10 Steam Next Fest Games You Should Try - October 2024

Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close and I’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of interesting indie games thanks to the over 3,000 demos. Many of them are interesting, and there are so many that I could hardly see them all, but here are 10 that you should definitely be paying attention to.

Dinocop

Dinocop is a charming adventure/investigation game where essentially the plot of Jurassic Park happened in the backstory… and then the dinosaurs all became sapient and are sharing a world with humans. As a specially engineered raptor, you are the first ever dinosaur cop, and you’re partnered with the most cliche, racist cop possible and sent to investigate a case of mystery meat to uncover whether it is human meat, which is illegal.

What follows is an exploration of ideas, with a strong comedic bent as issues of classism, racism, and how we all interact come together with a purposefully ridiculous world to let us examine these ideas from different angles. Investigate and find out what is going at the convention as you try to gather clues about the mystery meat.

Choose what events happen during the conference you will attend, what questions you’ll ask, and what leads are important to you. It’s charming, sharply written, and needing a bit more polish on the UI but is brimming full of potential and promises to be a lot of fun.

Sultan’s Game

Sultan’s Game is a narrative board game designed for a digital existence, and it's promising with a lot of interesting ideas. It’s a game you’ll be playing through multiple times to see different endings and paths you could take, as you try to survive the titular Sultan’s Game… or even win it. What do you value most, and what choices will you make when you have to make terrible choices?

Sultan’s Game adds on a sort of roguelite meta progression element. Because of the nature of the game, you are going to end up with times where the Sultan executes you for failing a task. You can improve your protagonist, or followers at the start, making it easier in future runs to get further when combined with the increased player knowledge.

Knights in Tight Spaces

If you liked Into the Breach or are interested in highly deterministic strategy games, Knights in Tight Spaces needs to be on your watchlist. As a sequel to Fights in Tight Spaces, it also includes the deckbuilding elements, but it dresses it all up in a much more appealing fantasy setting and style, giving it a very Dungeons and Dragons type feel compared to the previous game.

Ballionaire

Anything can be a roguelite these days as games like Balatro have shown us, with well known games like Poker getting a roguelite glowup. Ballionaire isn’t the next Balatro necessarily, but it’s drawing from a similar well, with Ballionaire turning Pachinko (or as you may know it from the Price is Right, Plinko) into a roguelite type of game.

Like Balatro you have increasing scores you need to meet, and the deckbuilding type element has you building the Pachinko board that you will drop the balls down with different bumpers and effects. It’s a lot of fun, and surprisingly strategic as you try to set up potential combos and get the highest scores possible.

Commander Quest

Keeping with the roguelite theme, Commander Quest is another game that makes use of the tools of that genre, particularly in the deckbuilder style. One can essentially call this a marriage of a Slay the Spire style deckbuilder (the map between battles is clearly based on Slay the Spire’s) and an autobattle strategy game.

Commander Quest was a lot of fun with the interactions between different units, and the different scenarios that the game tosses at you prompt you to think about how to solve the various battles you partake in.

ColdRidge

Continuing our walk down roguelite lane, ColdRidge takes the concept to an exploration board game type feel. In ColdRidge, you are in an odd western type society as a contracted surveyor in a world full of brutal winters. You take different jobs, to survey areas and find certain supplies for the town, seeking to find what you pledged in the run-based game.

ColdRidge’s focus on movement economy, exploration, and its lack of conflict make it an appealing different type of roguelite experience. The focus on resource acquisition, finding things in different areas, and weighing risks for what you can uncover make it a fun game to play.

Tower Factory

Continuing our weird walk through roguelites, Tower Factory marries some roguelite progression ideas and methods to a tower-defense game, with an automation focus. It’s like Defense Grid met Satisfactory with some rogue spice tossed in for the relationship.

The enemy and tower variety are cool, and there’s some neat different things you can do with the factory side of resource management, which will be interesting to see expanded out over the whole game. The roguelite side of things is perhaps the clunkiest part, as some of the metaprogression feels like it is holding back the game, like starting resources needing to be unlocked causing a very slow start until you get that. It needs some tuning.

Sulfur

Rounding out our stroll through the roguelites, we go to one that is a more standard actiony dungeon crawling  roguelite, but to reduce Sulfur to that would be to ignore its delightful weirdness. The art style, the vibes, and the general premise of being a priest in a purgatory-type realm seeking a being of darkness that cursed your town, are intentionally cast as weird and give it a unique charm.

Meet odd characters, shoot and slice your way down the depths of the realm, and make sure to go back to town sometimes or when you die, you’ll lose all your supplies. Sulfur is a polished, fun game to play with a unique vibe that releases on Oct. 28, so make sure to take a look at it.

Tiny Bookshop

Admittedly, this game may appeal to you less if you are less of a bibliophile than me, but Tiny Bookshop appeals to that side of me. This cozy life sim game has you arrive in a town by the sea, with a closed wagon that makes up your shop. Stack it with books, meet people, and figure out what books the people of this town may want.

Tiny Bookshop goes for a sort of timeless vibe, with the books in it referencing published works through at least the 2010s, but it lacks any sort of internet or phone in the few days the demo lets you play. It captures the spirit of small town, and like most of these cozy simulation type games, avoids many of the frustrations that real business ownership brings with it. It was fun to hang out, picking out books to sell, matching people to specific books when that came up, and just a chill time over all.

Kill the Shadow

We began the list with a comedic detective game, and we’ll end it with a much more serious one. Shadowlight Sanctuary’s game has you playing as Detective Lucas to solve difficult cases about a variety of things, uncovering mysteries that others may feel were best left buried.

Unlike some games in this genre, you are able to miss clues and make wrong conclusions based on it (like I did in one demo play), without it ending the game--instead it goes on with the consequences of that choice.

Kill the Shadow gives you a robust set of tools to uncover the clues and solve cases, so it feels like you messed up when you missed something--not the game. It’s combined with a dark post-war type of setting that gives it a gritty feel that works very well with this type of experience.

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Those were my picks for 10 Steam Next Fest Games from October 2024 that you should try, or keep an eye on. With over 3,000 games this time around, there were so many games in Next Fest that I hope I highlighted something that interests you, that you may have missed. If you played some Next Fest demos, let us know your favorites in the comments below!