Steam Next Fest is back with a new batch of demos, livestreams, and spotlights on several upcoming games from indie developers. And as has become tradition, games from publishing platform indie.io are heavily featured.
There are 13 indie.io games participating, and they’re from a wide range of genres. There’s a card-based city builder (Once Upon a Kingdom), a 2D action platformer based on Mexican folklore (Dark Adelita), and a cozy gardening game where you bring plants back from the dead (Greenhearth Necromancer).
So clearly, there are lots of different gaming experiences on offer. But we decided to focus on four specific titles that you can try for yourself right now, most of which just got new updated demos as part of Steam Next Fest.
From a dev team of two co-creators, Pluto sees you play as a less-than-heroic wizard who needs to break out of jail to attend their niece’s birthday party. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a unique spellcasting system where elemental sigils are connected to each of your fingers. Your deck is made up of spells that use different combinations of these sigils, and some spells can share sigils, meaning it’s possible for spells to overlap and combine.
So building your deck isn’t just about stacking the most powerful cards, it’s about experimenting with several different cards and finding ones that synergize well together and let you pull off gradually more complicated interactions. You’ll need them to take out the monstrosities you face as you race against the clock to get out of jail in time. Pluto recently announced it will be fully released on March 9, and it got a brand-new demo as part of Steam Next Fest, which you can download for free here.
As you could hopefully guess from the name, Esports Manager 2026 is a strategy-sim game where you lead an esports team and control its day-to-day operations. That means managing all facets of the team: talent acquisition, team finances, player morale, tournament performance, brand growth, leadership structure, everything.
You can scout and recruit real-life players, and you’ll need to consider market dynamics to figure out the right time to add them to your team. You’ll design training programs to help them grow, hire a staff to support them, and chat with them to make sure they’re happy and their goals are being met. Then take them into Simulation mode, where you’ll take part in esports tournaments and control your team’s tactics as you try to establish yourself as the team to beat. Esports Manager 2026 also has a brand-new free demo included in Steam Next Fest, which you can download here.
Inspired by Celtic mythology and Arthurian legends, SoulQuest has you take up the sword of Alys, a woman whose husband’s soul has been taken by the gods. She’s not a fan of that and will hack and slash her way through hordes of divine servants and the gods themselves to get him back.
Combat is fast-paced and has you combine sword attacks, magic, and ultimate abilities to unleash your wrath. It’s a system designed to be easy to pick up and play quickly, but difficult to truly master. You can string certain attacks into jump strikes, allowing you to juggle enemies in the air and pull off long combos. There are also secrets to discover, using basic platforming or Alys’s ability to slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them.
Like the previous two entries on this list, SoulQuest also dropped a new demo as part of Next Fest. It adds a new zone with new enemies and the game’s first god boss fight against the pagan deity Cernunnos. It also adds a new secret mission that wasn’t possible to find before. To try it yourself, you can download the demo here.
We finish off this list with a medieval city builder from Reverie World Studios, developers of the Kingdom Wars series. In City States: Medieval, a continent lies divided, and you lead a city state as it vies for power, wealth, and status while surrounded by powerful kingdoms. You’ll be charged with leading your city state to prominence by building up trade routes across the known world, improving your economy, and protecting your land from your greedy neighbors.
Your city will also have a legendary hero to help lead it, one whose skills will develop as time goes on, expanding your options for supporting the city. They can do things like defend the city, boost construction and city growth speed, or be sent to foreign courts to engage in political intrigue. You only have one hero, though, so you need to think through how best to use them. If you keep them at home, growth opportunities could pass you by. But if you send them on expeditions, your city’s defenses will suffer. And foreign invaders will try to besiege you. You’ll need to use a combination of real-time strategy combat and tower defense mechanics to push them back and prevent your city from falling. To get a taste of these strategic possibilities, you can try the demo here.
