Steam Pals - Recommended Next Fest Oct 2024 Demos For Steam Deck

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Last year, we were part of a group of content creators and news outlets that came together to make videos answering some burning questions and talking about our favorite games. This was Steam Pals. Initially put together by Hi-Tech-Lo-Life, each video would have different creators, but we would all have one thing in common: We cover and love the Steam Deck. Unfortunately, we all got so busy that our last real video for it was 11 months ago, but we are back!

Starting today, Steam Pals has been revamped and brought back, but now it will be a show premiering on the SteamDeckHQ Youtube channel, which you can subscribe to if you want to be kept up to date on future episodes! In collaboration with Hi-Tech, we are bringing it back as a monthly show that will talk about some of the newest developments revolving around the Steam Deck. With our first episode premiering today, we will be going over our favorite demos from the Steam Next Fest and are joined by a fantastic cast of content creators, including:

• Hi-Tech-Lo-Life (Host and Showrunner of Steam Pals)
• Noah Kupetsky (CEO of SteamDeckHQ)
• Fan the Deck
• The Phawx
• NerdNest
• Retro Game Corps

If you don't want to watch, this article will accompany the video so you can read all about our favorite Next Fest demos, but I fully encourage watching the video that Hi-Tech put together. We are extremely excited to be working together to bring back Steam Pals and look forward to future episodes.

Without further delay, here are our favorite Next Fest Demos:

Each paragraph here is taken from a transcript generated from the Youtube video. There have been some minor adjustments for readability.

Hi-Tech-Lo-Life - Metal Bringer (Releases 2025)

Metal Bringer is an action roguelike combined with extraction shooter elements, such as bringing gear back and using it to upgrade your character permanently. You take control of a remote-controlled robot known as a laborer. You can equip your labor with various types of weaponry and different abilities. These abilities, of course, are found in the wild in the form of discs that need to be decrypted in the wild. Of course, with equipping discs and their different levels, you must consider what fits your energy capacity, what fits your playstyle, and what suits your weapons best.

On top of that, though, is the addition of what are known as arms. These are giant mechas piloted by remote-controlled robots. You can find them in the wild and pilot them or even steal them from enemy combatants if you manage to kill them without destroying the robots. Of course, you'll want to find blueprints and construct your arm.

The gameplay is somewhat simple at first glance. It's a top-down sort of hack-and-slash affair with the ability to slash with your sword or use guns, but the gameplay can change drastically depending on what you bring to the party. You want to go guns blazing, dual-wielding guns. It's a different game. Or perhaps bringing two melee weapons with no ranged weapons.

And the same applies to your arms as well. You will have to start from the beginning, but the demo also features an extreme mode you can unlock. This puts you in a mid-game state where you're more leveled up and have more gear and arms. Of all the work-in-progress roguelikes out there, this one seems more unique, as there's always a sense of permanent progression.

It gives off a Dynasty Warriors vibe. I'm not going to lie; I have a soft spot for those games, especially the Dynasty Warriors Gundam games.

NerdNest - Number Stomper (Releases 11/4)

Number Stomper is a cool puzzle game you can play as a cube. Imagine playing with a six-sided die, which must always be touching the ground. You can move it from side to side but never pick it up. The way the game works is you play as this cube on the ground, but the ground is a grid with patterns on it, and each grid square has a number corresponding to the number of times you can roll over that square.

Each time you roll over the square, that number is reduced by one. If you roll over the square and it only has a one on it when it uncovers, it's now a blank square, and you can't roll over it anymore. The game's goal is to roll over each square on the pattern on the floor and make them all blank without getting stuck.

I want to point out that if you want to play it on a Steam Deck or on other devices that don't have a mouse and keyboard, it does not support a controller, but thanks to Steam input, it's really easy to set up. All I did was set my D-pad to be my WASD buttons and my bumpers to B, Q, and E so I could switch between puzzles quickly. I also made my button, the R button on a keyboard, to easily reset the board in case I got stuck. It's cool. There's a demo out right now. Make sure that you check it out.

Retro Game Corps - Somber Echoes (Release TBD)

I picked Somber Echoes because it was already on my wish list, and I have no idea how it got there. But I'm a big fan of Metroid Mania, so I must have seen some sort of preview about it and then added it at some point. And so my choice was super easy. I just woke up one morning, and I had an email from Steve saying, "Hey, one of the games on your wish list has a playable demo."

The developer of this game is Rock Pocket Games, based out of Norway. As I mentioned before, it is a Mertroidvania-style game with a lot of exploration and combat. The game is set on an abandoned spaceship, a mixture of sci-fi and Greek mythology. One of the things that stood out to me was the overall visuals. It's a very dark game. It's kind of like a more colorful Hollow Knight, and I found that playing it on my Steam Deck was visually very appealing, just because there are many dark moments and some really bright spots.

That contrast pops on my OLED panel. I also like the overall visual style here, especially regarding the enemies. They have a very fleshy look that is a bit unsettling, so I like the idea that these enemies have been designed to look repulsive and a little scary to now because it is a Metroidvania game. It has exploration at its heart, and one of the key features you have is what they call an ether lantern. What happens here is when you're in mid-jump, you can press the left trigger to turn it into a ball of light. From there, you can aim yourself to shoot out of that light, which gives you a double jump. And so once you have this ability, you can reach extra things you couldn't before.

In terms of combat, it's mostly sword-based, and you have a blocking and parry system. It's all very familiar, but it feels very good if you are into these games. I think it's a pretty cool mix between something like Ori and the Will of the Wisps and Shadow Complex. I think visually, it's more like the latter.

It's just because your character is a little bit small, and you're traversing over something that's more sci-fi and technical. Meanwhile, the swordplay and that ether lantern really remind me of Ori and the Will of the Wisps.

Now, let's talk briefly about the performance when playing the demo. First of all, it is a pretty long demo, over an hour long, so it gives you a pretty good feel of whether or not the game will be a good match for you. As of this video/article, there is no release date yet. Another thing worth noting is that performance is not super great on the Steam Deck right now, and I found to get the smoothest gameplay, I had to play it at 720p with medium settings, and I locked the frame rate to 30 frames per second.

So, if you do want to play the demo and you've got a gaming PC, I would recommend using that. Now, admittedly, the developers said that they haven't been optimizing performance just yet, but they are fans of the Steam Deck and they hope to have a Steam Deck preset when they launch. And so yeah, I'm pretty stoked for Somber Echoes.

Fan the Deck - Jupiter Hell Classic (Releases Q1 2025)

As someone who never really enjoyed traditional roguelikes, the main thing I kept thinking when I was playing the demo for Jupiter Hell Classic was, man, I can't believe I'm playing Doom in the style of Chip's Challenge. In truth, Jupiter Classic plays more like what if someone took DOOM and made it a traditional roguelike. In fact, the original version of this game is called DOOM Roguelike, but the developers at Chaos Forge wanted to bring it to Steam, so they knew they needed to remove any infringing portions of this amazing title. And yes, convoluted history aside, you have to try Jupiter.

Despite being turn-based, this game captures the adrenaline of DOOM. First, there's the dark and punchy soundtrack, then the unsettling environments soaked in guts, lava, and darkness. Finally, some encounters put you in unsurmountable scenarios, leaving you to chew through horde after Horde of Hell's spawn. Thankfully, you can have a moment to think whenever you so desire, but it doesn't change the fact that even if you survive this wave, you're going to have to scavenge for ammo, armor, and antidotes.

Strategy is key to survival. There are plenty of emergent gameplay mechanics; sure, you can try to shoot a barrel for a larger impact, both in terms of radius and overall damage, but shooting the barrel will likely also impact the surrounding environment. Alternatively, you can tailor your build to be better at dodging, melee, or aiming.

There are a ton of ways to express how you want to rip and tear, so it's all up to you. By the way, this demo doesn't support controllers, but the full game absolutely will, which is good because I suspect this game will quickly rise to the top of the list of top-played games on deck. Check it out.

The Phawx - Loco Motive (Releases Q4 2025)

This is a game that wrestled my attention immediately. There are a few standard parts there that just highlight parts of my brain. That callback to the older version of me playing PC gaming, specifically the point-and-click adventure genre that has long since been dead, albeit held up by a few key titles. As time went on, keeping that old genre alive, I was let down by many fancy animated points and adventure games that just fell flat in many different areas. The thing I love most about the Loco Motive, especially playing through the demo, the trailer alone sold me, but the demo and playing through it sold me even more.

First, the voice acting on this so far and the cast of all the different characters playing are exceedingly well done. There's a lot to hear and a nuance from each character that you can hear that doesn't feel forced, and the voice is acting alone. Whichever direction is being given to these people, specifically choosing the cast and the direction of the voice acting, there is a groundedness to each scene.

When you're playing and listening to the voices, there is something that I don't think comes across as easy, and they're making it look easy. So, just from the voice acting alone, that's a big hit. The other part that I like about Loco Motive is that I would say it borrows heavily from a lot of LucasArts games, and if you were taking a look at the trailer, some of you like how floaty the animation is, how cartoonish it is, especially from salmon to the tentacle, you're going to get a lot of that here and there, even doing things that LucasArts did in their games themselves.

With that cartridge, you have this kind of whiplash of existing in two different places, of being in this grounded reality with a story that has meaning. Juxtapose this cartoonish nature, where your character will pick up a desk bin and shove it into an infinitely large jacket pocket. So there's that type of stuff that is in the game that they marry together in a way that I don't feel has been done well enough.

And so far as the small nuance of animation like LucasArts has done in the long run, though, in fact, there are even secondary characters when you're talking to another main character where there's like a painter just folding up his thing and then shoving it into another infinity pocket. And that's just kind of happening off-screen. But it's something that is just the attention to detail that they're showing.

There is something that I greatly appreciate. The other part that I appreciate is that they have seem to have tackled all of the problems that a lot of people have, including picture games, and that is with like pixel hunting. They do support the game controls as it is. So you can entirely play this game with a game controller alone, or even one thing on a Steam Deck.

You can then go into game settings and choose the trackpad to work as a mouse, and you can play the game as a mouse at a point in-game. Would you have both of those options? So accessibility is fine, but the thing that I like that they do is that when you start messing around with or with using them, let alone sticking on the controller, it highlights all of the tooltips in your immediate area, showing you what is interactable that makes it so that you're not people having to use, you know, specifically where you going.

The other part that I liked that they really did is that in a lot of older Lucas art games, you had a bunch of verbs, and you clicked on the verb and then on the thing so you could look at it, taste it, whatever they did. They have honed that down into a collapsible menu. So, instead of just having one thing you're kind of going back and forth on, it just gives you all of the possible options at any given time.

So you can look at something or act on it, and it will collapse those into those things. And on the controller, it says x and y. So, it immediately gives you those two options without hunting for an action bar. So they've done lots of accessibility things. The other part that I love is inside of those tooltips themselves; for instance, very early on in the game, you can see that there's a suit you've been given. And we look at the suit, says, look at the suit. But the second time you look at it, when everything's wrapped up, it says, put the suit on. So it directly tells you that, you know, you may. And especially in older PC adventure games, if you've already interacted with an object, you think that that's already spent.

There's nothing more to do there. But this game highlights to you that, hey, something new is happening here, and that also happens when you're listening in on the conversation. You can listen more, and there are iterations; there's depth to doing actions more times. And I like that they've done that. So they've tackled many problems of point-and-click adventure games that I've had in the past.

I think many people have done it in the past and made it in a modern approach while still largely appreciating how games were made back then. There are also some menus where there are some things you can do to change some of the settings. One thing I want to turn off is that they have a new AR mode.

I'm not that big of a fan of it. I'd rather just have it in color, but there is a mode where you can change how the blending is happening. You can notice in some of the videos that I've taken that when you're in the train, there's this integer scale that makes all the pixels clean, but then they have this blurry ness to them.

It tries to give you an indication that the train you're on is moving. It's a nice effect, but I kind of waffled between wanting it off and wanting it on. So, this early on in the demo, I'm not entirely sold on either one just yet. I'm glad that option exists, though, and that's pretty much where this game is right now.

There is a lot of intrigue in the game of what's going on, combined with a lot of good voice acting. I think that they nail some of the comedy bits like Lucas Arts did as well in the past Disney game that I'm going to be focusing on the most, just because I feel like out of what I looked at, this is a game that spoke to me, especially what I would like. I would just really love for the point for the adventure game genre to make a resurgence.

Not with having to go to fancy art tremendously, you know, just way done and overdone. Going back to just pixel art itself is still great, and I don't think you need to go overboard, and just doing really good animation alone inside of a smaller pixel-like pixel art itself is just as good. So I appreciate Loco Motive. I think that the title isn't the best.

The play on words may be lost on a lot of people. Obviously, it's locomotives. You're on a train, but it's locos separated by motive, so it's quite literally a crazy reason to do something. I get it. I just don't think that the title alone sells the game well enough, and I hope that isn't the case because it genuinely is a fantastic point-and-click adventure game, at least so far.

Noah Kupetsky/SteamDeckHQ - POPUCOM + The Spirit of the Samurai

I tested out a ton of different Steam Next Fest demos, and while I adored so many, two really stood out to me. The first of which is POPUCOM. This co-op adventure is where you and a friend will overcome challenges and puzzles to advance through levels. To do so, you will each control two colors and have to match three to modify levels and take down enemies and bosses.

I played this with another SDHQ writer, Oliver, and we had such a blast. One moment, in particular, stands out where Oliver couldn’t get past a specific part of the level, and we had to redo it multiple times because he couldn’t make his platform move. It was so much fun, and mixed with the gorgeous Splatoon-like graphics, I was almost immediately sold on the game. There’s no release date yet, but you can wishlist the game on Steam.

While testing demos, there was another one that caught my eye, and it was called The Spirit of the Samurai. The game is about a samurai fighting off an army of undead warriors and protecting his village. Its combat feels a bit soul-like, but the visuals and animations are modeled after stop-motion movies. It gives the game a unique look and feels, and mixed with a progression system that allows you to customize your combos by swapping in different moves; it was hard not to fall in love with it. The game is slated to come out on December 12th of this year.

And that's all for this episode! We would love to hear what you think, what you would like to see next, and who you'd like to see on the next episode. Let us know in the comments here or on the Youtube video!

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