Steam Next Fest Kicks Off With More Than 600 Playable Demos

The latest edition of Steam Next Fest has kicked off, and if you've been eyeing certain games or have them added to your wishlist, there's a pretty good chance that you can try an early slice of gameplay for them.

In addition to the festival's gameplay livestreams, developer roundtables, and even some educational fun, the big draw of Steam Next Fest is the mind-boggling number of demos that'll be available. This year will see over 600 game demos that you can try out according to Valve, so you'll need to be really good at maximizing your time if you want to get a 100% completion rate before Next Fest ends on February 27.

Some of the demo highlights for this year include managing a space station in Ixion, tactical space-based shooter Boundary, and Food Truck Simulator for all the Jon Favreau fans out there. Also worth checking out is Nergal, a first-person surreal adventure game involving Slavic folklore and Baba Yaga from developer The Parasight.

You can grab links for the game pages and a few other highlights, below:

• Boundary
• Celestial Empire
• Core Keeper
• Coromon
• Crowz
• Fata Deum
• Food Truck Simulator
• Hero's Hour
• Ixion
• Monsters Domain
• Nobody: The Turnaround
• Silt
• The Wandering Village

This is a big month for Valve, as the company will launch its handheld Steam Deck gaming system on February 28. A number of these demos will be a natural fit for the Steam Deck, the compatibility of which will be made known through a system called the Steam Deck Verification Program. Alternatively, there's also a fansite that shows you all the Steam Deck Verified games so far.