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Nerdy Bookahs @[email protected] · 2026-03-09 · 14:04 UTC

Steam Next Fest (Mar 2026) – Thoughts

First of all, I love that there are these Next Fests. They bring visibility to smaller indie developers and with the vast amount of games out there, this is always good.

For me personally, though, it seems that the excitement is mostly gone. I guess this is partly because I have so many games that I want to play (and bought already because I found them on sale). I already know that the games I bought are good ones (for me) and I even found a lot of them through Steam’s Next Fest. The last few Next Fests, though, I spent hardly any time in these demos and quickly decided “not for me” for most of them.

In the end, my curiosity won and I gave most of the demos that I downloaded a try, after all. If I remember correctly, when Steam Next Fest first started, the demos would stay only for the duration and a lot of developers disabled the demo afterwards. By now, the demo stays available for almost all of the games. So I can take my sweet time working through my list.

I already uninstalled a few that just didn’t catch my attention at all. But here is a list of the ones that I played a bit or hope to be playing at some point:

As I said, I haven’t tried all of them yet. I did enjoy Hozy, Demiurgos, MMO 98 and ShantyTown.

MMO 98

MMO 98 was a surprise. It is basically clicker game with not many options to choose from. So the “strategy” part is slim, at least in the beginning. But it was entertaining and engaging. It is on my wishlist and I will watch the development news to see how casual it is going to be. The retro charme is also probably part of the attraction. The gnome is at least as annoying as Clippy was.

Demiurgos

Demiurgos is a God Game. It seems that this genre is on the rise again (I’m thinking about Fata Deum and The Universim). I do not like the way the humans look with that paper doll look. But when playing, for the most part, I could ignore it. The gameplay was nice, though, as I had to work really hard (that is, I had to cast a lot of spells and flex my almighty muscles) to gain followers! Another game for my wishlist from where I am going to watch its further development process.

Hozy

Hozy is one of those “decorate rooms” games. The first of that kind (apart from The Sims series) that I played was The Tenants. What I liked in that game is that there was more to the game than purely decorating the rooms. I guess Hozy will be a game with no goals to reach. This is certainly nice as well, but I often find myself ignoring these games because I like working towards something. Still, it is also on my wishlist now.

ShantyTown

And the last of those that I played and really liked is ShantyTown. This reminds me of Islanders. There are some puzzle mechanics as you need to decide where to place which items in order to upgrade certain buildings. The result is a chaotic charming little town. This one currently has the highest probability to end up in my library. It’s different enough, fun to play and nice to look at.

In the end, even though I did not have high expectations, I found some fun new games. Another successful Steam Next Fest, at least for me.

#Demiurgos #gameDemos #Hozy #MMO98 #ShantyTown #SteamNextFest

#steamnextfest #shantytown #mmo98 #hozy #gamedemos #demiurgos