What’s this? Thousands of new demos have sprung up on Steam? That can only mean one thing: Steam Next Fest is upon us again! Until March 3rd, you can try out new demos, wishlist the games that you like, watch developer streams and provide feedback.
I’ve tried a bunch of promising new demos and have filtered the best thinky games and I’m surprised by how many I’ve found. From demos that are very polished to some still in early development but with an exciting idea, from child-friendly adventure games to challenging head-scratchers, here are the best of the best.
Below you'll find our picks and links to each game's Steam page. Played something that's not listed below? Join our Thinky Games Discord and let us know! There are lots of Steam Next Fest discussions this week in the community so you'll almost definitely find something you'll love.
If you liked these short demo reviews, I regularly post them in the weekly Puzzle Lovers newsletter, Brainrack.
The 10 most polished demos
Cell Command
Very similar to the genetic-themed roguelite Genome Guardian, but this time instead of a turret shooter, Cell Command is a turn-based strategy game. Build your microbes by extending their genetic code, adding modifiers and traits, then fight enemy microbes in turn-based battles. I really liked Genome Guardian last year, and Cell Command seems even better and a lot thinky-er.
ChromaGun 2: Dye Hard
Solve hard puzzles by painting objects in different colors. The demo showcases 5 very different environments with unique puzzle mechanics, with a lot more strange worlds featured in the trailer to look forward too. This is very thinky, but the demo lacks cohesion because of the choice to showcase disparate worlds. Many of the puzzles are about figuring out unexplained mechanics instead of applying known rules to complicated scenarios, which I for one like.
Double Trip
A lovely game. You control two characters that must coordinate to solve box-pushing puzzles and reach the exit. Looks good, sounds good, and has challenging puzzles. Looking forward to the full game.
The Electrifying Incident: A Monster Mini-Expedition
Another great game from Draknek & Friends, in which the monster from A Good Snowman and A Monster’s Expedition makes a comeback as a factory worker. Grab boxes from afar with your mechanical grabber-arm, put them on buttons, avoid electrical current, and solve cross-room puzzles. Lovely game, looks like another fine addition to the DEMU (Draknek extended monster universe).
Gentoo Rescue
A strong candidate for the hardest thinky game, this is a huge open-world puzzle with a lot of mechanics. Help animals reach their target spots by sliding on ice. Use plenty of tools, like springs, hammers or rockets. Discover strange interactions, automatically documented in your journal. Explore nested and recursive levels. Gain new powers and revisit impossible levels. And on top of that, it’s all so cute!
Hazard Pay
In this interestingly themed Sokoban, you play as a cleaner trying to remove all evidence of an industrial accident: dissolve bodies in acid vats, mop up blood, and pack up everything that doesn’t belong in the level. Great puzzles in a polished implementation, with a bonus leaderboard if you want to compete against your friends.
Is This Seat Taken?
A lighthearted logic puzzle that puts you in the role of a matchmaker. You're tasked with arranging groups of people based on their preferences and peeves, you must make deductions to ensure everyone is seated in a way that keeps them happy and content.
Olaf the Boozer
Sokoban meets the hit movie The Hangover in a medieval fantasy world. Play as a dwarf after an epic bender from which you don’t remember anything, trying to piece together the events of last night and fix everything that you and your rowdy friends broke. Gameplay involves solving Sokoban levels in reverse, pulling boxes, uncrashing furniture, moving through the places you’ve been. Great game with a funny story, and the demo hints at a mysterious plot.
Schrodinger's Cat Burglar
A lovely game. Part exploration platformer, roaming an underground lab with secret tunnels, furniture to climb and stuff to knock down, computers to hack, and mice to catch, and part puzzle solving, in which you can split yourself into two different cats and recombine yourself. Good puzzles, an intriguing story, and it looks and sounds great plus it has smooth controls. If the rest of the puzzles in the full game will not disappoint, this is a strong contender for the thinky game of the year!
So Fart Away
Another Sokoban where instead of pushing boxes. You generate odorous clouds as you eat tacos, then find your way to the exit without killing anybody (including yourself) with the deadly gas. The silly premise shouldn’t deter you from trying this, it is a true gem with an intriguing story and great puzzles.
Cute and cozy
Adventures of a Cat in Space
Cartoonish adventure game with a great soundtrack (the game is made by an award winning singer/songwriter), silly scenario with great British humor. Great adventure game for kids.
Bento Blocks
Taking a lot of inspiration from Inbento, you have to pack sushi into boxes. After a few levels in which you just have to fit all the pieces in the box, the true mechanic of the game shows up: you have to cut some pieces to fit in. Each cut counts, and to get a perfect score you have to solve the puzzle using the given number of cuts, but it’s OK if you can’t figure out the optimal solution, you’ll just get fewer stars. At least in the two chapters in the demo it doesn’t go too deep, but some levels are surprisingly challenging.
Blobun
A one-line puzzle with extra mechanics, good looking, plenty of QoL and settings, optional speedrun goals, quite good!
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
Continuing the successful first Duck Detective game, in this one you go glamping (glamorous camping). While there, solve the mystery of the “ghost” that keeps on making things disappear. Examine people and objects, talk, gather words and names, then fill in the missing words in sentences. Funny, good voice acting, with simple but good graphics. A more child-friendly detective game, although personally I found the first one a bit too easy.
Einstein’s Cats
A variant of Einstein’s puzzle, but with cute cats. You're given a bunch of cats with different colors, patterns and accessories, a bunch of containers, and a few sentences like “black cats love cardboard boxes” and “cats with stripes hate tall containers”, you have to find the right container for each cat. It looks really good, and I like how picking up a cat highlights all the statements that may affect it. Oh, and you get rewarded with stickers to build your own scenes.
Kiko's Apple Adventure
It’s time to collect apples for the biggest apple pie! A Sokoban variant, you must push apples onto rafts, but while the apples follow the classic Sokoban rules, the rafts use a sliding mechanic. Add some sharks, tunnels, movable land and other fun mechanics, and you get a lovely game!
Medusa Crisis
When Medusa finds herself under attack from Athena’s warriors, she must try to escape without being captured. Strategically sneak, turn enemies to stone, and try not to look into a mirror. Nice puzzles, good looking, but the lack of undo makes it a bit tedious.
Nekograms
Put cats on rugs, but you can only move cats horizontally, and rugs vertically. A novel type of logic game. It started too easy, but by the end, I had to concentrate to solve the puzzles. Nice theme, and solid puzzles, but my only complaints are that it’s a bit slow and it uses a move counter.
Place Icebergs Apart
A unique take on the Block Puzzle concept, instead of closely fitting blocks in a grid, you must fit them so that they don’t touch each other. 10 easy levels in the demo, simple but cozy implementation, looks like a nice relaxing puzzler.
Ruya: Ascension
A logic game taking the match3 idea into a smart direction. On a grid with beads of different colors (and shapes, for accessibility), you draw a line through the beads you want to remove, but you must follow a series of patterns, like three in a line, L shape, two then another two, then four in a line. The challenge is to figure out which beads to remove, and where and when to add the replacement beads. It’s not a dumb match3, but a smart meta-match3, the first time I actually enjoyed this genre.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home
Good nonogram with a cozy theme, solve levels to receive clothing, furniture and other decorations to build Squeaky’s new house, read emails (including pretend spam and phishing emails), a lot of things to do other than solving puzzles, if you wish to.
A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe
You play as a giraffe afraid to talk to other people, always imagining long anxious conversations, so your goal is to silently distract other people so nobody notices you. You have to figure out how to use the environment and the many items in it to create distractions. Nice game, I wish there were more scenarios in the demo.
Zachlikes, programming, and automation
Automate It
Well done factory building game, like Factorio, shapez, or Infinifactory, focused on optimization: throughput, power consumption, surface area. Not as clever as Infinifactory, I didn’t feel that it is puzzly enough in the demo levels. Still, it’s quite well done, with narrated guided tutorials, decent UI, zachlike features.
QuantumPulse 2A
Write very simple programs running on parallel chips, very similar to TIS-100, but with an even simpler instruction set, and instead of fixed connections between nodes, they all broadcast on common channels. Decent zachlike with all the needed stuff, multiple program slots, debugging, histograms and leaderboards.
Replicube
Write the shortest or fastest LUA code to color a 3D cube of voxels to match the target image. Not quite a game as it is a pure code optimization challenge. Recommended if you want to learn a bit of code through art, or if you want to show off your code optimization skills.
ZAVOD
On a pre-built factory with plenty of conveyor belts taking shapes from place to place, and robot claws moving pieces from one belt to another, you’re tasked with deciding which way these claws are facing - moving pieces from left to right or from right to left - in order to have the pieces reach a certain spot. Sounds simple, but by the end of the demo it’s quite complicated, with lots of belts, pieces of different shapes, plenty of filters in the way, many robots to orient, plus multiple targets to reach. Basic implementation, but the game seems good.
More Sokobans and other grid-based puzzles
Bloxpath
Inspired by Bloxorz, this block tumbling game enhances the formula with weird shapes, asymmetrical multiagents, walls, and other mechanics, in a very nice implementation.
Enlightening
Sokoban with Roombas. Instead of moving in the direction you’re pressing, the robots move forward relative to the direction they’re facing, and left/right just mean rotate counter/clockwise. The controls take a while to get used to, and the first puzzles are quite trivial, but it gets interesting when you can control multiple robots, each moving their own way.
Inconceivable Rat Endeavour
In a hexagonal grid, rotate rings of things, trying to get the rat to the good cheese, or the cheese to the rat. Walls prevent you from just going straight to the cheese, you must find a path around them. Then more dangers and items are added, moldy cheese that makes you sick, crocodiles that eat you if you get close, locks and keys, weapons. Really nice, and a quite unique game.
Play Twice
Interesting idea, you have to solve the same level twice. Each solve requires you to move an avatar to a target point, but the second time you continue from the state the level was left in at the end of the previous solve, so the first time around you don’t just focus on getting the avatar to the end, but also on setting up the level for the second solve. Just 4 levels in the demo, as a proof of concept, and quite basic QoL features, but it’s something I’d definitely like to play when it’s ready.
Pushmania
Box-pushing game with two brothers you can independently control, including having both of them grab a box and carry it through narrow paths. Lots of mechanics, including blocks you cannot push but can destroy with dynamite, pushing crates even outside the normal level to make a path around the level, crates you can turn into rafts, and many others. The levels get very challenging, and while there is both a move counter and a timer, I haven’t seen them used for anything yet, they’ll probably be used for leaderboards in the full release.
Secret Agent Puzzle
Find a path to the exit on top of fragile tiles and lots of traps you must disable. Nice theme, you’re a secret agent infiltrating an evil lair. Or at least you will be in the full game, this is just the training area. The nice animations make it a bit too slow for my taste, and the puzzles are mostly trivial in the demo, but the game has potential.
Shrink Rooms
Sokoban/pathfinder in ever-shrinking rooms. Every room has its sequence of walls moving in, and you must plan a path to the exit taking the wall movement into account. Sometimes they push a box in your way, sometimes they destroy the exit if you're not quick enough, sometimes they just crush you, but many times the walls can actually be helpful. Tight puzzles with good mechanics, mostly easy but also lots of optional advanced levels.
Snakeloop
Grow and shrink a snake until it can form a loop, a nice variant of the classic Snake game, with plenty of new mechanics: single use grow and shrink tokens, infinite use grow and shrink tokens, multiagent puzzles, and more mechanics are planned for the full game. The levels can get challenging, especially if you’re trying to solve them in optimal moves to get the stars. I don’t like that it doesn’t say what the optimal number of moves is.
Telealiens
Sokoban, but instead of manually moving boxes, a group of aliens use telekinesis to push them away. You must carefully plan the route that boxes can take, sometimes even pushing the aliens themselves into better positions. The implementation is quite basic, but the puzzles are decent enough for a short demo.
TERASLIDE
Sliding pathfinding game on a hexagonal grid with multiple goals in each level, like max number of moves, collect all flowers, don’t turn clockwise, don’t move to the left. Decent levels, interesting mechanics, nice graphics, seems well polished.
Tombs of Myra
Wasps, rats, goblins, warlocks and other creatures are chasing you through the catacombs. Each enemy type has its own movement. Wasps first try to move vertically to your position, while rats first move horizontally, and if they can’t move directly closer, they’ll get stuck. Goblins and leeches move two spaces at once. Warlocks and blobs can always follow the shortest path to you, you can't trick them. Use carnivorous plants, swords, faster boots, portals, keys and other mechanics to stay ahead and escape. Quite a big demo with lots of good levels.
Treasure ‘n Trio
Solve increasingly difficult Sokoban characters with three very different characters: one can push boxes and kill enemies, one can walk through deadly spikes, and one can teleport people. An interesting game idea, and challenging levels, with just a small issue: you don't push objects, but kick them, with the effect that moving an object requires twice as many keypresses as it should.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Do No Harm
You're a doctor in the late 19th century, who has just arrived in a small, remote town. You have a few quasi-medical things at your disposal, and you must try to find the right medicine for each patient. Other than patients, you get visits from strange people, bizarre apparitions, enemies and allies, new gadgets, new medicine, more tools and more instructions. Oh, and you must also ration your medicine, be speedy since time passes when you're treating a patient, manage your money, your sanity and your reputation, and try not to kill too many patients. A nice take on the Papers Please genre, if you don't mind the Lovecraftian monsters that show up from time to time, but I do feel that the game throws too many things at you too quickly. Maybe that's just in the demo, trying to showcase all the things as quickly as possible, we’ll see.
Ginger
This is one of the most unique games I’ve tried. What you get is a dictionary of a made up language. What you can do is try to speak its words, and try to translate it. You control a mouth, the position of the tongue and the shape of the lips, and then make sounds. Combine these sounds to say the words in the dictionary. The more words you can pronounce, the more of the game opens up, offering starting points for actually understanding the words.
Lingo 2
First person impossible geometry maze exploration, with very cryptic word puzzles along the way. Very confusing (in a good way), takes a little while to figure out what’s going on, but seems good so far.
Schematic Void
Sequel to Schematic, a small game from a few years ago. While the previous Schematic game was mostly a logic/deduction puzzle with separate levels, this sequel leans more into out-of-the-box meta puzzling, with funny things to do like zooming into tiny secrets, moving pieces from one level to another, finding secret ways to actually unlock the next level, etc. Fun!
非常迷 Variable Puzzle
The goal is to activate a certain number of dots by moving over them, but how you do that varies from level to level. You’re not told what to do, and new mechanics keep getting added without any explanation, so keep experimenting. There are some troll levels, some precision movement levels, but most levels in the demo are quite easy. Not a spectacular game, but distinct and good enough for a change.
And the rest!
Box #341
Dye each of your four sides a color to alter your behavior: red makes you jump higher, yellow makes you move faster, white makes you stick to walls. Good puzzles, good mechanics, seems like a good game!
ELISSA: Body in the bedroom
Looks like a classic detective story, a body in an apparent suicide in a room locked from the inside, look for clues, talk to witnesses. Nice pencil drawings for the art style, point&click interface for looking at things, notebook with collected clues, choose between several options to proceed. Could use a highlight button to see what you can interact with. The demo doesn’t go deep enough to figure out if the story is good or not, but the vibes are good.
Noah's Dilemma
Collect animals and smartly arrange them on your ship to maximize your Sailing Power, then also find the optimal arrangement when fighting battles. Despite the name, this is not a religious game at all, but a very mathematical deckbuilder. You must read each animal’s description carefully, then arrange them on the ship in the ideal order. The presentation isn’t great, the mechanics aren’t described clearly enough, but the game has potential.
Overencumbered In Another World
Place objects in a backpack in a post-apocalyptic world, an almost standard block puzzle like Tidy Backpack or Save Room. What makes it special is that you can interact with some objects. Sometimes you get spare bullets which you can put in magazines, and the mags in guns. You get radioactive food, energy syringes, and anti-rad medicine you can consume to boost your health and lower your radioactivity. The goal isn’t to just pack everything in the backpack, but also to have max health and 0 rads, and the order in which you consume things matters. A bit tedious when you have to put 20 bullets one by one in their respective guns, but overall a more interesting block puzzle.
Piece by Piece
Combine fragments of a level like jigsaw pieces to guide your avatar across the level, collect a golden trinket, and reach the door. Feels a lot like The Pedestrian or Path of Ra, but a lot more interactive since you’re responsible for platforming as well, and you can readjust the pieces even while falling or jumping.
Quadphos
A grid-based rule deduction logic puzzle like Minesweeper. The puzzles consist of a grid and several numerical clues. Your goal is to light up the cells to satisfy all the clues. There are symbols next to the numbers that represent the certain rules for each clue. The game doesn't explain these rules, so you will need to deduce them. Reminds me of 14MV a lot.
Spacecaps
Another difficult game from Artless (14MV, A=B, Understand). Push crates in space, with no gravity, so orienting yourself is a real challenge. Like all Artless games, it looks very barebones, but the levels are super challenging.
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