Every time Steam Next Fest comes around, I’m highly susceptible to the allure of shiny new demos. There are so many indies to be excited for in a given year, but 2024 is looking even better than most, and I always find myself downloading way more demos than I can feasibly play in the week the event runs. The most recent Steam Next Fest has ended, but I find myself still trawling the platform for demos I can play right now, trying to pick out the most surprising and innovative ones in a sea of great games.
Because demos are often very short, I’m far more willing to play things I ordinarily wouldn’t be interested in, because why not? This means I lean much harder into the weird and unsettling, which is huge for me considering my well-documented aversion to horror games. Not all of the demos I’ll be talking about are horror games per se, but they’re all unconventional and a little weird in some way. Here are some you should try out, because it’s free, and you might end up discovering a cool new game to look forward to.
I Am Your Beast
Coming from Strange Scaffold, the developer behind last year’s much-loved third person shooter El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast is an FPS where you “hunt the military-industrial complex” across levels that look straight out of a comic book. It’s frenetic and beautifully stylised.
As you boot up the game and go through the tutorial, your character – a secret agent sick of taking orders – roves through a forest, hopping over logs and perching on tree branches, taking out soldiers from the initiative you used to be a part of. The screen periodically fills with huge block letters over video clips of your environment, narrating your character’s thoughts and voice, cutting up the tutorial level as you learn the controls. The tone feels totally right, and the game does a great job of making you feel like a killing machine. You can find the demo here.
Aberration Analyst
I’m a sucker for a detective game, especially one as stylised and experimental as this one. Aberration Analyst doesn’t hold your hand through what you need to do – in fact, you won’t find a single tutorial to point you in the right direction – but the mechanics are simple enough that it’s not too hard to figure it out on your own. This point-and-click game puts a stack of tabloids in front of you, a computer you can use to access police and coroner reports, a phone to send teams on investigations, and a stack of books that collect lore tidbits about the monsters you might encounter.
Oh, yeah, you’re hunting monsters, by the way, except you don’t go out into the field, you just figure out what’s worth investigating and send priests, private investigators, photographers and the like to do your dirty work. Try it out here.
Cryptmaster
This May 2024 release is pretty niche, considering it’s a dungeon crawler you type your way through, but it’s doing very well with the audience it’s attracted and the introductory level I played was so delightful that I’m definitely going to make time to play through it this year. This black-and-white world is stunningly illustrated and well voice acted, and has a surprising amount of variety in the things you can do, as long as you can describe your action in a single word.
The game’s opening has you being woken up by a necromancer, who has resurrected four fallen heroes to do his bidding. Each hero has different skills, and you toggle through those heroes, typing different commands to trigger different abilities in combat, exploration, and more. While the crypt you wander through at the start is fairly limited in scope, the game’s Steam description promises you’ll continue to encounter new mechanics ranging from creature collection to ‘bard rap-battles’. The demo is excellent, and you can play it here.
Silkbulb Test
I’ll be honest – I only lasted three minutes into this demo and immediately removed it from my wishlist after closing out the app, but that’s because it scared me so badly I couldn’t bear to sit through it any longer. I even uninstalled it seconds after stopping, because I felt like my PC would get haunted. I’m superstitious, okay?
Silkbulb Test’s demo isn’t indicative of the game’s actual gameplay, but it’s certainly indicative of the terror it’ll strike into your heart. The three minutes I made it through were unsettling at first, with me clicking buttons to answer prompts projected on a screen in front of me, but even the demo was masterful in managing tension, and I was almost immediately too afraid to turn around and look behind me despite the sun still being out. The game itself is a co-operative horror experience where you “harvest the minds of the Sunken Ones to keep your body from grinding to a halt”, whatever that means. I won’t be finding out, but you can also scare the bejesus out of yourself here and let me know how the game shakes out when it releases.
Grunn
Okay, I have to be honest again – I lasted only ten minutes into this one. Please stop pointing and laughing at me. Grunn isn’t terrifying on the face of it, but it’s very unsettling. Your job is to do some maintenance work in a garden, including cutting grass, picking up trash, and watering the flowers, except some of the tools you need are nowhere to be found. You’re also told not to go out after dark, and you feel like you’re being watched, all the time.
Visually, the game could be considered cutesy, except there’s a really weird filter that makes it look like the world is wavering in space all the time. I don’t like it, in the sense that it freaks me out and I do not want to hang around these weird garden gnomes, but I love it in the sense that it freaks me out and I do not want to hang around these weird garden gnomes. Have fun gardening and trying not to die here.
Blue Prince
Mercifully, unlike the previous two games, Blue Prince did not make me want to crawl into bed with my comforter over my head and hide. This game calls itself genre-defying, and truly, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game quite like it. This roguelike doesn’t have you fighting enemies – instead, you make your way through a mysterious manor with ever shifting rooms, choosing from three options what room you’ll find behind a door as you create a floor plan for the house. A room might contain resources, clues, or secrets, but no matter what, every day resets the house and makes you start afresh.
This is definitely a notebook game, something the demo makes clear as it encourages you to take notes across runs to piece together a winning strategy. While the demo only lets you play for four days, I’m already intrigued – what’s in Room 46, the room I’m supposed to find? What do I even use my resources for? Why is the house like that? This game is probably gonna suck up a lot of my time when it releases, and I can’t wait. Try it here.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
I’ve already written about why you should play Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, but I’m including it as an entry here for good measure. Capcom’s latest release has a surprisingly compelling mix of action and tower defense gameplay, wrapped up in a beautiful, psychedelic, Japanese-inspired world. You can play the demo here, and the full game will be out in about two weeks.
