King Slime Boggy (@lolwhoops.bsky.social)

RPGamer Checks Out Steam Next Fest Winter 2026, Pt. 1 With so many RPGs releasing each year, it can be hard to keep track of which ones to keep an eye out for. Steam Next Fest offers players a chance to try out some of the many upcoming games ahead of launch and figure out which ones warrant closer attention. Here at RPGamer, we looked at a few of the publicly available demos during the summer 2025 edition of Steam Next Fest. In this two-part feature, the second of which will follow in the next few days, we picked out some titles we felt were worthy of shining a spotlight on. --- Ardenfall Release Date: 2026 Publisher: Spellcast Studios Developer: Spellcast Studios Steam Page Deeply inspired by the atmospheric depth of Morrowind, Ardenfall is a first-person RPG that wears its influences proudly. From its colorful aquatic landscapes to its open-ended mechanics, the game captures that classic early-2000s sense of exploration. The demo places your character on a mysterious island as a shipwrecked survivor, where a familiar character creator provides numerous options to play exactly how you want. Whether you prefer the weight of heavy steel, the finesse of light weaponry, or the arcane power of magic, the game encourages you to mix and match styles to suit your playstyle. I played the game as a heavy, axe-swinging warrior who may have accidentally thinned out the local town population. I found that your character’s build directly dictates how you navigate challenges. If you lean into brute strength, you might find that your fists are just as effective in a "conversation" as they are in a dungeon. Progress is earned organically by passing skill checks and defeating monsters, all while engaging in fast-paced, real-time combat. The demo provides a compelling glimpse into the developers' ambitions, leaving you curious to see if they can successfully scale this vision into a much larger world. — Erik van Asselt --- Detachment Crew Release Date: To Be Announced Publisher: NeoludditeMindset Developer: NeoludditeMindset Steam Page Stuck in the middle of nowhere with minimal resources is a tried and true dungeon exploring premise. In Detachment Crew, players have a party of three members that specialize in one aspect of combat as they continue to inch forward to collect enough food to keep surviving. The maps, enemy positions in this grid-based world, and transitions to new screens all stay in place for each run. When the party moves, enemies follow, bit by bit on a grid, always shuffling to the next transition. In this world, the camera angles shift constantly, and transitioning between areas is determined by a circular portal that appears underneath the players when they step on it. Transitioning to a new area keeps players safe from enemies, most of which in this demo are giant turkeys, some of which pack a wallop, making it quite easy to get a game over and lose any collected resources. The three party members' abilities are: block, throw, and shoot. Combat itself is action-based, so timing the block, when it becomes available, is the best way to stay alive, or to spam shoot repeatedly and hope to outlast the enemy. In the demo, that's the gameplay loop in a nutshell, add in a jaunty trumpet tune that overlays it all. What truly makes Detachment Crew unique are its visuals. They are batty, in a handmade stop-motion style that is quite charming in an odd way. The rough textures and jerky motions harken to an oddly nostalgic time and utilize a style not often seen in gaming. This crazy visual world extends to all the backgrounds and little details in each mapped area, making for a wonderfully odd visual treat. Now it's just time to shape up that substance a bit to go with that style, and there could be something exciting to keep an eye on. — Ryan Costa --- Emery Hearts Release Date: 2026 Publisher: Haishō Interactive, Shinyuden Developer: Haishō Interactive Steam Page Emery Hearts sprinkles Minecraft aesthetics with action RPG elements and a ring menu-based inventory system akin to Secret of Mana. All of this creates an interesting concept with room to grow before the game fully releases. The game starts off with Lug, who is searching for some villagers after a recent earthquake struck his hometown. As a player, you are then tasked with finding the next objective in an old-school fashion, with no arrows or markers pointing you in the right direction. It took a second, but eventually I found the right way to go and moved on. Eventually, you get your first weapon, an axe, and also stumble into the first dungeon. The dungeon teaches players how to do the basics of combat and introduces a new weapon to play around with. Lug gets magic and even a floating, talking, robotic companion. There is even a weapon leveling system that adds specials to different weapons. Eventually, you fight the boss, and the game moves on. Emery Hearts has a lot of neat ideas, but truthfully, I got lost more often than I’d like to admit. There is room for this game to grow before it releases, but I had a fun enough time roaming the world. — Ryan Radcliff --- Fogpiercer Release Date: 2026 Publisher: Hooded Horse Developer: Mad Cookies Studio Steam Page I like trains. Always did and probably always will. They have a calm about them. But there is nothing calm about Fogpiercer. You play as a lone train driving through a snow-covered wilderness. As you choose a track closer to the fog wall to pierce through it, bandits on a variety of vehicles attack, resulting in a turn-based grid battle with deckbuilding elements. Every encounter is selected one after another, chugging forward through branching nodes as you take a path forward. Unable to outrun them, you use the power of some well-armed carriages. Using cards to activate mayhem from one of four possible carriages in the demo, you shoot, push, shield, and even harpoon enemies to their doom. There's plenty of train-based carnage, as you can try some advanced mayhem by pushing enemies to attack each other or push them in front of your destructive cowcatcher. If that is not enough, you occasionally get the chance to push enemies off a cliff, into obstacles in their path, or have the remnants of their colleagues fly towards them in their high-speed chase. With so much power, limits need to exist. As such, you only have limited action points to spend on cards and move your train with, and you have to plan carefully how to do a lot with a limited amount of actions. While this can feel menacing, nothing quite hits as achieving combos that destroy multiple enemies with one carefully placed hit. As you proceed through the game, you will get various chances from train stations and combat on your path to add new cards to your deck, upgrade your carriages, lick your wounds, or upgrade existing cards, all to become more and more capable in ever-increasing amounts of enemies and, on occasion, challenging bosses. The Fogpiercer demo mesmerized me with all those mechanics, and if you like roguelites and tactical card combat, you might look forward to it too. — Benedikt Geierhofer --- Fuzz & Dizzy: Part-Time Heroes Release Date: To Be Announced Publisher: Tikitello Developer: Tikitello Steam Page Ever wonder if you have what it takes to be a hero? Fuzz & Dizzy: Part-Time Heroes is a retro, turn-based RPG adventure, featuring half-siblings who are part-time mail carriers, and, as fate would soon have it, part-time heroes. The short demo begins with Fuzz and Dizzy waking up in a room for an interview of sorts, presumably after applying to be heroes. A mysterious and hidden interviewer explains that the player must pass the “Official Basic Mechanics Test,” in order to be competent enough for the “full game” later. Players take on the role of both Fuzz and Dizzy, learning key mechanics such as platforming, obstacle-clearing, and combat. Combat is turn-based with real-time inputs for dealing bonus damage and dodging enemy attacks. The platforming is quite fiddly, because even though both characters move in unison, they complete actions like jumping or hitting asynchronously. Player experience could improve immensely with a remapping of controls, though, since all actions, including dialogue advancement, are currently bound to the same button. I like that the developers, Tikitello, don’t take Fuzz & Dizzy: Part-Time Heroes too seriously, poking fun at things like the unfinished room in their demo, and simply referring to Dizzy as “the blue one”. This whimsical, self-deprecating humour is easily the most endearing aspect of the demo for me. I also adore the game's vintage, cartoony style. With no release date yet, players can wishlist Fuzz & Dizzy: Part-Time Heroes on Steam. — Elena Ng --- GladiEATers Release Date: To Be Announced Publisher: MilkBubblesGames Developer: MilkBubblesGames Steam Page Milk Bubbles Games’ GladiEATers tells a story both fresh and as old as time: warrior chefs battle for honor and glory, calling on the power of mutated food creatures to pummel their opponents’ dishes into scraps. In the case of Eggie, the pun-loving heroine who leads the demo, that means saving her family’s egg farm through ritualized culinary combat. Naturally, she specializes in egg dishes such as curse-lobbing deviled eggs, yolk-shooting fried eggs, and terrifying souffles. Cooking a team of edible eidolons begins with several Cooking Mama-style minigames. Success in whisking, frying, and preparing the food fighters increases their battle stats. After that, it’s time for turn-based arena combat! Each dish has a choice of 2-3 attacks common to its type. These battles are quick and unforgiving, driving home the importance of stacking advantages before the opening bell. Prep time is a key resource, which increases after winning battles in the Roguelike mode and progressing through story mode. Prep time allows combat chefs to retry low-quality dishes for better stats, prepare a squad of up to six fighters, and refine existing dishes. For example, two of Eggie’s basic whisked yolks are not the most ferocious fare. However, with the proper recipes, she can craft them into a single mighty soufflé or two individual omelets, or save them for later. The demo shows a lot of humor, heart, and mechanical promise, although it’s clearly a taste of what’s to come. Several interface issues mar the experience. For example, the chunky font matches the pixel graphics, but it is unpleasant for extended reading. Similarly confusing, battles can involve a lot of conditional effects. It’s not always clear which of them trigger and how they interact. A turn-by-turn text log would clarify a lot. That said, the core loop of cooking combatants, fighting battles, and learning about the world is an appetizing mix that leaves me hoping for seconds. — Zach Welhouse --- Magical Princess Release Date: Spring 2026 Publisher: MAGI Inc. Developer: Neotro Inc., MAGI Inc. Steam Page If anyone remembers Princess Maker, this game kind of plays like that. Magical Princess is in the style of a visual novel, where you pick different activities for the main character, Alice, to do each “day”. All of the activities have mostly positive benefits; however, there is a morality system as well. Picking different ones will affect how good or bad she may become. The visuals are cute, and the soundtrack is fun. There are some systems for character customization that can be unlocked as you level traits. There is also a much deeper plot going on behind the scenes that is only briefly hinted at within the demo. I do have two concerns with the game. The first concern is that the game does offer a “Streamer Mode”, and although the game does not portray any such tags that generally need it, so I wasn’t sure why it was there. The second was that the first introductory battle was missing from the demo. So there was no way for me to test out how involved those systems may be. The demo progress most likely does not carry over to the full game, based on it starting at the point where she is already going to school, skipping some of the early aspects of the game. I'm kind of optimistic for Magical Princess, and I enjoyed what I played so far. — Robert "TheMightyTAM" Albright --- Mousebusters Release Date: 2026 Publisher: Odencat Developer: Odencat Steam Page When there’s something strange on your apartment block, who ya gonna call? (Hint, check the title). Odencat Studio, the folks who brought us Meg’s Monster, Wish Upon A Cat, and Snowman Story, among other things, offered a short, fifteen- minute demo of their latest adventure title, Mousebusters, for this year’s Steam Next Fest. While it would stretch a few definitions of the term RPG, this feels like a game much in the same vein as anything Love-de-Lic produced back in the day. In Mousebusters, the player takes up the role of a young man who’s just moved into a dilapidated old apartment block, only to wake up the next morning as a mouse instead. Apparently, ghosts are at work, and this is their idea of a joke. The situation is hardly optimal, and the only way for him to fix this is to team up with another mousified former tenant and take out the marauding phantasms himself. The greater part of the demo, and presumably of the game, is a point-and-click interactive adventure, as the Mousebuster explores a tenant’s room, gets a better picture of their personal life issues, and then susses out the ghost that’s keeping things from ever getting better. The battle with the ghost is more of a point-and-shoot affair, aiming for the weak points and shooting down whatever mini-ghoulies get sent his way. The mouse-blaster needs a second to reload after every three shots, so timing is important. From what is teased in the demo's outro, there is a lot of story going on here, with a building full of tenants haunted by ghosts with grudges and some intimations of nefarious dealings behind it all. This is in keeping with Odencat’s usual M.O., and I am looking forward to seeing how the rest of the game turns out later this year. — Michael Baker (gaijinmonogatori) --- We hope you enjoyed reading about our staff’s Steam Next Fest winter 2026 experience. Stay tuned for Part 2 as well, and please let us know what games you played during the event through the comments, social media, or our dedicated Discord server! The post RPGamer Checks Out Steam Next Fest Winter 2026, Pt. 1 appeared first on RPGamer. https://rpgamer.com/2026/03/rpgamer-checks-out-steam-next-fest-winter-2026-pt-1/