Let's Review Demos From Steam's June 2026 Next Fest Event - Part 1

So... I've been dealing with some of the worst writer's block I've ever had. That's partly to blame for my nearly monthlong absence on the site in terms of article writing, and also the main reason why the Community Spotlight has been the lone mark I have made here for a while now. And as was the case when the last Next Fest rolled around, musing over a handful of Steam Next Fest demos is what I am pegging my hopes on to jolt me out of this unproductive fugue state! Now, compared to 2026's February Next Fest, I thought the June edition was demonstrably better. Sure, the glut of roguelike deck-builders still doesn't seem to be slowing, the Vampire Survivor clones were also lamentably over-represented, and modern Steam has been doing jack all to filter games using generative AI from my filter, but the games I did find that seemed more than neat this time around outnumbered previous Next Fests! And while the event in general still has its issues separating the wheat from the chaff, finding a real gem during Next Fest still provides that same nice warm tingling feeling as it did when this event first debuted. It's just the whole wading through pages upon pages of AI slop that is a new bummer.

But I'm here to be mostly positive and excited about the future of games, particularly indie gaming! I know for a fact I will do at least a second edition of this June 2026 Next Fest review feature, with the possibility of a third, before restarting a long-form article feature on the site. Nonetheless, if there were any Next Fest demos you enjoyed that I did not cover this time around, feel free to share them in the comments. I'm not covering it now, but rest assured, I will review About Fishing at some point, probably next week, even! Regardless, here are the games I'll be looking at this time around:

• Rivage

• Well Dweller

• Shroom and Gloom

• Rolla

• Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World!

Rivage

What is it?

I know I keep affirming that at some point I'll start covering adventure game puzzles as I did in the past on the site, but for now, know that I have been playing a WIDE assortment of good and bad adventure game puzzles on Twitch. And with Giant Bomb going on a Myst and Cyan streak thanks to Mike, I was in the mood to play a Myst-like game during Next Fest. In came Rivage, a time-loop puzzle game where you wake up alone on a space station and are unable to navigate its many rooms and corridors without expending its power, which triggers a fail state or "game over" if you aren't careful. The game plays a lot like an escape room, where you need to pick up on subtle environmental clues or interact with manipulatives around you to unlock doors or lockboxes in a set sequence. For example, the end of the demo requires you to duplicate a damaged ID card of another crewmember so that you can enter their quarters, and you need to scavenge journal pages and manuals to find the missing numbers on that ID card before a vending machine will produce a copy.

Now, for those of you who have been following the current situation on Steam regarding Generative AI disclosures, you know this Next Fest was especially rough on that front. Rivage is unfortunately no different, with its developer publishing the following disclosure on the game's Steam page:

Generative AI tools were used during early prototyping to accelerate visual iteration and research.
Any AI generated assets from the prototype have been fully replaced with original artist made content in the final game.
No AI generated content is present in the game.

As its developer reiterated in a community thread on the Steam forums, they apparently used generative AI tools to create art assets for reference purposes, and that's it. Their claim, at least in part, is that they used these references to "manually" generate art for their game. Likewise, they have committed to ensuring there is no generative AI art in the game's full release. I'm mentioning this because I played the demo and missed this disclosure entirely, and would have skipped Rivage completely had I known about their disclosure or done my due diligence. To my defense, I played this demo after reading a PC Gamer preview that made ZERO mention of the game's use of generative AI. PC Gamer even gave Rivage airtime during its PC Gaming Show during SGF 2026 week, which led me to believe it was a proper indie adventure game with no AI-related baggage. So, that sucked, and it's also a bummer that a game I think showed a ton of promise used AI when it was entirely unnecessary, if my reading of their statement is correct. The game developer reference toolbox has been flush since the Atari days, and if you needed to fill shelves and cubbies with books with covers and titles, there were other entirely valid non-AI resources to use.

What's in the demo?

With the game starting right from the rip with a Groundhog Day premise, and not hiding from that, you do know to always think outside of the box while playing Rivage. Every door or lock box you need to open requires an intricate series of steps, and very often that means perusing books, sticky notes, and tablets for hints and clues on how to progress. A highlight puzzle for me involved operating an audio terminal to learn a person's name, then logging into a computer using the station's hilariously insecure but corporate-mandated pre-assigned password system. Another involved lowering and raising a science station, then manipulating it to obtain an item that powered up a terminal in the kitchen. Often, these clues will require you to use devices that draw on the space station's low energy reserves, and if you use the last of that power bank, you find the station completely depowered and are unable to progress any further in the game. Upon that happening, you need to find an arcade cabinet that conveniently resets you to the start of the time loop, with all your power restored, but most of your progress reset. So, in a way, the game is a run-based puzzle game much like Blue Prince, but this time around, your action points are manifested as units of power. Also, the space station has a set floor plan with no RNG.

So, there's no way for you to have a "perfect" run in Rivage, as you will need to explore paths that require you to exhaust all of the station's energy reserves to power up a single machine or device, which serves as a jumping point for a new story beat. There's no punishment or penalty for exploring a path, having little to show for it, and needing to restart your loop. While the developer has indicated that you will be able to expand the station's power bank, I do hope they consider having "milestones" where, upon finishing enough of the story, rather than having players respawn at the protagonist's bed, as they do in the beginning, there's a mid-point or near-end point they gravitate towards instead, after achieving enough story progress. Otherwise, I noticed a lot of rigmarole at the start of every respawn with you needing to open the same set of doors ad infinitum, which Blue Prince avoided with its RNG aspect, but Rivage lacks. Even in the game's short demo, it started to feel like tedium rather than immersion. And maybe there's a better justification for the time-loop reset input being an actual arcade game, but I found it weirdly anachronistic to the game's more often-than-not serious tone.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

As I already indicated at the start, while I think something endearing about the game's setting and premise exists in this demo, its developer has dabbled enough in generative AI to disqualify me from ever playing this game again. The puzzles are a bit too esoteric as well, and the time loop mechanic ends up being a major nuisance rather than a tone-setter. Because there's no timer, you can mull over puzzles as long as you'd like. Nevertheless, if you don't approach things in the "correct" order, you often find yourself at a dead end, needing to reset the loop to tie two loose puzzle pieces together, and that can be incredibly frustrating. The atonal, emotionless narrator is "trope appropriate," given that the game draws inspiration from Blue Prince. Regardless, while the world looks beautiful and vibrant, the people who inhabit it are entirely lifeless. And unlike Blue Prince, there's way too much useless junk and filler in Rivage. If you buy the developer's excuse on what their AI use amounts to, and I'm not suggesting you should, they filled so much of their game with useless tat that was better off being filled with lorem ipsum, and I wouldn't have batted an eye.

Well Dweller

What is it?

Well Dweller is a fantasy Metroidvania from the maker of Islets and Crypt Custodian, and it borrows several visual and design choices from their earlier works. However, unlike Crypt Custodian, Well Dweller is more on the Hollow Knight end of the Metroidvania spectrum, as it is a room-by-room or screen-by-screen side-scrolling variant rather than the angled top-down arena variant that Crypt Custodian was. Likewise, there's a greater emphasis on map exploration, item and upgrade gathering, and traditional 2D Metroidvania platforming. There are pits filled with spikes that will quickly whittle away at your health, and hostile enemies that require you to employ timing attacks or basic strategies to take them out without taking a blow. The non-boss enemies require some simple pattern recognition, and the demo's lone boss has waves and patterns that require much more precise timing and execution. There are tents scattered across the map that serve as save points; using them also restores your health. This all sounds like standard Metroidvania fare, but where the game diverges from the norm is its jump. This game doesn't give you the genre-expected double jump and instead requires you to use a match, which is your main weapon, and by throwing it into walls, you create a springboard that serves as a double-jump equivalent. However, you can only pull that off if you are standing on solid ground and have a platform or wall ahead of you.

What's in the demo?

The demo relays the game's opening act of sorts, with your player character being presented as an anthropomorphic bird supported by their mother and surrounded by a dozen or so smaller siblings. After their mother asks them to fetch a meal, the game sets an objective marker inside an ominous home, and that remains your lone goal for much of the demo. The demo gives a general sense of the full game's scope, with the map surprisingly large during your short jaunt to the house. Weirdly enough, and I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, the mini-map is a toggleable option, and the default is set to "off." You can always view the map whenever you please, and the game does have some handy user-assist options, including an "Easy" difficulty setting, but this mini-map choice stood out to me as odd. Obviously, this vertical slice is just a demo, and it does generally come to an hour or less, but Well Dweller doesn't seem like it's trying to approach Hollow Knight's difficulty range unless you want or force it to. I was also a bit taken aback by how the demo lets you look over an upgrade and equipment screen but doesn't really let you put anything in it, and instead spends most of its time filling out your move-set. As a result, the demo is incredibly railroaded, and I wonder whether the full release is a more linear or an open Metroidvania variant, since the demo is fairly unclear on that point.

There's a singular boss fight with four patterns to recognize and imprint into your memory, and the game provides a tent right next to it before you start that particular battle. The demo ends with a chase sequence, and while there are some tricky timing parts, it never felt impossible. All of this is to say I was genuinely impressed by the tightness of the controls and the game's overall "balance," which was nearly perfect. I still go back and forth on whether I buy into the game's double jump being a springboard rather than the standard double-tap A. It took some time to really get comfortable with the mechanic, similar to needing to accept you can't jump in OG Bionic Commando, but there were plenty of times when I just wished I could do the standard double jump. Likewise, the game employs an Estus Flask-like healing system, but where, to heal, you need to nail a timing minigame similar to Gears of War, but in this case, you don't get any healing until you do it correctly. Luckily, that entire mechanic can be disabled in the options for those unable or unwilling to do dexterity minigames. And it goes without saying that the game is beautiful. The storybook-like look of the environments and enemies, and the game's moody, dreary color palette, make the few vibrant colors it uses pop out immediately.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

Maybe. I'm not a Metroidvania fan if I'm being perfectly honest, but I do appreciate Well Dweller laying out a more welcoming experience with playability options on top of difficulty settings you can change and toggle at any point. Likewise, the enemy and environmental hazards never felt overwhelming in what I played, but I do concede I just played a demo, and that could change. For the most part, Well Dweller understands that it benefits from letting players progress between its settings and set pieces without too much tribulation, but people also want some grit with these sorts of games. Again, Well Dweller's current balance is laudable. Nonetheless, my concerns about how open or closed the game's progression will be in the full release remain ever-present until further notice. I also wasn't entirely impressed by the game's projectile attack option, which involves you flinging torchlights and hitting them with your match like a baseball to knock them into enemies or breakable walls. When you are dealing with challenges that require this mechanic, the game's pace doesn't always give you the best situation to pull that off perfectly, and replenishing your torchlight is oddly involved and takes way longer than it feels like it should. But those are largely minor complaints about a demo that, overall, impressed me as a skeptic of this genre.

Shroom and Gloom

What is it?

Considering how many filled up the ranks during this edition of Steam Next Fest, I felt obligated to play at least one roguelike deckbuilder. Shroom and Gloom stands out in an incredibly packed crowd for a few reasons. First, it has you navigating dungeons and paths from the first-person perspective, though your movement is largely linear, and your choices usually boil down to going left or right at the start of a level or chapter. Which is a nice enough segue into the fact that the game has you creating two separate decks rather than the standard one. Your first deck is the one you use to explore your surroundings, and it also helps you remove hazards in your camp or unlock stations that allow you to improve your combat deck during breaks. The other deck, as hinted at earlier, is the one you use for combat, and you need to strike a balance between these two decks. It's important to have a strong "exploration deck," because should you rest and not address enemies or threats in your camp, you might get KO-ed upon resting. Whereas the combat deck does exactly what it says on the tin. When you run into an enemy encounter, that's the deck you use and are limited to in defeating foes. Your actions are, unless you get upgrades, limited to just three points per turn. That might sound limiting, but there's a workaround: if most of your cards are used to kill an enemy, you get an additional bonus card in your hand that you can play instantly at no cost.

What's in the demo?

The demo seems to be the first dungeon in the main game. As you walk into your first room, you have to decide on a route and which items, if any, you want to expend before unlocking a door or route. No individual act during the interstitial levels will ever make or break your run, but small mistakes can definitely add up if you are not careful. When your hand has a lighter, would you rather use that to unlock a camp to rest or to kill an enemy that is hovering right next to you? Do you use a key to open a chest in the hope of getting a new card or trinket, or do you use it to open a door with a padlock to avoid needing to bash it open, which enacts a damage penalty to your health meter? Unlike a game such as Monster Train, your breaks in between battles require you to be as pensive and prudent as the combat phases, and aren't just a simple choice between which shiny trinket you want. Which may be a bit off-putting for some people, as there are not a ton of opportunities to catch your breath in Shroom and Gloom, but at least the game looks gorgeous as it caves your teeth in. The graphical style plays with a FOV effect that makes the wood-and-cardboard cutout backgrounds and enemies look like stand-ins for an amusement park horror ride.

The combat itself is interesting. As I mentioned earlier, the game by default only lets you burn three action points, which at first might not seem enough, especially when you start collecting cards that cost three points. However, that's where the game's cascading combat comes into play. As I highlighted, most of the cards in the game pop off special bonuses if you use them to kill an enemy, regardless of whether they are a big baddy or not. This means if you play low-cost cards at the start of your first turn to spread your damage output, by your second or third turn, you'll start KO-ing enemies sequentially, which unlocks a no-cost positive feedback loop for more KOs, and you repeat that process for as long as you can. Also, the game is somewhat inspired by Delicious in Dungeon/Danjon Meshi, as there's a major mechanic about preparing and eating the enemies you kill. The debuffs you can inflict on enemies are all about seasoning them, and if you season an enemy before you kill them, you can get zero-cost healing cards for your deck. Nothing Shroom and Gloom does is in and of itself "unique." Still, it's the presentation and packaging that definitely make it feel fresh, and the combat working in tandem with how you explore your surroundings is definitely an interesting twist.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

Yes! This next point might be a bit controversial, but I wasn't super impressed by Vampire Crawlers. I didn't find its mix of Vampire Survivor's brain-off sentimentalities and deckbuilding all that successful, and the bog-standard gameplay was somewhat boring if you asked me. Shroom and Gloom has a bit more meat on its bones without compromising accessibility. It's definitely a step up in terms of difficulty, and I didn't get my first successful playthrough until at least a dozen or so attempts, but the existence of that grit makes the roguelike aspect stronger. You get a better sense of which card harmonies work and which don't rather quickly, and restarting a run is rather seamless. It will be interesting to see how the developers can extend this preliminary concept across multiple dungeons or playthroughs. Still, the outline of something compelling for intermediate card builder fans is there. Plus, the game looks and sounds incredible if that point wasn't already obvious.

ROLLA

What is it?

This will be a quick entry in this article, as it won't take much to explain what ROLLA is and who might want to consider wishlisting it. So, here we go: what if you merged the gameplay of Katamari Damacy with the body horror aesthetic and premise of Carrion? The hellspawn from that combination would be ROLLA, wherein you take control of a mass of sentient flesh that wishes to consume as many people and things in a city as it possibly can before police and army forces obliterate them. Using a controller, which I strongly recommend, or a keyboard, which I do NOT recommend at all, you roll your bundle of muscle and tentacles, and as you absorb humans, you get larger. Likewise, there's also a list of objectives for every map, like in Tony Hawk, so you are motivated to do more than just roll over buildings and skyscrapers. However, in the case of ROLLA, the game has the environmental destruction sensibilities of Rampage and a few other Tony Hawk-isms, such as being able to spell out the word ROLLA by finding letters strewn about a map. The demo includes one map and a worldwide and local leaderboard so you can see how you compare to friends and the best of the best.

What's in the demo?

The demo is the first map in the game, along with the full list of objectives and tasks associated with it. The map is moderately sized but has some obvious invisible walls and chokepoints (i.e., bridges) that round it off, limiting its footprint. ROLLA's gameplay is rather simple: your mass of flesh requires human beings to become larger, and while destroying buildings and vehicles is fun and required if you care about your high score, they don't add to your ball's size. However, as you destroy buildings or absorb more people and get larger, the game deploys hostile enemies of increasingly higher lethality. At first, it's just police officers with handguns, but eventually you'll find yourself needing to dodge aerial bombardments from B-52s. Every hit whittles away at your ball's size, and if you get too small, it's eventually "Game Over." Like a lot of leaderboard-focused games, ROLLA is all about finding a rhythm and squeezing out one really good run. Much like the classic Tony Hawk games, if you feel like things are not shaping up all that well for you, there's a quick reset option. Likewise, the pixel graphics and thumpy synthetic music really do help you to get into the right mood. The game also has some special moves for you to test out. You can shoot out a wave of tentacles to snatch up fleeing civilians or destroy hostile vehicles, and a dash maneuver very similar to the one in Katamari. However, both of these abilities have cooldowns you need to be mindful of.

There are, however, two niggling criticisms I have of the demo. The first point is the biggest: this game isn't very well optimized. The developers opted for a pixel look to make the game able to run at a decent framerate while also letting you shoot out waves of tentacles, while shrapnel and debris fly all around you. However, even with the deliberately rudimentary art style, the game's framerate dropped noticeably during the demo I played. Considering how much chaos can end up covering your screen during the later stages of the game, I'm not entirely sure this will ever not be a problem, but there were times when I was rolling through skyscrapers and dealing with military bombardments, and the framerate dropped to sub-twenty frames-per-second. The other issue is one more closely connected to the game's design. Based on my experiences, once you took one of the heavier blows, especially the aerial bombardments, it was next to impossible to recover from that if you were in the mid to late-game phases of ROLLA. It didn't matter if I popped off my tendrils or juked as much as possible; the minute you lose half your mass, it felt nigh impossible to return to my earlier peak. Death spirals are swift and vicious in this game, to say the least.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

Yes! ROLLA is a fun warm-up game for those who want something light and a bit mindless before they jump into a weighty, mechanics-heavy title or a narrative-driven one. Even if I never once cracked the Top 100 leaderboard in the game, I had a blast trying to find new ways to create as much mayhem as possible. Hopefully, the developers can fine-tune the game so it runs better, and I hope they plan more activities and tasks for the other maps as well. Given the game's Tony Hawk DNA, could we also maybe include online and group activities similar to those in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2? That would be incredible, because while the base of the game captures Katamari's mojo, albeit with viscera and gore, it feels like ROLLA still needs a little "something" to keep itself fresh beyond your standard global and local leaderboards. But even if that's not on the horizon, the bones for something special and fun are there with ROLLA.

Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World!

What is it?

Hey, want to play a Crazy Taxi clone that doesn't have the stink of generative AI hanging over it like a Sword of Damocles? Well then, Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World! might be for you! The game starts with an anime/manga-inspired cutscene where we watch an excited female rise through the corporate ladder before being hit by a truck and informing the driver that she has spawned into a fantasy world where she needs his help leveling up to beat a skeleton king. To do so, you need to run over pedestrians to generate slime enemies for her to defeat, and as you explore the city the game takes place in, you'll find power-ups and other objects and things that provide her with a bevy of perks. There are delivery missions to complete, as well as a task list that guides your actions, so you aren't always just running over hapless beachgoers or tourists without reason. If you want the story to progress, you'll need to collect stars, which are granted by completing specific missions that range from destroying billboards to drifting for a set amount of time.

What's in the demo?

The game plays exactly how you'd like a Crazy Taxi clone crossed with Carmageddon to control. There's a way for you to quickly turn your truck around, as well as plenty of people and objects to run over. The game also features a drifting mechanic that lets you easily focus on a single area. For example, let's say one of your objectives is to destroy ten parked cars, and you find a parking lot. After clicking the button to drift, you can knock all of them out by burning donuts in the lot until nothing remains. The game will also spawn police cars you'll need to bump out of the way, but luckily, getting struck by them isn't impossible to recover from in Truck-kun, and the game does a fantastic job of maintaining its hectic pace throughout an entire session. The Crazy Taxi-inspired delivery missions also provide enough of a reward that they don't get lost in the mix. Your best bet is always to have one delivery mission active, and as you drive from one location to another, create havoc that completes task-list-based objectives along the way. The full game intends to have upgrades as well as a free roam mode, which will certainly be nice, but the main campaign is where most people will find themselves, and much like Crazy Taxi, there are times when you'll need to grind out stats and missions before the game provides the next step or part of its story. At least things make more thematic sense here than they do in Crazy Taxi, given that you're trying to assist a girl who is fighting slimes, dragons, and skeletons in a fantasy isekai world. The story is trope-laden and highly referential, so if that's not your cup of tea, this game might not be for you, but in the end, the combat is flashy and fun, and the controls are tight and satisfying.

The first issue I have with Truck-kun is one endemic to Crazy Taxi, which this game clearly pays homage to as much as possible. Sometimes, when you have a mission on your task list, unless you have memorized the map like the back of your hand, you often find yourself going "huh... where is that?" The game provides a giant green arrow whenever you opt into a delivery mission. Still, you can't set mission markers for task list items like ramming billboards or destroying tables at a cafe, which for me often led to dead time that broke up the game's frenetic action. The other big problem I have with this game is the RPG element with the anime isekai girl. Most of the missions and tasks, whenever you spawn into the city as the truck driver, add time to your session, but a few give you stars, which more often than not act as roadblocks to progressing the story. Story updates will have meters that tell you that you need fifty or seventy stars before the next cutscene will play, which creates enough motivation to take tasks seriously when they appear. However, things just sort of happen on her RPG-inspired screen insert, and you very often don't feel connected to what's transpiring there. There are objects on the map, like feathers, that improve her stats during a battle, but just making as much mayhem as possible while striking a nice balance between deliveries and tasks always got the job done for me, and I was never once warned about her being at low health or at a critical battle. Things just sort of happened on her screen, and it looked nice for the most part, but nothing else.

Will I buy the full game when it's released?

Yeah, probably! As I said, if you were excited about Crazy Taxi: World Tour when it dropped its SGF 2026 trailer and then were immediately bummed when the generative AI stuff about the game got revealed, Truck-kun is a completely valid alternative. Whether you're drifting or crashing into people or cars, the game feels good. The colorful, cel-shaded world helped the demo maintain a stable framerate, at least for the most part, and the task list never filled itself up with items that felt completely unattainable. The story, based on the demo, does exactly what it promises: make a bunch of referential jokes at the expense of the isekai genre. It's not exactly breaking ground with its humor or characters, and your truck driver protagonist remains faceless, which is a good gag, but if you are anime-averse, this is "not it." There's room for improvement in the gaps between the story moments, but that's the demo being a demo. Nonetheless, the star requirements near the end of the demo jumped exponentially, and the tasks and possible missions didn't change to make reaching those goals easier, which caught me a bit off guard. Though that's a balance issue I'm confident the full release will address, in due time. Ultimately, if you want to play a goofy arcade racer and don't mind a generous spoonful of anime in the mix, Truck-kun is a great time.