Highlights of Steam Next Fest - October 2025

I downloaded a bunch of demos in February and never got around to trying any of them. This year I downloaded A LOT more and have made at least an attempt at playing the interesting ones. Here's this Fest's highlights.

Dispatch
I'm aware of a few games where you play a role like this, but I've never tried one. In this game, you are a dispatcher for city emergencies, and your team is a bunch of criminal superheroes with personality disorders. Each are good at different things, and your job is to send the best person for the job to each call, making difficult decisions along the way. It's really funny and well written.

Dead as Disco
This is an extremely polished rhythm beat-em-up. You play in an arena and have to punch out waves of enemies, dodge and counter in time to the beat. Also supports your own music (although I haven't had actual music files since I started using Spotify about 10 years ago). Looks like it could be good mindless relaxing fun and look forward to see if they add anything more complicated to it.

In the Black
Feels exactly how I would imagine playing The Expanse. It's a space flight / combat sim that does lots of things really well. I also completely suck at it, so I can see it taking a lot of practice. There are very few decent space flight games though, so I'll probably be spending some time with this one.

Alchemy Factory
Low budget automation game about creating materials for alchemy. Looks like it could be interesting, but is still quite rough around the edges. Maybe I'll take a look when it's further along.

Star Ores Inc.
A game about mining an asteroid and setting up some light automation in the form of robot helpers. You mine ore, destroy goop, and revitalise a mining station on a remote asteroid. It looks old, but I can tell it's already well polished. Found it quite addictive so I'll definitely be going back to this when it's out.

Everwind
I've never played Minecraft, but this looks just like it, but feels like a modern survival crafting game (Valheim / Enshrouded etc). Crafting stations, gear, punching trees etc. The unique selling point however is the flying ship which is an upgradeable ship made out of the same blocks as the rest of the world - meaning you can build, extend and upgrade it however you like. You can also build land bases, and shape blocks so they're not all square.