Steam Next Fest can be a hectic time. While some of the demos will remain after the week-long Festival of Nextival is over, many do not. You need to find time to squeeze everything in—especially if you want to get in on a multiplayer beta of strictly limited duration—even if one of the biggest games of the year happens to be launching right in the middle of it.

There are usually three Next Fests per year, in February, June, and October, and 2025's first is wrapping up at 10 am PT on March 3. Based on , organized by daily user count, we can see that multiplayer robot rumpus Mecha Break is number one and has been consistently for days. Which is interesting, given that it's currently got a , with only 34% of the user reviews having nice things to say.

This cross between Armored Core and a hero shooter is [[link]] appealing to fans of Gundams and , but those reviews do contain a lot of complaints about its lengthy tutorial, live-service cruft, and aggressive monetization. And yet, in spite of all the negativity, it's stayed in the number one spot while other demos have risen and fallen.

Gothic 1 Remake was in the number two spot for a while, but fell off as people gave up on its clunky movement and edgelord fantasy vibe. Right now the number two position is being held by , which takes the VR version of the beloved Werewolf-like and lets players experience it flat-style. It comes with proximity voice chat built in, so you won't have to join a Discord server, and the full release will have cross-compatibility with the VR version.

, a game of roadbuilding and logistics for the Snowrunner sickos, is sitting in third place, while , which lets you play what are basically World of Warcraft dungeon runs without having to actually play World of Warcraft, [[link]] has dropped back to fourth after spending some time in second place.

Rounding out the current top five is Haste: Broken Worlds, a third-person physics-defying sprinting game that looks like what the Sonic the Hedgehog series might have evolved [[link]] into if its fans didn't keep dragging it back into 2D. and said, "The trick is to make sure you come down at a good angle, and your only tools to do so are your innate sense of digital depth perception, some rough mental calculations, and a button that mercifully lets you speed up your descent in case you get either of the first two things wrong."

The rest of the list is in flux, but there's plenty more demos in there worth checking out before Next Fest finishes—most of them with much better user ratings than Mecha Break. Like Shotgun Cop Man, an action-platformer about going to Hell to arrest Satan, which currently has a .