Four great games from Steam’s June Next Fest

Steam’s June 2025 edition of its Next Fest is going on now through June 16th, and the event is packed with great-looking demos for games coming to PC. Seriously, it seems like there are a lot of demos; a search filter on my Next Fest homepage shows more than 2,500 English demos to pick from.

If you open up the Next Fest page and are overwhelmed, I get it – admittedly, I am, too. But I’ve played a few and have four to recommend.

Mina the Hollower, the next game from Shovel Knight creators Yacht Club Games, feels like a Game Boy Color title made in the modern era. You play as Mina the mouse in a top-down action-adventure game that reminds me a lot of Link’s Awakening. Mina’s signature move is a slick burrowing ability that lets you zip around underground for a few seconds, and even in the short demo, I found it immensely useful to get under obstacles or create space during hairy fights.

The demo ends with an exciting boss fight, and I was sad when it was over after about 30 minutes. I’m really looking forward to the game’s full release on October 31st.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a retro-style side-scrolling action-platformer with gorgeous pixel art and an electric guitar-filled soundtrack. Like other Ninja Gaiden games, it’s filled with flashy combat and a lot of blood, but I also quite liked the old-school platforming – there’s a lot of double-jumping off enemies, which never gets old. Like other Dotemu games, Ragebound seems to perfectly capture an old-school vibe but with a game made in 2025. And after finishing the three levels in the demo, I’m eager to play the rest of the game when it’s out on July 31st.

Within moments of starting the Ball X Pit demo, I openly said to myself, “oh no.” Not because it’s bad. But because it immediately grabbed me as an engrossing blend of roguelikes, Puzzle Bobble, Breakout, and Vampire Survivors.

As enemies slowly advance toward you, you move your character around and fire balls at them, which you can bounce off walls or even between enemies. (Naturally, you’ll have to dodge bullets from the bad guys, too.) Dead enemies drop experience gems, and when you level up, you can pick from various upgrades, like balls that shock nearby foes. You can even fuse balls together, and between runs there’s a land management game. And for the people that this will matter to, your health meter looks like it was taken right from Diablo.

I can see losing a lot of time to Ball X Pit when it’s out later this year.

Word Play, from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit, mixes ideas from Balatro and word games.

Each round, you’re tasked with getting a specific score by spelling words that can be up to ten characters long before you run out of turns. As with games like Scrabble, different letter tiles have different point values, and words with five letters or more will get added bonus points that will help you reach the goal score more quickly.

When you reach the goal score, you move on to the next round, which will have a higher goal. But you’ll also be able to pick from an upgrade of some kind, like a modifier that automatically applies a 3x multiplier to the second tile of any word you spell.

Unlike the rest of the demos I’ve recommended here, Word Play is a chill puzzle game, but like with Balatro, I found myself trying to sneak in one more run instead of going to bed. The game is set to launch on July 14th.