The Best Of February 2025's Steam Next Fest
Three times a year, we are blessed with Steam’s Next Fest, a festival of demos for games that are coming out this year. It’s always a treasure trove of indies and unheard of gems if you are willing to go digging. But with a load of big releases coming out the last few weeks, we’ve decided to help out once again and done some of the digging for you. Here is what we loved from Steam Next Fest.
Is This Seat Taken?
A cozy puzzle game about finding the perfect spot for the perfect person and all the dread that comes with it. People are pretty particular when it comes to their comfort and your job is to place everyone in the best possible spot for them. Whether it be a bus, movie theater or even a concert, finding the perfect spot is worth the effort.
FEAR FA 98
Harkening back to the days of Mutant League Football, imagine the old style FIFA games, but now in a survival horror setting. Murder the enemy players before they murder you and avoid the giant Nemesis-style hulking beast that roams the field for your blood. Complete with the original PlayStation’s swimmy vertixes, but somehow it all works.
Promise Mascot Agency
From the developers of Paradise Killer comes Promise Mascot Agency, where you play as Michi, a man driving around a cursed Japanese town recruiting giant mascots and causing all sorts of chaos in this visual novel mystery that doubles as an open world road trip game. Come for the creepy giant mascot costumes but stay for the slapstick story that follows.
Static Dread
What do you get when you combine Papers Please and Eldritch Horror? You get Static Dread, a new procedural lighthouse keeping game where you are tasked with leading ships to safety by following procedure as well as checking their paperwork. It’s all about following a stringent system and trying to keep your sanity as the darkness is always looming.
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon
If you remember back in 2016, a hilarious party game was released called Ultimate Chicken Horse, which combined four-player competitive platforming levels with Mario Maker collaborative level making so that everyone could work together to make a chaotic hellscape of a level they would then have to complete. Now we finally have a follow-up with Ultimate Sheep Raccoon, which combines 2D racing similar to the Trials series, but now multiplayer as each player continues to be able to add more difficult hazards to the course. This is bound to be a major hit at parties.
Steam Next Fest runs from February 24th to March 3rd.
