Your best opportunity to try out hundreds of upcoming games for free is about to return, as Steam Next Fest is coming back for a week full of videogame demos. With many more announcements of participating games incoming, now is the time to start scouring places like Twitter to see who’s getting involved and get your list of demos you want to try out ready, because I’m sure it’s going to be a long one.
While I love a good Steam sale, nothing beats being able to try out promising upcoming games for free. This is where the newest Steam Next Fest comes in, as Valve has worked with indie developers to help bring players snippets of their games for free for a limited time.
Between Monday, October 9 and Monday, October 16 you’ll be able to play hundreds of demos, and some developers have even already started putting up their demos ahead of the Steam Next Fest’s official start date, giving you even more options.
Valve has already shown off some Steam Next Fest games in a trailer, and they include some absolutely delightful entries. There’s Doggy Don’t Care where you play as a dog left at home alone wreaking havoc, Checkmate Showdown which combines chess and fighting, A Date With Death sees you dating the Grim Reaper, and Relentless Frontier, which is a classic-inspired FPS running on the GZ Doom engine. All these games also have demos right now, if they sound up your street.
Games also can’t participate in any future Next Fests if they’ve already entered one, so while that means unreleased games you may have already tried in previous Next Fests will no longer have demos up for download, the silver lining is that you’ll get a plethora of new games to try. Keep in mind that the majority of demos are also only available to download for this week of Steam Next Fest, so get your library filled as soon as possible.
It’s also a great way for you to get in on the ground floor of what could very well be the next colossal Steam hit, as even Valve doesn’t know when that’ll come around. You’ll find roguelikes, cozy games, action games, RPGs, and anything in between during Steam Next Fest, so just go to your favorite genre tags and start looking.
In the meantime, we’ve already put together the most essential free Steam games you need to add to your library alongside the best PC games ever, with Steam Next Fest potentially introducing us all to new entries in the latter category.
