Three macabre picks from this Steam Next Fest
Three demos from Steam Next Fest that deal with the dead
Steam Next Fest offers hundreds of demos, and I've been prancing through the field, arms spread, dabbling in dozens of experiences. I'm a big fan of horror, and the horror-adjacent: the grim, the mysterious, the spooky. Here are three games from this summer's Steam Next Fest that hooked me with the macabre: one where you play a coroner, one where you collect corpses, and one where you become a corpse via murder in an evil hotel.
Death at Fleming Manor
There are few pleasures as simple and timeless as a murder mystery. There’s a certain thrill that comes with pursuing justice, putting together clues, and finding the killer. In Death at Fleming Manor, I step into the shoes of a coroner, investigating both crime scenes and corpses, combing an area for clues that might tell us how some poor, unfortunate soul met their end. It’s 1959, so I don’t have any advanced technology — just good old fashioned sleuthing skills and a heavy tome of medical technology.
Here’s how that looks in practice: I go to the crime scene, and I find clues: a student’s book with their name scrawled on the side, a letter from a disappointed father, a discarded wallet. More information can be gleaned from blood tests and the autopsy table. Using a combination of on-scene investigation and medical knowledge, I fill out my official coroner forms, filling in blank fields with either clues from the field or knowledge from my medical tomes.
If Death at Fleming Manor has a flaw, it’s that everything is a little too carefully signposted. Clues are marked with sparkles, and once I’m done with an area, it gets a little green checkmark. I can submit incorrect forms as many times as I like, and there’s even a little tool to highlight mistakes. It’s a bit of a shame if the final release will allow the player to brute force their way through these intricate little mysteries, but this is a demo, so developer Superthumb will likely iron out the difficulty for the final release.
The demo did its job — hooking me on its investigation mechanics and getting me interested in the tale unfolding around Fleming Manor. The game should be available on Steam some time in 2026.
Crow’s Requiem
A horrible plague has descended upon humanity, the government has long enacted martial law, and things seem pretty bad. But I got one thing going for me: I just got a new job! I’m the body collector, also known as a Crow. It may sound pretty bad to traffic in corpses, but on the other hand, I’m basically guaranteed job security.
Crow’s Requiem is a narrative management game where I’m tasked with not only cleaning out corpses, but dealing with things like keeping gas in my truck, infection out of my body, and maintaining good relationships with the various factions around the city. I wouldn’t call it quite post-apocalypse, it’s post-apocalypish. We’re in the boring, dreary spiral at the end of an apocalypse, where there are anarchists with rifles co-existing with religious communes for desperate new cults ... but there’s still a functional hospital, and a drinking hole to drown my woes.
This plays out in a combination of sequences. Dialogue and worldbuilding is accomplished through a visual novel, while the nuts and bolts of my job is done with a map UI and some minigames. The visual novel stuff is very stark and stylish, with heavy, scribbly lines adding an air of decay to everything.
The rest of the game is much harder to parse. I have to admit, I have no idea what I was meant to do with the minigames. After clicking enough, things would flash green and allow me to proceed, so I guess I did OK. During one route, I encounter strange radio chatter, and the text is difficult to read in a way that seems more like an accessibility issue than an exciting mystery.
Crow’s Requiem is clearly one of the games where you make tough narrative choices and deal with the consequences, and while the demo can’t quite show that off, it does make for a compelling introduction to its — as developer Ex Ignorantia calls it — pandemic punk world. Crow’s Requiem is expected to release before the end of the year.
Phantasma Hotel
Fear and Hunger, a punishingly difficult and hideously grim little RPG maker gem from Miro Haverinen, is a game that has slowly gained traction and fans since its release in 2018 and subsequent sequel Fear and Hunger 2: Termina. Fear and Hunger, along with other indie games like World of Horror and Look Outside, have inspired other developers to use the top-down RPG as a canvas for hideous environments and terrible fates.
Enter Phantasma Hotel, a game about being trapped in an evil Hotel California. You meet a variety of horrible fates, only to awaken on the floor of a filthy bathroom, psychologically scarred but a little wiser for the experience.
The artwork does a lot to carry this creepy concept. While exploration happens with a top-down view, encounters happen in the first person, and whether you’re meeting with another survivor or some ominous creature, the vibes are immaculate. Everything is drawn in this exaggerated, slightly uncanny manner. You can fight back against the monsters, and there’s something charming and kind of funny about the animation on these attacks.
Phantasma Hotel’s demo is just a taste of the torment the final game, which is set to release some time in 2026, will offer — but it definitely has me interested in the final release. With multiple protagonists and a roguelike structure, I think there’ll be a lot to dig into, and the demo provides an appetizing teaser for the horrors on display.
