Steam Next Fest’s top demos were packed with gnomeslop hijinks, open world piracy, and vampire card battling, but then—well—Marathon happened

Steam Next Fest has quickly become one of our favorite occasions at PC Gamer as developers of all sizes offer up samplings of their latest work to earn places on our wishlists. The top demos list of the latest Next Fest has provided a particularly rich variety. Since things kicked off Monday, the charts have been topped by gnomish burglary simulators, Vampire Survivors spinoffs, robot cowboy co-op, and more.

At least, that was the case until the Marathon Server Slam unlocked yesterday and immediately rocketed to the top slot on the list, anyway. Ah, well. Far be it from me to deny the allure of an electric teal spacegun. While players flood by the thousands into Tau Ceti shootouts—players who, so far, have much itchier trigger fingers than their Arc Raiders counterparts—let’s run down the other previews that pulled the most attention.

(Image credit: Fobri)

At second place in the Next Fest ranking is Burglin’ Gnomes, representing the friendslop contingent of the field. In it, you and up to five friends play as a band of ankle-high gnomish bandits with unsettlingly extendable arms and a profound love for blasting cigs, risking gruesome death at the hands of shotgun-toting homeowners and their murderous cats while performing the mischief mandated by the High-Gnome’s edict.

After trying their own hand at gnome burglin’, our Elie Gould said “it’s got all the right stuff to warrant a REPO-like explosion onto the gaming scene: funny little guys, a good dose of horror, death, and a fun soundtrack. I can’t wait to play more.” A powerful recommendation for pint-sized vandalism.

Sailing into third place is Windrose, an open world pirate survival game pairing base building with Black Flag-style seafaring combat. It’s a moodier sort of marauding than your Sea of Thieves fare, but its sea shanties hit home well enough for Chris Livingston to leave “loving the pirate adventure aspect of it” after sinking seven hours into the demo. And he’s not alone: The Windrose demo has received over 5,400 Steam reviews, 93% of which are positive.

(Image credit: Windrose Crew)

While Windrose has landed on over 1 million wishlists, its developer Windrose Crew said it’s not quite ready to lock in a release date, urging the many eager freebooters now following their work to “please, let us cook more.”

Next comes Vampire Crawlers, Poncle’s attempt to contort Vampire Survivors into a deck-building dungeon crawler. Despite whatever dark and inscrutable ritual that entailed, the attempt seems to have worked—perhaps too well, as our Wes Fenlon said it “already seems polished and stuffed with stuff,” offering an approachable on-ramp to deckbuilding synergies and combos that, he suspects, is “what will make it so dangerous. Just one more run, right?”

Rounding out the top five is Far Far West, offering perhaps the most specific flavor of videogame yeehawery ever produced as a co-op FPS starring robot cowboys who are also wizards. That, it turns out, makes for a winning combination: After a couple hours with Far Far West, I think it’s nimble, polished gunplay has the potential to bring a replayable co-op heat that could rival games like Deep Rock Galactic. Even if I’m scared of where all those skeletons come from in a world populated by robots. Troubling implications.

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