The latest recurrence of the semi-annual blowout of game demos, livestreams, and other stuff known as the Steam Next Fest is now live, and that means you have exactly one week to power through nearly 900 demos from nearly every genre you can imagine.
To keep the math simple, we’ll round it up to 900 demos: That means you’re going to have to punch out 129 demos every day over the course of the Steam Next Fest if you want to see them all. That works out to about 5.5 demos per hour, which gives you a total of 12 minutes to dedicate to each, assuming you don’t want to waste any of your valuable time on frivolities like eating, sleeping, or hitting the head.
Of course, if you do fancy partaking in the sorts of activities that enable you to survive and function, you’re going to have to be a little choosier with what you play. The good news is that Steam isn’t just backing a dump truck up to your door and letting ‘er rip: The Steam Next Fest page includes a handy “recommended for you” section, tailored to your interests as Valve’s algorithms sees fit.
Here, for instance, is my list:
- Dark and Darker
- Planet of Lana
- Darkest Dungeon 2
- Plan B: Terraform
- Voidtrain
- Sons of Valhalla
- Fabledom
- Desynced
- Wandering Sword
- I Am Future
- Hero’s Adventure
- Witchspring R
- Super Raft Boat Together
- Operation Harsh Doorstop
- My Dream Setup
I recognize probably less than a half-dozen of those titles, and a few of them really don’t make any sense to me at all, but that’s what the Steam Next Fest is really all about: Discovering things you weren’t previously aware of. If idle browsing is more your thing, there’s plenty of scope for that too, including options for poking through the most-wishlisted games or demos with the most active players; you can also sort them all by genre, players, perspective, “themes and moods,” and a whole bunch of other filters.
The February 2023 Steam Next Fest is live now and runs until February 13. The full list of Next Fest livestreams and presentations is up at store.steampowered.com.