Steam Spring Next Fest 2026 (Part 1/2)

First up was Shift at Midnight which is a fun twist on the ‘retail simulator’ genre. You can play solo – and to be fair, it’s quite fun solo too – or with up to three friends. You work the night shift at a gas station and must keep things clean, tidy and restocked as you serve your customers. So far, so much like the other retail simulators we’ve seen released over the last few years.

The twist here is that not all of your customers are human and you must inspect and question each of them to decide if they’re actually a doppelgänger. If you think they are, you can pull out a gun and shoot them. If not, you can let them pay and leave safely. There’s a daily store quota to reach, so you can’t shoot everyone just to be safe, and there’s no immediate penalty to letting a suspected doppelgänger walk out of the station.

But if you do let one or more doppelgängers leave they’ll return in their monstrous form at the end of your shift and attempt to murder you and your friends. You get a warning and a little time to prepare various traps and barricades to slow and hurt the creatures with the goal of driving them away. It’s a simple, quirky little game that will be more randomised in the full release, but this demo only had three scripted shifts to try. I played it through with a friend and we certainly had fun with it. It’s hard to say what kind of long term replay value it will have, but if appropriately priced, I can see this doing quite well.

The demo for Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! gave me the impression of a fun, if somewhat limited, first person shooter in which you get to join the Mobile Infantry and fight an endless horde of bugs. This demo featured a single mission on a fairly large map with multiple objectives, each of which you can approach in your own order. The objectives range from defending a base, to evacuating civilians, to collecting an arms cache . . . but really they all involve going to a place and killing a hell of a lot of bugs. It’s rather mindless and repetitive but, as I said, also rather fun.

You have access to weapons like your standard assault rifle and shotgun, but there’s also turrets to man and even an exoskeleton to ride. There are also support items you can use to call down deadly area of effect attacks – handy for dealing with a swarm. I played on the default Normal and found it to be way too easy. You get ranked at the end of the mission and difficulty does factor into your score so that’s clearly a way they’re pushing replay value. The visuals are . . . I wouldn’t say bad.

They’ve gone for a very distinct, colourful style that works better in some ways than others. The bugs look great but your fellow humans are essentially just 2D sprites and they just look . . . goofy. Maybe that’s intentional, but I can’t say I cared for it. Whilst the shooting is fairly solid, the movement makes you feel like you’re skating across the map. Not sure I cared for that, either. I do like the effort they’ve put in to capture the spirit of the movie, even giving us cheesy FMV sequences. Overall, not a bad demo but I can’t say I’m quite sold on the game.

Wanderburg is a surprisingly addictive ‘minimalist’ (low budget) roguelike set in a silly medieval world where castles have wheels and can roll around the world ‘consuming’ resources in order to evolve into the most powerful. It’s a bit like ‘Mortal Engines: The Game’. The demo only featured a single map with only a default selection of abilities and equipment. Nevertheless, I played it several times and had quite a bit of fun doing so.

As your little castle trundles around the map and defeats enemies you collect coins that eventually unlock upgrades, new abilities and equipment and eventually level up your castle into a bigger, meaner version. As times goes on, the map throws more and more enemies at you that range from simple groups of archers (that you can roll right on over) to large, hulking fortresses that demolish everything in their path.

Eventually the map throws a ‘Boss’ castle at you and even if you deal with that you will, inevitably, be overwhelmed at which point your castle will be destroyed and you’ll need to start all over again from scratch. You’re scored on the time you survived and the coins you collected. The map in this demo was rather simple, and I’m curious if other maps will be more or less the same just with a different biome.

I’m also curious about possible cosmetic unlocks for your castle. It feels like there’s some fun and engaging ways they could incentivise repeat play here. One to keep an eye on.

Someone once said: ‘What if Jet Set Radio but . . . trains?’ And so we have Denshattack! It takes the exuberant visual and audio style of Jet Set Radio with a dash of Tony Hawk style score attack as you grind, flip, trick and race your way as a . . . train! Yes, as a train! You might think that couldn’t work, but you’d be wrong!

The demo for Denshattack! was super fun to play. There’s a short but welcome tutorial before the game lets you take a crack at two full levels. They’re linear in the sense that your goal is to get from A to B as fast as possible whilst also racking up as high a score as possible, but each also features multiple pathways and optional objectives to complete, giving you a reason to replay.

The game is fast, colourful and I appreciated the unique little moments of each level – such as riding atop a Ferris wheel or escaping a lava pit. The camera remains locked behind you most of the time, but occasionally shifts for cinematic trick moments.

There are different trains to unlock and various cosmetic options to customise your ride. The only thing I had a little trouble with was the trick control system which felt a tad finicky to handle but maybe I just needed more practice. Denshattack! is pure video game – simple concept, executed brilliantly.