Steam Next Fest 2025

The first Steam Next Fest of 2025 had a few games that caught my eye, so I thought I’d write a little about each of them here.

The King is Watching is a fun little mix of tower defence and settlement management with a rogue-like twist. Your goal is to keep your castle standing for as many weeks as you can, as every week brings with it a new wave of enemies. You’ll construct various buildings within the walls of your castle to generate resources and train the soldiers you’ll need to defeat the enemy waves.

The castle has a limited number of building plots so you’ll need to chop and change depending upon what you need. But all buildings are only ‘active’ when you – the King – are ‘watching’ them and your gaze only extends (initially) to a handful of plots.

You can increase the range of your gaze, just as you can upgrade the limit of your soldiers but, as you can probably guess, doing so requires an increasing number of resources for each upgrade tier, and with waves of enemies attacking your castle regularly, the game becomes a balancing act between production and defence.

The rogue-like aspect is related not only to the randomised enemy waves, but the rewards you can receive and the upgrades you can unlock. And each new ‘run’ resets everything, although there is a selection of permanent modifiers you can unlock to give you an edge on future runs.

The King is Watching is a visually charming little game. Simple and repetitive, but fun. If the price is right, I can see this doing very well.

Tempest Rising is an RTS game that feels like someone really wanted to make a Command & Conquer sequel but couldn’t get the licence, so they decided to make it anyway and just change the names. There are two faction campaigns to play – the GDF (not to be confused with GDI) and the Tempest Dynasty (not to be confused with NOD).

The demo offered a couple of campaign missions for both factions and . . . yeah, this is a new Command & Conquer in all but name. There’s no live-action mission briefings, but you do get similar in-engine briefings instead. Once you’re in a mission, you’ll build a base and harvest Tempest (not to be confused with Tiberian) and recruit units to destroy the enemy and complete your objectives.

Your building types (power plant, barracks, refinery, silo etc) are exactly what you expect if you’ve played C&C and so are most of the unit types. I’m not saying Tempest Rising doesn’t have any new ideas of its own, and there are obviously aspects to the game that this demo doesn’t reveal such as an unannounced third faction – although it looks like that will only be playable in skirmish and I feel like it’s going to be something akin to the Scrin from C&C 3.

But . . . yeah, it’s unashamedly C&C in all but name. And I’m pleased to say, this demo was pretty fun to play. I’m not totally sold on the setting, perhaps because it does feel a little too much like off-brand C&C rather than something new. But it plays well, perhaps a little too fiddly at times with so many different unit abilities – but that’s something you learn as you go.

The missions were fun, with main and optional objectives, and there’s a neat campaign upgrade system that enhances your faction and units between missions. The demo even came with a few skirmish maps which was nice. I’m not totally sold on picking this up at release, but it’s something I’ll certainly keep my eye on.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a side-scrolling zombie survival game set in 1980s Texas. It is, essentially, This War of Mine with zombies – and that’s a pretty neat idea. I reviewed This War of Mine back in 2015 and I wasn’t really a fan, but it’s a game I’d like to try again some day to see how the ‘Final Cut’ edition stacks up.

Given how I disliked quite a few aspects of This War of Mine, I wasn’t sure how much I’d like Into the Dead. But whilst the basic gameplay structure is more or less the same, Into the Dead does do and allow you to do things a little differently and in ways that appeal more to me.

For a start, you’re not locked to a single shelter but can (and it appears must) relocate your survivors to new shelters in order to stay one step ahead of the zombie horde. You also assign tasks to each survivor during the day/night phases but aren’t forced to tediously watch or wait for said tasks to be completed.

You also have the option to leave your shelter and scavenge during the day or night. And controlling your survivors is a little more ‘hands on’ as you sneak, sprint, vault and fight your way through various locations. Like This War of Mine, your survivors have their own unique skills, needs and quirks and you’ll be splitting your time between scavenging for supplies, keeping your people healthy and/or sane, and improving your shelter.

But unlike This War of Mine, you’re not just passively waiting around for a (randomised) ceasefire, you’re actively seeking out clues that will let you prepare a plan for your survivors to escape the city. It’s not super impressive visually, but it looks decent enough. It’s going to release in Early Access first, so I’ll keep an eye on it and see how it shapes up.