Steam Next Fest season is in full swing, but the sheer amount of options may be paralyzing to some. Here is how to navigate it.
It’s that time of year again, when Valve opens the floodgates to hundreds of developers with upcoming games to share their demos with the general public. Steam Next Fest has become one of my favorite gaming traditions: settling down in front of the Steam storefront in each February, June, and October to scroll through dozens upon dozens of new games to try.
You, however, may be less prone to doomscrolling a video game storefront than I, and so, might want a clearer starting place for how to get the most out of your Next Fest experience. Well, fear not — I’ve got a few tips for you to help make sure you walk out of this week with some potential new favs instead of fatigue and a blistering headache.
No Thanks, I’m Just Looking
Rule #1: You’re not shopping, you’re just looking. Steam Next Fest isn’t the time for commitments, it’s the time for just checking things out. Which means you’ve got to cast off the shackles of optimization. Don’t worry about what anything costs, don’t worry about what reviews say, don’t worry about your backlog. Just let it all go and flip through the stacks until something reaches out and grabs you.
This is a mindset thing and it might feel awkward at first. Steam Next Fest is a time to trust your eyes, your ears, and your gut. That rogulite deckbuilder speaking to you even though you’ve never Slayed the Spire once in your life? Add the demo to your library, worry about it later. Have a hunch that you might like this new RPG but aren’t sure if there’s three games in the series before it? Who cares — get in there and add it.
Let the games speak and say yes to what feels good. Next Fest is the brainstorming of video game events: to have good ideas you have to have plenty of ideas, so be more open to experiences, publishers, and genres than you might otherwise have been.
Embrace the Spaciousness of Not Knowing
Here’s another mindset shift. Set a timer and just click around for a while, adding demos to your library as you go. You aren’t here to buy, so don’t act like the end point is the purchase. Instead, imagine Next Fest as a big open space that you’re just gonna wander around in for a while. It’s less like hunting and more like birdwatching.
And while we’re on the subject, break out of your algo. Steam’s recommendations have gotten better and better over the years through its Discovery Queue and most recently with it’s Personal Calendar feature. Give yourself time to ignore those things. Browse by a genre you don’t know well instead, or simply open up the charts and scroll to the bottom a few times to find the deeper cuts. You have enough content hand delivered to you by a machine — go hang out in the store for once and pretend you’re a tourist at the Louvre. You don’t know what the Mona Lisa means, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look at it for a while.
Ride the Waves
Ok, here’s some more practical advice. Avoid adding a demo to your library and then playing it immediately. What you want is a pool of games in your lirbary you can hop around in, rather than a cycle of dipping in and out of the store front. The more times you dip in and out, the worse it’s going to feel, because repeat visits to the Steam Next Fest storefront have diminishing (and sometimes exhausting) returns.
Think of it this way. Steam Next Fest is Halloween and you’re a sugar high 9-year-old. You want to gather as much candy as you can. This means you go out and canvas the neighborhood, hitting all the good spots, and then only when you’re tired of walking do you come home and start perusing your spoils. It’d be insanity to go out trick-or-treating for ten minutes, come back home and take stock, then go back out for another ten minutes, then come back again over and over. That’s misery, that’s missed opportunity.
No. You go out and gather, then you come back home and play. Next Fest is short, so if you’re really ambitious, plan out two, maybe three rounds of browsing. Split it apart by spending time actually trying the demos in your library out. It’s more efficient and it’ll help you keep your focus across the dozens of demos you want to give a shot.
Write Something Down
Wishlisting is a great way to give devs a shoutout when you play something you like as well as a convenient way to make sure you don’t fully lose track of a game after you set it aside. I think you should go one step farther: every demo you play, write down one or two sentences in a little journal about your experience. Do this for the demos you like, the demos you don’t like, and the ones you just aren’t sure about either.
Why? Because the secret about Steam Next Fest is it’s a taste clarifying machine. This is your chance to learn a little bit about yourself — what you like and more importantly why you like it. Ordinarily, that kind of thing takes a really long time, spread across weeks and years of playing game after game. For most of us, that long of a horizon keeps us from ever really reflecting on how our own preferences are taking shape, growing and contracting. But during Next Fest this process gets supercharged and intensified, which means you, in just a week’s time, get to do some nice gaming introspection for free.
You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Clean Up Your Mess
If you’ve followed my advice up to this point, then by the end of Next Fest your library (not to mention your SSD) will be a disaster. Don’t let it stay that way. You’ve been in exploration mode all week, and now it’s time to clean up the campsite. Delete those demos and use this opporuntiy to wishlist any demos you might have missed early on.
If you wake up Tuesday morning and find your Steam library clogged with a bunch of partial games, you’re gonna be mad you ever did any of this. So be a big kid and keep things tidy. You could even do this in waves like I described before — add 20 demos, play what you want, get rid of them and hit the Fest again.
It’s Not That Deep
Listen. The key to a good Next Fest is to keep it light. Could the UI and discovery features be better? Absolutely. Is it easy to fall into the fomo trap and constantly wonder what you’re missing? For sure.
Remember back in the day when you’d go to Walmart or Best Buy or FYE and just stand looking up at an old CRT playing a tiny loop of Fusion Frenzy or Jak and Daxter for hours until your mom noticed you were missing?
That’s the vibe we’re going for here, folks. Hang out, try stuff, and maybe reflect a little. That’s the recipe.
