The best Steam Next Fest demos to play on PC before they're gone

Record shop management, match-3 warfare, and skateboarding trains

Back in the day, there were only a few ways to play a game before it came out: go to an expo like E3, find a demo kiosk at Walmart, or get a disc from a magazine that was loaded with demos. (I mean, you could also break into a game studio, I suppose, but that was frowned upon.) You don’t have to go through those hoops anymore thanks to Steam Next Fest, which has once again arrived and brought more demos than you could possibly handle.

Running from Feb. 23 to March 2, this year’s Next Fest brings some particularly exciting PC game demos to Steam. From heroic frogs to skateboarding trains, there’s a lot of weird and wonderful stuff to sift through. We can help get you started. Here are 10 great Steam demos that you should check out this week.

1 Denshattack!

The elevator pitch of Denshattack! is enough to sell it instantly: anime game where you can kickflip a train. And it lives up to that elevator pitch instantly too. The demo is brief, covering just a few levels, but rips from the start. Denshattack! takes place in a futuristic version of Japan where cities are contained under domed spheres. You play as a train operator who connects those cities. But that’s all just a pretense for grinding, tre-flipping, shuv-it-ing, and otherwise treating a 200 mph subway car as if it’s a skateboard. The early taste of Denshattack! makes it seem like one of the coolest games of 2026, and if it pulls out all the stops, we’re all aboard. —Ari Notis

2 Titanium Court

I don’t know if I can adequately describe Titanium Court in a short paragraph. The new game from Consume Me co-creator AP Thomson is a text adventure, a match-three puzzler, and a strategy game rolled into one. The way-too-easy explanation is that you need to defend a castle from rival castles, all of which are squares in a puzzle grid. You do that by matching terrain tiles — rocks, water, fields — together so that your castle is in an advantageous position ahead of the battle phase. Once time runs out, you hire some farmers to gather food from surrounding fields and soldiers to raid nearby castles. That only covers like 5% of what you’ll see in the Steam Next Fest demo, and I could not possibly begin to explain the rest to you in a way that makes sense. All I’ll say is that it’s fantastic. —Giovanni Colantonio

3 Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

We've seen a lot of Vampire Survivors imitators since the "bullet-heaven" game invented a new genre in 2022, but leave it to its own developer to one-up itself. Poncle's latest game is Vampire Crawlers, and it almost looks like a gag game at first glance. It's Vampire Survivors but rebuilt as an old-school PC dungeon crawler. You navigate corridors using your arrow keys, bump into monsters from the game, and take them down in turn-based combat where all the attacks from the regular game are represented as cards. And guess what? It rules. Sure, it may not have the thrill of seeing thousands of sprites flood your screen, but all of Vampire Survivors' fundamentals translate very well to a totally different genre. It's still fast-paced, has constant level-up progression, and is filled with unlockables even just in this demo. Even if it looks like a joke, don't underestimate its potential to become a serious obsession. —Giovanni Colantonio

4 Dosa Divas

Dosa Divas is the latest game from Thirsty Suitors and Falcon Age developer Outerloop Games. It’s a clear take on the Paper Mario formula — turn-based RPG combined with real-time dodging and attacking — that comes at a moment when a certain other game built on that formula absolutely dominated gaming discourse for a year. Dosa Divas isn’t as lavish or precisely tuned as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but it’s got style for days. It’s about two sisters who, alongside their mecha best friend, fight against a third sister who’s stated goal is to take over the world with her soulless fast food empire. Expect lots of cooking minigames and mouthwatering food. The demo offers a decent taste. But be prepared to leave hungry. —Ari Notis

5 Australia Did It

Australia Did It, the new game from Rami Ismail and Aesthetician Labs, is a tower defense game with a whole lot of twists. Your goal is to protect a train from all sorts of creepy crawly critters living in the desert it's trying to cross. You protect the vehicle in two phases. The first one has you positioning units in a square perimeter around the train, placing them in front of approaching bugs. You can make units more powerful by combining them, mashing up their abilities. Between those fights, you have to fend off monsters while the train is moving, in a sort of locomotive version of Vampire Survivors. With a lot of depth to explore with unit combinations, Australia Did It is feeling like a promising spin on the tower defense format already. —Giovanni Colantonio

6 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City

For a certain person of a certain age, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City is wish fulfillment: a VR game where you’re embodying one of the classic turtles with ninja powers that mutated them into teenagers. Its creator told Polygon in an interview earlier this year that Empire City is “the ultimate Ninja Turtles LARPing simulator.” And there’s another wrinkle for fans. Shredder, typically one of the primary antagonists for the turtles, isn’t the villain for Empire City, which allowed the team to center a lesser-known villain: Karai, the daughter of Shredder. What’s the catch? The full game will be co-op, but unfortunately, the Next Fest demo is limited to one player only. —Ari Notis

7 Armatus

Remember Godfall? No? Well I do! The glitzy looter-shooter helped kick off this current generation of console games, but there wasn’t much to it beyond flashy visuals. Six years later, developer Counterplay Games is ready to follow that up with Armatus. And as a Godfall naysayer, I’ll be honest: It kind of kicks ass. It’s a third-person shooter roguelike that feels like Godfall rebuilt in Returnal’s image. The runs go about the way you expect — gathering weapon upgrades and extra attacks while shooting through waves of enemies — but damn is it fun. In one run, I chewed through monsters with a shotgun that had a flamethrower attached to it, and augmented them with an ability that made enemies I burned up explode. It's stupid spectacle at its finest, and I am enough of a simpleton at heart to love it. —Giovanni Colantonio

8 Damon and Baby

Damon and Baby is a twin-stick, run-and-gun shooter in the vein of Smash TV and Zombies Ate My Neighbors, with intricately detailed environments, deep customization options, and two-player co-op. The rapid-fire action can seem daunting at first, but moving fast and hitting hard in tight spaces is a perfectly viable strategy here. Get up close and whack an enemy with a melee attack, so your guns will automatically lock onto them, eliminating the need to fiddle with aim. If you’re looking to sink into a flow state and let the bullets fly, definitely check out this adventure from Arc System Works. —Jen Glennon

9 Wax Heads

Wax Heads is as much of a puzzle game as it is a visual novel, but don't let that put you off. The game simply oozes charm. If wacky, larger-than-life characters (especially those who love some post-punk or hyperpop music) are your vibe, you'll immediately feel at home. You're the newest employee at Repeater Records, and your job is to tell the customer exactly what record they're looking for. If you've ever worked in retail and had to deal with a nightmare customer, this is the game for you, because Wax Heads operates on a yang to real life retail's yin: The customer is not always right. Search the store, uncover secrets, find new records (the game has an extensive original soundtrack, spanning loads of genres!), and become best mates with your colleagues. It's a wonderful time. —Ford James

10 Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

There’s one reason that you should play Zero Parades during Steam Next Fest: to actually gain an informed opinion about it. The new CRPG comes from ZA/UM, the studio behind Disco Elysium that's been mired in controversy for the past few years after three of the game’s creative leads unceremoniously parted ways with the studio. The finer details are complicated, but Disco Elysium fans are, in a word, skeptical about ZA/UM’s future. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, a thriller about a spy on a mission that goes south immediately, answers a lot of questions you might have.

The short of it is that Zero Parades still has a lot of the same strengths as Disco Elysium. In my demo, I argued with a kid about cartoon wolves and interpreted an obvious murder as death by jacking off. It’s funny, weird, and full of tabletop RPG depth. It also looks exactly the same as Disco Elysium to the point of parody. The locations you'll visit in the demo, like your opening hotel room, look identical to those in Disco Elysium at times. ZA/UM might be setting itself up for some ungenerous comparisons, but I implore you to try Zero Parades for yourself. Whether you love it or hate it, at least you’ll be able to judge it based on the actual game rather than the story behind it. —Giovanni Colantonio