The Best Next Fest Games for Steam Deck

Steam’s Next Fest 2024 has come and gone, and we had the opportunity to test a ton of upcoming indie titles on Steam Deck.

Some demos leave Steam once Next Fest ends, but demos from most of the titles below are, incidentally, still available to download. So if you missed them during the event, you can still try them out before you buy.

Without further delay, here are some of the games we tested that are perfect companions for the Steam Deck.

1. Ultros

If one game seemed to be everywhere during this year’s Next Fest, it was Ultros. And, to top off that momentum, the game was released the day after the event wrapped to a “very positive” user rating on Steam.

Ultros is a Metroidvania with a hand-drawn psychedelic art style by El Huervo — an artist known for their work on Hotline Miami. Each room is visually crowded with plant life, pillars, and stained glass everywhere. Just how well this colorful artwork pops can’t be understated, and it’s perfectly at home if played on the Steam Deck OLED.

The cinematic move set on the player character, Ouji, makes the game’s combat an enthralling experience, too, as you stab and spin your way through The Sarcophagus: a massive spaceship trapped in an eternal loop inside a black hole. There’s full attention to detail on display in Ultros, with Hadoque game design director, Mårten Brüggemann, having revealed the development even “travelled to Peru and the Amazons to record sounds of nature, classical instruments, and other sound-making tools”.

The game also manages to get away from the genre’s foundations with some interesting mechanics surrounding the ecosystem that has developed in The Sarcophagus, with Ouji able to cultivate plants that help in “unlocking skills and levelling-up abilities, to solving puzzles, to even subduing enemies.”

2. Mullet Mad Jack

I’ve never been especially comfortable playing twitch shooters with a joystick (skill issue, I know) so I was surprised by how natural an intensely fast-paced FPS like Mullet Mad Jack felt to play on Steam Deck.

Time is of the essence in Mullet Mad Jack. The player is a “Moderator” live streaming as they pummel their way through a tower to rescue an “influencer princess”. You start each procedural floor with a countdown marking 10 seconds to live, with each kill adding a pittance to that time. If you slow down, you die. Straightforward.

This is another game where the art style stood out, and I couldn’t help being reminded of Far Cry: Blood Dragon. Mullet Mad Jack takes on more of a “classic anime” style, but has a similar 80’s cyberpunk feel to it and clearly takes queues from action movies of the era. The Moderator is basically Roddy Pipper pulled straight out of They Live, down to “CONSUME” written across the side of their car in the opening scenes.

Don’t take that to mean the writing is contrived, it doesn’t need much to fill the short sequences between quick runs, and what’s there is lighthearted fun. It sets up the environment well, with endearing self-awareness.

Shooters can have a hard time running on the Steam Deck, but I found Mullet Mad Jack’s performance flawless. In the demo, each floor takes about a minute, making it an ideal game to pick up and play when you have a brief window.

3. Pepper Grinder

Pepper Grinder has a classic indie pixel art style and an interesting movement system. It’s a would-be platformer, except anything you stand on is secondary to the sand that Pepper, the player character, grinds her way through to reclaim her stolen pirate treasure.

Movement feels very fluid as Pepper swims through the game’s sandy environments and dives in and out of the surfaces (and through various enemies). It can be a bit of a challenge to get the hang of — while playing the demo, I wasn’t always sure whether I should guide Pepper in a circle to face where I wanted her to go or just jostle the joystick back and forth. It’s a good balance of responsiveness and natural range for the “swimming” motion. Turning is sharp, but didn’t feel like it was on a dime.

Levels in Pepper Grinder have a few layers to them that will encourage players to revisit past areas. First, there are five medals, large coins emblazoned with a skull, hidden across each level. If you progress straight to the end, you’re sure to miss some, so these medals encourage you to fully explore. Once found, you can revisit levels in “Time Attack” mode where, as you might expect, players need to reach the end as fast as they can.

4. Raw Metal

I would have never guessed that a game merging stealth and beat-'em-up mechanics could work so well, but Raw Metal is up there with the best games I tested this year.

In an art style I can only describe as “mole-man punk”, Raw Metal sees players sneak through an “exoplanet mining facility” collecting gadgets and supplies. You can use the environment and equipment you gather to hide from, distract, or disable guards by hiding in the shadows and firing taser darts.

When caught, players are thrown into a fight sequence where opponents will begin to block repetitive attacks. You’ll need to change up your fighting style throughout combat to stay on top of things and continue to use the environment by pushing enemies into walls to gain an advantage. Of course, if you initiate the fight with a sneak attack, you’ll gain a healthy head start.

Bosses are, of course, unavoidable (at least the first is). So don’t ignore those fighting skills!

Raw Metal runs very well on the Steam Deck, with even a relatively low battery impact for the environment. Floors are short missions, running about 3-4 minutes in the demo — making it perfect to fill a short window to game.

5. Nimrods

Nimrods is a top-down bullet-hell horde-survival game that merges Vampire Survivors with Enter the Gungeon.

Going in, I was skeptical of the full-screen crosshair aiming mechanic. Other demos with a similar mechanic didn’t feel natural to me on the Steam Deck but, after a short while, Nimrods did. Its default sensitivity may be just tuned better for the platform. I gravitated to the trackpad here, and can recommend it as an excellent game to get used to using it.

You start Nimrods with a simple pistol. Each level, a supply crate is fired down to the planet to crush part of the horde encroaching upon you, forcing you back into it to reap your rewards — a gun mod.

Nimrods is, after all, about “GunCraft”. Modding your pistol (and other guns) with anything from missiles to rubber duckies to help you mow down hordes of slime, grubs, and big ‘ol bosses.

Between runs, you’ll find yourself in a base of operations where you can buy unlocks, speak with rescued NPCs, and fit a helpful little drone with the weapon from your last run. It will follow you on your next mission, lending a hand while following your previous run’s upgrade path.

6. Children of the Sun

Maybe the most original gameplay to feature in Next Fest was Children of the Sun. It’s a puzzle game where players are an assassin, “The Girl”, working to take down groups of cultists with a single bullet that is re-aimed repeatedly from each point of impact.

The bullet worms a path through each map hitting cultists and traps until every enemy is eliminated. There are multiple solutions to each level, and a scoreboard if you’re keen to get competitive and find the best solution.

It’s surprising how much small deviations impact each level in Children of the Sun, and that makes where you position The Girl to take each initial shot matter a lot. Time moves slowly once you’ve pulled the trigger, so taking your time to skulk around the map and keep an eye on who is where and how the environment changes can make a big difference. Even so, taking a beat to mull over each level won’t feel cumbersome; they’re mercifully brief, making for another great short-session game.

Children of the Sun’s story manages to have some depth even without dialogue of any kind — voice or text. A narrative shines through in the short cut scenes between maps, giving you a nice little rationale for the Stranger Things-esque telekinetic killing spree.

7.Helskate

Pro Skater with demons. ‘Nuff said.

In Helskate, you play a skater in “Vertheim” (hell on earth vibes) who fights through hordes of monsters with a skateboard and a sword. As players progress, they collect upgrades that make skating easier (better balance-meter stability) and weaponize tricks. Summoning a demonic missile with a kick flip feels pretty cool.

Helskate feels a lot like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and there’s a good reason for that: lead designer, Steve Swink, worked on Tony Hawk’s Underground and literally wrote the book on “Game Feel”. Twisting Pro Skater into a roguelike context makes the arcadey game style chaotic, but manages to feel perfectly situated.

Swink captures why that is when he explains Phantom Coast has tried to make abilities in Helskate something that players can curate to tricks they know and love, or use them instructionally to learn new things.

The limited roguelike runs in Helskate can make skating games more accessible to newcomers to the genre by dodging lengthy tutorials and trick memorization in favor it learning as you go. Being taught tricks as you unlock skills for them, the game encourages players to try new things, and Swink says the team wants players to be able to take the skills they gain to other skating games when they finish their approximately hour-long Helskate run.

Helskate mostly runs great on Steam Deck, but the demo’s early build did crash my system at least once. Chalk it up to growing pains, I wager. Unfortunately, the demo is now gone in favor of an early access release. So, you’ll have to buy it to try it yourself.

8. Rotwood

I’m a sucker for Klei games. The Vancouver-based developers won my heart with Don’t Starve and haven’t disappointed since. Rotwood looks to carry on in that regard with a roguelite in the developer’s quintessential art style.

Rotwood is a classic roguelite for solo or co-op play, which seems to be the standout feature here as it joins only a small host of roguelites with group play. Otherwise, it’s pretty standard for the genre: fight hordes of enemies and gargantuan bosses, upgrade your equipment and abilities, die, upgrade your home base, rinse and repeat.

Nothing wrong with the formula, and Klei’s implementation of it feels good. There’s some slight variation here; while abilities will reset every run, purchased equipment will follow you. Even without that, the game manages to stand out in terms of quality and by allowing you to pull in a friend or three for a quick rampage.

There’s a small caveat here in that Rotwood’s demo ran on what looked to be a 16:9 resolution. It wasn’t listed in the settings and couldn’t be changed to match the Steam Deck’s native 1200×800 or something suitably closer. Still, it ran well and was a good time. It’s the sort of thing you have to accept from some early demos.

9. The Land Beneath Us

The Land Beneath Us is probably best described as a turn-based roguelite, but I prefer to call it a solo tactics game — as opposed to team tactics. I was reminded of larger tactics games like XCOM or, probably more fittingly, Invisible, Inc. while playing.

The game is a procedural dungeon-crawler based on Welsh mythology, according to developer FairPlay Studios. In it, the robotic player character, U.S.H, delves into the underworld, Annwn, to rescue its kidnapped creator and harvest souls to upgrade itself along the way.

Combos are a neat addition to the genre here, where moving in a certain sequence allows you to use powerful abilities — if you can avoid the enemies moving around between each turn. There’s a certain amount of future planning involved to do things well, adding depth to otherwise short runs.

Otherwise, the game is a pretty standard merge of its genres. You know what you’re getting and it’s easy to jump into. It’s lightweight and runs flawlessly on a handheld like the Steam Deck.

10. #BLUD

If one thing is going to draw you to #BLUD, it’s probably the Nickelodeon art style reminiscent of 90’s cartoons like Dexter’s Laboratory. The story fits that style well — a cutesy horror as new-girl-in-town Becky Brewster hunts down a vampire infestation while balancing the demands of her social life and field hockey team.

The hashtag in the game’s name nods to its use of social media as a quest log and the place where you’ll be tipped off to new missions by community requests and odd observations. It feels original and ties the world and its characters together in an appealing way.

In the demo I was, at first, overwhelmed (and a bit impressed) by the amount of unique NPCs. But as I talked to characters and posted selfies of Becky to the game’s social media, I found myself quickly familiar with who was who and what they were all about. They’re all basic cartoon archetypes, after all.

#BLUD plays a bit like a roguelike might with room-to-room combat where you’ll dodge incoming attacks but is, refreshingly, linear. It’s nice to let the game’s vibrant hand-drawn art (that pops on the Steam Deck OLED, by the way) and fun story be the main draw.

Unfortunately, the demo is gone following Next Fest, so those interested in playing will need to wait for the full release later this year.

There are always way too many upcoming games to cover from Steam Next Fest, so be on the lookout for other recommendations from 2024.

Or, just browse the list of participants on Steam!