Steam Next Fest begins on June 15 and runs through June 22, which means the internet is about to become very bad at choosing what to play. That is not a complaint. It is one of the better problems to have. A week of demos is still a strange, generous thing: unfinished games, anxious developers, wishlists opening in other tabs, half an hour with something that may not exist in its final form for another year.
I like Next Fest because it brings the medium back down to size. The rest of June has been loud, as June usually is. Summer Game Fest filled the timeline with trailers. Wholesome Direct did its kinder, softer counterprogramming. YouTube is already full of "play these demos first" videos, which are useful and also slightly impossible, because the whole point is that nobody can play everything.
So maybe the better question is not what you should play first. It is how to move through the week without turning it into a chore.
The demo week problem
Demos used to feel simple. A disc in a magazine. A slice of a PlayStation game. A weird PC download you found because somebody on a forum swore it was worth trying. The limits were obvious. You played what you had.
Steam Next Fest has the opposite problem. It gives you abundance, then asks you to have taste under pressure. Hundreds of demos appear at once. Some are tiny. Some are almost complete. Some are rough in a charming way, and some are rough in a way that tells you the final game may need more time. A few become the thing everyone talks about. Many disappear quietly after a week, leaving only a wishlist notification months later when you have forgotten why you clicked it.
That pressure can make people weird. You start sampling games like you are doing inventory. Ten minutes here, six minutes there, a half-built spreadsheet in your head. Before long, you are not really playing. You are processing.
I have done this too. I have installed a dozen demos, opened the first one while tired, bounced off it after a slow tutorial, then felt guilty about the other eleven. That is a ridiculous emotional journey for free previews of videogames, but it happens because games do not arrive as neutral objects anymore. They arrive as queues.
Start with a mood, not a ranking
The useful move is to decide what kind of week you want before the list starts shouting at you.
If you want surprise, avoid the giant recommendation threads for the first day and pick by instinct. Bad capsule art, strange title, genre you barely touch. Give yourself permission to be wrong quickly. If you want comfort, go straight to the cozy, strategy, puzzle, or horror lane you already know you like. If you want to help small developers, play the demos with fewer wishlists and leave useful feedback where they ask for it.
None of these is the correct way. They just produce different weeks.
The worst version of Next Fest is the version where you try to catch the conversation instead of your own curiosity. That does not mean ignore what people are excited about. The communal part is half the fun. But there is a difference between hearing, "this little tactics thing surprised me," and treating every video roundup as homework.
A demo does not have to earn a permanent place in your life. It can simply be a twenty-minute mood. You can enjoy the texture of a combat system, admire one menu transition, laugh at a strange voice line, and uninstall it. That still counts. In some ways it may be the cleanest kind of play: no obligation, no completion percentage, no need to turn the experience into a verdict.
Keep notes before memory edits them
The funny thing about demo weeks is how quickly they blur. On Monday you are convinced you will remember the name of the surreal fishing RPG with the excellent inventory screen. By Thursday, it has become "that fish one, maybe with moons?" By the time the full game launches, the feeling is gone and all you have left is a wishlist entry with no context.
This is where I think a gaming journal earns its keep. Not as productivity software. Not as a demand that every session become a review. Just as a place to catch the small reactions before they dissolve.
Write down one sentence after a demo. Not a proper critique. Something more honest: "movement felt heavy but the music got me," or "great idea, too much tutorial," or "play this again when you are less tired." Those notes are often more useful than a score, because they preserve the conditions around the play. Sometimes the game was not wrong for you. Sometimes you were just hungry, distracted, or trying to squeeze art into a ten-minute gap between chores.
Perthro is built around that slower kind of memory. You can track what you are playing, what you plan to play, and what you have shelved. You can rate games if a rating helps, write as much or as little as you want, and keep a backlog or wishlist with a "next up" view. For a week like Next Fest, I would use it less like a scoreboard and more like a little field notebook.
The note matters because future you is not as reliable as present you thinks. Future you will remember the big trailer, the obvious hit, the game everyone clipped on social media. Future you will not remember the tiny demo that had one room, one idea, and one moment that made you sit forward.
Demos are not promises
There is another trap in demo week: treating a demo like a contract. You play twenty minutes and decide the game is brilliant, broken, doomed, saved, overhyped, underrated. Sometimes that instinct is right. Often it is just the first chemical reaction between you and an unfinished thing.
A demo is allowed to be awkward. It is allowed to show too much tutorial because the developer is terrified you will miss the point. It is allowed to have pacing problems that vanish in the full game, or a perfect opening that the full game never quite matches. The slice is real, but it is still a slice.
That does not mean players owe developers endless patience. If the demo feels bad, it feels bad. Time is time. But the healthiest way to play these things is with soft conclusions. "I want to see more." "Probably not for me." "Interesting, but not this week." Those are better than pretending we can render final judgment on a game that is still finding its shape.
This matters even more for indies, where a demo can become a public audition. A huge studio can survive a confused first impression. A tiny team may have one shot to persuade someone to wishlist, follow, or at least remember the name. That makes honest feedback useful and drive-by certainty less useful. If something confused you, say what confused you. If something delighted you, say that too. Developers can work with specifics. They cannot do much with "mid."
Make a small list and let the rest go
My plan for Next Fest is boring, which is probably why it works. Pick five demos before the event starts. Leave room for three surprises. Stop there unless I am having a weirdly open week.
That is the one list I think is worth making. Not a definitive ranking. Not a spreadsheet of everything interesting. Just a small shelf. A handful of games you genuinely want to meet.
Perthro's custom lists are good for this sort of thing because they do not need to be grand. "Next Fest June 2026" is enough. Drop the games in, reorder them when your mood changes, and move the ones that stick into your wishlist or backlog later. The list is not there to punish you for what you did not play. It is there to keep the week from becoming mist.
There is a nice humility in admitting you will miss things. You will. Everyone will. The most beloved demo of the week might pass you by because you spent the evening with a strange little city builder that nobody else noticed. That is not failure. That is taste doing its actual job.
The games industry loves moments of total attention. Showcase week, awards week, launch week, demo week. Everything points at the same screen and asks us to look now. But play has never really worked that way. Play is private before it is public. It depends on weather, mood, energy, patience, and whatever else happened that day.
So when Next Fest opens on Monday, I hope you find at least one demo that breaks through the noise. Not necessarily the best one. Not necessarily the one that ends up on every roundup. Just one that feels like it found you at the right time.
Write that one down.