A Shakespearean roguelike and bad times on submarines headline the latest Steam Next Fest

Other standouts include a musical RPG and chess-themed Balatro.

By Elijah Gonzalez | February 23, 2026 | 3:00pm

Image Credits: AP Thomson, Iridium Studios

Games Features Steam Next Fest

A Shakespearean roguelike and bad times on submarines headline the latest Steam Next Fest

Steam Next Fest has become a fixture for discovering what’s on the horizon in the world of games, with its thousands of demos offering a chance for previously under-the-radar games to find an audience. Many viral hits have gotten their start here. As an event, it’s heavily skewed towards games of a certain size—smaller to mid-budget—but this makes it a useful tool for getting a pulse on what’s in vogue outside of the shrinking AAA sphere. A central theme across some of the most interesting games from this February’s Steam Next Fest, which starts today, shouldn’t come as a surprise: Roguelikes are still very popular. The good news is that despite this kind of run-based experience being so prevalent, some of these demos make it clear that we haven’t seen everything this sub-genre has to offer yet.

The game that best sums up this untapped potential is Titanium Court, a bizarre mashup of resource management, match-three mayhem, tower defense, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired whimsy. After a very meta opening, you play as a displaced woman who takes on the role of Queen Titania, tasked with defending her keep from incoming invaders. To crudely summarize, this is more or less a strategy game where the topography of the battlefield is determined by your choices during match-three puzzle sequences. For instance, if you match three forest tiles, you’ll gain resources in the form of wood while causing those trees to disappear from the map. The ability to morph the surrounding terrain lets you build up moats (by maneuvering water tiles around your base) or take out enemy battlements in advance by lining them up and clearing them. Once you’ve used up your turns during the match-three sequence, the battle begins, and your automated troops defend your castle or storm the enemies, depending on which role they’ve been assigned. While this central push-and-pull is engrossing and unique, what really sets the game over the top is its puckish presentation, with dialogue, pixel art, and characters that are very in keeping with the Bard’s comedies. It turns out the best way to spice up a well-worn formula is to add a little Shakespeare.

The other standout roguelikes weren’t quite as unique as this one, but they still managed to do something new with familiar influences; specifically, they owe a lot to Balatro. For starters, there’s DiceVaders, a sort of pseudo-sequel to the deckbuilder StarVaders where you play as that game’s bad guys, the aliens. As its name suggests, this is a “dicebuilder” where you attempt to juice up your odds. Each turn, you roll D6 dice whose numbers correspond to columns, allowing you to score whichever units you’ve placed in those corresponding grids. It’s not all up to chance, though, and the key is to manipulate your rolls while combining them with various artifacts and unit abilities to build a big score. As for where Balatro comes in, DiceVaders has a similar scoring system that includes a base number and a multiplier: Just like in LocalThunk’s hit, the name of the game is using the power of multiplication to generate a total with a whole lot of zeros at the end. The different unit and artifact types have abilities that allow for creative solutions, and while the math can sometimes become a bit tough to follow, it feels great to blow past a level’s score threshold. There are also lots of ways to minimize the inherent randomness at play by using resources that let you nudge a dice one column over or reroll entirely. It’s a brainy and distinct twist on familiar ideas.

If DiceVaders takes Balatro’s scoring, then Gambonanza borrows almost everything else, including its aesthetics and basic premise of spicing up a classic game—in this case, chess. From the trippy tie-dye backgrounds to the look of its shop and progression, it doesn’t attempt to hide its influences, something that would feel a bit cheap if it weren’t for how fundamentally different chess is from poker. Here, you accrue chess pieces and powerful modifiers called Gambits that let you break the rules of the game. For instance, a particularly busted Gambit grants the ability to take extra turns after taking a piece with a bishop, essentially turning the game into checkers as you skip across half your enemy’s board. Where things get tricky is that when you lose a piece, it’s gone for good, which is particularly brutal given that you start with only three. It’s easy enough to get more, and many Gambits are geared around doing just that, but these contests become particularly tense because in the later, more difficult matches, you’ll inevitably need to make sacrifices to win. This experience is very much geared at roguelike-heads who were also in the chess club; that Venn diagram is probably close to a circle.

While this trio all offer very different takes on run-based experiences, not all of the standouts are from this genre, thankfully. One title playing into a more old-school design is Heavy Metal Death Can, a low-poly survival horror game set on a doomed submarine. Here, fixed camera angles combine with cramped corridors to bring the pain as you solve puzzles, track down keys, and just generally make like Jill Valentine while trying to avoid becoming lunch. The whole “Death Can” element of the title is not an exaggeration, because this demo is truly brutal, throwing many zombies and considerably less ammo your way as the undead lurch into the frame to take a chunk out of the heroine. While there are certainly modernizations involved, like the ability to switch from tank controls to a smoother control scheme, there are still many old-school flourishes—like in the original Resident Evil games, you need to use a consumable item to save. When combined with the fixed camera and sense of claustrophobia, Heavy Metal Death Can reminds us that submarines are a nightmare that should be avoided at all costs.

On the lighter side, another promising non-roguelike from the event is People Of Note, a music-themed RPG. You play as Cadence, an up-and-coming popstar on a quest to assemble the ultimate band in a world where songs can be used as weapons. At first blush, it can be tempting to brush aside the game’s rhythm elements as basically indistinguishable from the Mario RPGs and other turn-based games with timing elements, but there turns out to be a bit more going on here. For instance, each of your party members, who play distinct genres of music, will take center stage at different points in battle, giving their moves a significant boost as the soundtrack shifts to complement their sound. Playing with, not against, these shifts in the music is the key to battle, adding compelling decisions around when you want to spend your mana equivalent to perform showy solos. This February’s Steam Next Fest may showcase an overrepresentation of roguelikes, but considering there’s at least one game where characters work out their differences through musical numbers, it’s clear some developers are still looking for what’s next.

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