Steam Next Fest, which started back on February 23 and runs through March 2, is a time when I end up adding way more games to my wishlist than I anticipated. Sure, it’s fun to get a look at a game you’ve been looking forward to, but it’s even more fun to be surprised by something you’ve never heard of.
Here are recommendations for you to give a try to see if they can earn a place on your wishlist.
New Blood Interactive has done experiments with the DUSK universe before, turning it into a pixel art puzzle game in the vein of Chip’s Challenge, but that still didn’t prepare me for their latest experiment, Dungeons of DUSK. Set between chapters of the hit retro FPS, this new game is an old-school, turn-based dungeon crawler that works way better than it has any right to.
Dungeons of DUSK drops you into maze-like levels that you move through one square at a time, with the enemies taking a turn any time you move or take an action. While so much of the appeal of DUSK was the speed, part of the charm of Dungeons is its methodical pace. Seeing an enemy from a distance gives you pause, thinking about how you want to approach them, and what resources you have to use to take them out. The chainsaw man is across the room from you. It will take three turns for him to reach you. Should you use pistol ammo to hit him from a distance, or wait for him to get in shotgun range? Do you have the health to just wait for him to get close to finishing him with your sickles while he’s taking swings at you? It’s a fun twist on the formula that doubles down on the ammo management aspects, forcing you to think tactically.
There’s even a full RPG-style skill tree that you slowly unlock, allowing you to get more powerful as you progress through the stages. Some of the environments are a bit same-y so far, so it can be easy to get turned around, but this is a labyrinth I can’t wait to get lost in.
Dungeons of DUSK releases later this year.
One of my favorite underappreciated tactics games of the past several years was Othercide, a visually striking roguelike that had some really clever twists to the formula. Now the team over at Lightbulb Crew returns to the same model with Ex Sanguis, which seems to be the same formula applied to a new world and narrative.
While I didn’t get a great sample of what that story is, aside from the excellent vibes brought by the gorgeous black-white-and-red art style, the in-mission tactics immediately reminded me of everything I enjoyed about Othercide. There are some elements of pushing enemies around the battlefield, like Into the Breach, that make it stand out, but the main hook involves a timeline that you and the enemies operate on. You can see the order of the turns, and they are all separated by a specific number of time units. The enemy’s position can be manipulated on the track via the use of skills, but the main way this affects play is through the burst mechanic. Normally, you can spend 40 action points on your turn to move and attack. If you want to spend more, you can go into burst mode, which allows you to spend up to 80, in exchange for delaying your turn further.
It’s an interesting push and pull that makes you think about how to maximize a turn if you really want to go for it. It’s hard to tell from the demo how the roguelike structure will play out over time, but the clever risk-reward mechanics that make up the tactical battles are good enough for me to be excited.
Another roguelike demo caught my eye, this one taking the form of a high-octane third-person shooter. Set in a post-apocalyptic, demon-infested Paris, Armatus took me by complete surprise with its rock solid game feel. You play a supernatural warrior of an ancient order searching for the last gateway to Heaven itself. The look of it has a big 90s Image feel in the best possible way, with a rad-looking protagonist blasting his way through hordes of gnarly demons.
Much like Hades, the game moves you from arena to arena, requiring you to kill a wave of enemies before moving on to the next. After a certain number of sectors, you’re given a new boon that will improve your combat capabilities, allowing you to come up with some great builds that play to your strengths. The structure is nothing revolutionary, but the shooting just feels really good, with enough alternate fires and special moves to allow you to keep things interesting. I was able to get to and defeat the amazing-looking first boss on my first attempt, so it hasn’t exactly shown its hand challenge-wise yet, but it’s easy to see how they could ramp things up quickly to keep you on your toes.
I’m so curious to see how this plays out over the length of an entire game, because the groundwork has been laid for a great little roguelike in the vein of Returnal.
Armatus will be released later this year.
Last year, I wrote up a little list of “interface horror” games where the main mode of interaction was sitting at a computer terminal. Shutter Story fits right into that mold, taking a creepy look at the world of haunted photography. Your friend Eli has been experiencing hauntings in his home, and it’s your job to use SpectralAware software to analyze family photos for evidence of hauntings to help convince his family that this is more than just an overactive imagination.
There are moments in the game where you walk around the house and interact with his family, but the core of the gameplay hook involves using SpectralAware to manipulate photos, using an early-2000s style interface. After flipping through the game’s guide about the types of anomalies to look for, you go through each picture, adjusting the brightness, contrast, and other settings to try to spot them, either marking the photo as Safe or Haunted. It’s a simple setup, but it’s surprisingly freaky when you zoom in and make adjustments, only to spot a face that was hiding in plain sight.
Based on the demo, it feels like Shutter Story could be a cool little shortform horror, sitting somewhere between Home Safety Hotline and Her Story, with some inspiration from the 2001 film Pulse.
Shutter Story releases Q2 2026.
THE INFECTIOUS MADNESS OF DOCTOR DEKKER 2
Even though I’m a big FMV fan, I somehow missed the original Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker when it came out almost 9 years ago, but that’s a mistake I intend to correct by getting into its sequel. You play as a psychiatrist who is trying to solve a murder by talking to your patients about what they know about the case, which seems to have a supernatural angle to it.
It starts pretty simply, but I was impressed by the way it developed as the demo went on. There’s a very simple UI that shows you information you are trying to get on the left side, along with information you can ask about that comes up through your conversations, situated on the right side. The key wrinkle that makes it interesting is that you can link two topics together to make a new question that might get you down the path you need. For example, if someone brings up ghosts and voices in their head as two separate topics, you could link those to explore the idea that the voices they are hearing are in fact ghosts. It’s a great system that seems very versatile, without having to rely on something as open ended as a text parser to take your input.
The Steam page promises that the game has multiple endings and that the murderers are chosen at random when the game begins, making for a mystery that can be solved over and over again. It seems like an ambitious project, and I’m excited to see how it plays out!
The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2 releases later this year.
It’s hard to look at Zero Parades in a vacuum. After Disco Elysium, there was turmoil at developer ZA/UM that saw the exit of many of the creative leads of the team, some of which started their own studios that promised to be making the true successor to their acclaimed game. Zero Parades comes from the team left at ZA/UM, clearly building on the excellent RPG foundation of Disco Elysium to tell the story of a spy trying to navigate a web of lies as her latest assignment unravels around her. It’s a compelling setup that seems like it would be perfectly in line with the tone of Disco Elysium, but will the team be able to keep up with the quality without much of the talent that set the bar so high?
From the hour or so I put into the new demo, I’ve upgraded my expectations from deeply worried to cautiously optimistic. The art style is extremely similar, looking like a brush stroke filled oil painting turned into an isometric RPG, and the presentation feels slick and polished. You’ve got the same system as Disco Elysium, with a large list of strange sounding skills that all are being passively checked during dialogue, talking to you with different insights about your current situation. There’s little dice rolls that can affect your success with certain dialogue options, and you now have three different health bars to manage, which can permanently affect your stats if they get out of hand. If you’ve played and adored Disco Elysium like I have, your real question is, “but how’s the writing?” While it doesn’t quite have as much bite as its predecessor, there’s definitely a spark of that genius in there. I had a really great conversation with a guy named “Petre, the Format Fetishist,” and that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for in this type of game.
Even in an hour-long chunk of the demo, it seems ZA/UM has been able to once again strike that surreal, dreamlike, weird fiction tone with Zero Parades, and I’m excited to see more of how it meshes with the world of burnt out spies.
Have you run across any great new demos for Steam Next Fest? Shout them out in the comments below.