If you’re anything like me, after a weekend of being barraged with a dizzying number of trailers in conferences and directs, you’re probably in the mood to actually try some of these videogames. Thankfully, the latest Steam Next Fest starts today, letting loose thousands of demos on the platform, some of which were even teased during this gauntlet of live streams. After digging through many of the offerings, we’ve come up with a list of five demos you should check out before the event wraps up on June 16: we’ve got deadly ninjas, doomed small towns, and a man with too much junk in the trunk toppling down a cliffside. Truly a demo for all seasons!
Baby Steps
Those still traumatized by any number of calamitous spills in Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy will be delighted to hear that Foddy is back at it again, now alongside Gabe Cuzillo and Maxi Boch, to deliver another tale of straight-up eating dirt. Baby Steps is an open-world walking game where you play as Nate, “an unemployed failson with nothing going for him,” who gets teleported into a strange world. It’s a game mostly about walking. The twist? It is damn hard to get from point A to B. Much like Foddy’s Getting Over It and QWOP, the biggest obstacle here is getting a grip on an intentionally obtuse control scheme: hold the left trigger to put your left leg forward and the right trigger to put out your right, as the left stick controls how the speed and distance you place your limb. While it seems simple on paper, that isn’t true in practice, as you repeatedly overstep to send the groutfit-wearing protagonist into the mud.
Transported into a strange world of endless hills, Nate is too dang awkward to accept the advice or lore drops of anyone around him, leaving you to your own devices as you explore a vast space in pursuit of going higher. You’ll trip, you’ll tumble, and if you explore enough, you’ll find an incredibly Getting Over It-styled sequence where you slip on some mud and slide down the entire map as the game delights in torturing you with just how far you got set back. Fellow Foddy sickos rejoice because Baby Steps is here to deliver familiar pain in an entirely new form: there’s not one mountain to fall down but many. Yay!
As the retro survival horror revival continues, Holstin is here to offer a fresh perspective on this familiar material, quite literally. While the game is presented from an isometric camera angle, you can shift the camera 45 degrees horizontally in either direction, letting you see new corners of diorama-like rooms. And even more strikingly, when you take aim at the zombie-like creatures that have taken over this small Polish town, the camera shifts over your shoulder, letting you see the world from an entirely new point of view.
These visual tricks make for a striking first impression, but I’m glad to say the game seems to be much more than just its clever presentation because I was equally taken with the ambiance and sense of place on display. The town of Jeziorne-Kolonia exists in an interesting middle space between the outright delirium of Silent Hill and the devastation of Raccoon City, as a mysterious corruption slowly pollutes the minds of its inhabitants (which sometimes turns them into zombie monsters). From what I’ve seen, Holstin seems to have its own novel angle when it comes to these engaging puzzles, this eerie atmosphere, and its specific sense of place.
Possessor(s)
While Heart Machine’s output since Hyper Light Drifter has (at least visually) been on the same page as that game, Possessor(s) seems like an exciting step in a new direction. You play as Luca, a young woman on death’s door after a calamity tears both her body and city in two. To stave off death, she forms a pact with an injured demon named Rehm, and from here, the two journey through this wrecked metropolis to find a way out. The first element that stands out is the dynamic between the two leads, as the tensions in their relationship tease at the exploitative relationship between humans and demons—Rehm tells Luca about how an evil corporation’s experiments led to this catastrophe, while Luca judges a book by its cover when she assumes hellish forces are the cause. These exchanges quickly complicate classic good-versus-evil assumptions about the underworld, leaving me intrigued to learn more.
In terms of gameplay, this experience is structured in a Metroid-esque style as you work through destroyed laboratories and desolate streets with the help of your trusty map. When you encounter feral demons during exploration, Possessor(s) reveals that it’s also drawing on platform fighters like Super Smash Bros. as you roll, air juggle, and parry your way to victory. Combat really picks up when you find your first secondary weapon, a computer mouse, that lets you uppercut foes into the sky before volley-balling them across the map with sword strikes, resulting in free form combos that really evoke the Smash series’ juggles. Add in the excellent art style that combines colorful 2D character portraits with a desolate 3D-rendered backdrop, and this trip through hell on Earth has some real promise.
After Shovel Knight kept Yacht Club Games working on the game’s many Kickstarter-promised spin-offs for the last decade, the studio is finally on to something new. Because while Mina the Hollower is another retro-inspired title, this one splices classic The Legend of Zelda influences with some Bloodborne-inspired hacking and slashing. As its title suggests, you play as Mina the Hollower, a mouse who is a member of the Hollower guild (warrior scholars who can quickly travel underground) as she finds Tenebrous Isle in a state of bedlam.
As Mina takes up arms, you decide between one of three starting weapons—a shortsword, giant hammer, or ball and chain—before engaging in fisticuffs inspired by the top-down classics. I particularly enjoyed the ball and chain because, just like with the Belmonts, its range made positioning a breeze. Beyond this, the unique twist here is that Mina can dig whenever she’s above soft ground, a move that’s fast, satisfying, and opens up lots of unique platforming challenges. Not only does this allow her to avoid attacks and move quickly, but when she resurfaces, she can grab objects from underneath or use her upward momentum to leap a much greater distance than normal. It doesn’t take long until you’re forced to jump, dig, and then resurface to deal with all sorts of tricky pitfalls and enemies, resulting in the type of engaging twist on a retro design that makes you wonder why no one made a game with this precise mechanic before. On top of this, there are some cleverly considered FromSoft-style flourishes, like the interplay between attacking and this game’s equivalent to blood vials, and so on. While Shovel Knight’s success brings fairly high expectations, what I’ve played of Mina the Hollower has me hopeful that Yacht Club is taking a confident step forward.
Ninja Gaiden Ragebound
It only takes a few minutes with Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound to conclude that, at least when it comes to its core ninja acrobatics, The Game Kitchen’s (Blasphemous) latest very much seems to have the juice. Here, you take control of Dragon Clan ninja Kenji Mozu and the Black Spider Clan’s Kumori as these two shinobi find themselves bound in the same body. While these two sworn enemies may not love the arrangement, their combined powers must be put to good use as you dash through lightning-fast platforming challenges in a series of tightly designed levels. While The Game Kitchen’s previous two Souls-inspired games had very deliberate movement, their latest evokes the speed of a fleet-footed assassin thanks to hair-trigger controls: slash to deflect kunai, roll to get around strikes, and perform a bounce called a Guillotine Boost to parry opponents while airborne. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a clever Ikaruga-styled twist where you need to utilize Kenji’s close-ranged blue-colored attacks and Kumori’s red-tinted projectiles to efficiently deal with enemies of the corresponding colors, letting you enter a powered-up state where you deal extra damage. Even as someone who doesn’t have a ton of nostalgia for old-school Ninja Gaiden, this hands-on demo with Ragebound quickly cut my skepticism down to size.
Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
