cemetery that is also its own city, and her job is to name them so they can finally rest.
I Shall Name the Dead is an extremely stylish, artsy horror game, with cool animations, colors, framing, and transitions, in a world where something is deeply wrong in every scene, so you have to work for each answer.
Rockbeasts
TL;DR
Skip rehearsal with your grunge rock-animal band and showtime turns every note into gibberish, the funniest punishment a rhythm game has ever dealt.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Lichthund (Warsaw)
- Publisher: Team17
- Platforms: Steam | PS5 | Xbox | Switch | Switch 2
- Release date: January 2027
Please never hire me to manage your band.
In Rockbeasts I skipped rehearsal on one song, and at showtime the note prompts turned into gibberish while my musicians fumbled their guitar, bass and drums and mumbled through lyrics they did not know, and I sat there with a controller and no recourse. It’s genius, and a very funny kind of punishment.
Honestly, the rhythm game is the least exciting part, but the management won me over. This ragtag bunch of 90s grunge animals can’t afford breakfast, so you spend your days marketing the gig, fixing their gear, feeding them, and getting them on the radio, all in the hope of turning them into rock stars.
It’s written by Jakub Szamałek of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, with Iggy Pop lending a voice, and it feels like an adult cartoon from MTV in the 2010s that I would happily live inside.
Angelic Agency: Soul Salvation Unit
TL;DR
A detective duo investigates Ghosturbance Cases to a soundtrack so good you’ll want to live on the title screen, chromatic aberration and all.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer and publisher: YOKUNIKU
- Platforms: Steam
- Release date: TBA
I only had a few minutes with Angelic Agency: Soul Salvation Unit, and I would have gladly spent all of them on the title screen, because the soundtrack bangs. Then the game starts, and two detectives with a dynamic I loved reading wade into Ghosturbance Cases, which means actual ghosts and a little spelunking.
The art has the anime DNA of Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, with what I’d call watercolor backgrounds and chromatic aberration seething off the screen, which left me faintly queasy after a while, though I’ve decided that’s deliberate.
You read files, pay attention, and work out who lied to you and about what, which is detective work at its finest. The full game promises four standalone episodes, so I’m filing a formal request for the other three, and for a few of my evenings.
Inkblood
TL;DR
Trapped in a carriage with a camera, a magnifying glass and zero instructions, you’ll hunt a cult through 19th-century Eastern Europe with barely a clue.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Hey Bird!
- Publisher: Critical Reflex
- Platforms: Steam
- Release date: 2026
I would love to tell you what Inkblood is about, but the game wasted no time not explaining it to me. It simply dropped me into a carriage for a very moody thirty-minute demo, where the coachman has a map on his back for reasons I still don’t understand.
From what I gather, you’re an Inquisitor hunting a cult through a world inspired by 19th-century Eastern Europe, seen entirely through the carriage windows, with a camera, a magnifying glass for zooming in and peeking into the past, and a desk holding a locked suitcase and a fiddly radio.
You can tap the coachman’s back to choose your next stop, and after that you are on your own, in the spirit of Strange Antiquities, to the point that the game literally says good luck.
It’s grim, eerie, and secretive, and it has enraptured me. I want the freedom to explore it and make sense of it, though I would not be upset if it made no sense at all.
My Arms Are Longer Now
TL;DR
You’re a very long, very gross arm on a train stealing from commuters, and the only thing harder than the physics is not laughing.
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Developer: Toot Games (Melbourne)
- Publisher: Jackbox Games
- Platforms: Steam | Epic Games Store, consoles to follow
- Release date: 2027
In My Arms Are Longer Now, you are an impossibly long arm in a train carriage, wrecking chaos the way you would in Untitled Goose Game, to a narration full of very funny Australian humor.
I stole from commuters who mostly shrugged at me, grabbed a key, unlocked the next carriage, and kept going until I got the briefcase off the main old lady, who knows what’s inside.
But when it came to completing an objective to “trip the inspector”, I kid you not, I spent twenty minutes trying to do so, because limited instructions plus frustrating physics is a recipe for humiliation. When it finally clicked, I was delighted, but the mechanics need tightening.
If you loved Thank Goodness You’re Here, this is a close cousin, a bit more sandboxy, less about fetching an item for an NPC and more about fooling around with other people through scripted events.
Still hungry for more demos? Amanda tried There Are No Ghosts at the Grand and has lots of nice things to say about it. Plus, I’ve been playing monster-taming Leafblade’s demo for a dangerously long time. I’m actually wondering if the devs are aware of how long you can keep this thing running for… but hey, let’s keep that between us, shall we?
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