Steam Next Fest returns with hundreds of new demos and dev streams

The latest Steam Next Fest event is now underway, bringing hundreds of game demos, developer chats, and livestreams to the platform along with something new: Next Fest badges.

For the Steam badge collectors out there, the Steam Next Fest: October Edition will offer a profile badge for blasting through your discovery queue—essentially Steam's personalized recommendation center. You can quickly roll through it multiple times to level it all the way up.

It's worth taking it slowly, though, at least if you have any interest at all in the games themselves, because there are hundreds of demos of upcoming games available for the duration of the event. How many hundreds? I don't know, but it's a lot, and covers every Steam category from your basic action-adventure and strategy to controller-based games and VR.

(There were roughly 700 demos in the October 2021 Next Fest, and I'd expect at least that much this time around. So, y'know, get ready to do some digging.)

Acknowledging again that there are literally hundreds of demos in this event and we can't possibly talk about them all, here are handful that we've taken notice of recently:

• Aquatico
• Warhammer 40,000: Warpforge
• Forever Skies
• Thirsty Suitors
• Storyteller
• Terror: Endless Night
• RomanceIvania
• Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree
• Season: A Letter to the Future
• Dredge

The broadcast schedule is likewise overloaded, with multiple events set to take place every hour, almost around the clock: The final show of the first day is a Space Menace livestream that begins at 1 am ET, and then the action resumes at 5 am ET with a Q&A with the developers of Hello Neighbor 2, a Mask of the Rose livestream, and something called Hijack Overdrive—all happening at the same time.

The Steam Next Fest: October Edition is live now and runs until October 10.