Three more gems to discover this Steam Next Fest

We’re continuing to dig through Steam Next Fest, which is one of the best place to find upcoming games and sample a huge variety of demos. This year is a little tougher, due to the wave of AI slop that is allowed to co-exist alongside human made work. For every “cozy” match-3 job simulator with gormlessly grinning genAI characters in the thumbnail and horny anime sex game, there are tons of carefully crafted and intentionally designed games that deserve more spotlight.

We’ve been rounding up some of these games, but there are still more that deserve a shout. Here are three of the most impressive games I’ve sampled so far from Steam Next Fest’s summer 2026 run.

Hae Stack

Hae Stack is a game that’s very silly on the surface, but the more you play, the more parallels to real life you may notice. This is fully intentional; Hae Stack is about the chilling effects of corporate surveillance. We play as someone who really needs a job, and so we take up a role as Data Analytics Technical Associate at HAE Technologies, one of the world’s most successful geolocation data brokers.

After the opening legal text about the game being a work of fiction and any resemblance to the real world being fully coincidential, there’s a note that made me pause. “That being said, invasive surveillance technology is real, and is significantly more powerful than what is depicted here. For more information, see the “research” section of the main menu.

Alarming! But hey, a job is a job, and when I log onto the company chat app, everyone is very nice. There’s even a pets channel, with a stretching corgi and cute cats! Something I really appreciate is that Hae Stack gives me room to explore my virtual workspace instead of funneling me right into the main thrust of the game. It makes the corporate mundanity feel more real.

I can take the time to ask my new trainer things, even if it gets awkward. When I ask her what she thinks of the company’s CEO, she remarks “Wow you drill right in.” and I can almost sense her making a note in my personnel file before she types “Seems like a smart guy, and I’m happy to have a job!”

Then, she tasks me with looking up a person in the system, a random target for a practice task. I watch him grab a bagel, head to Trader Joe’s and Sam’s Club, and go home. Once he arrives at his house, I mark it at his location in the system. Strange, but it’s just a practice task, right? Then, I get my second task. A small business owner is asking us to hunt down two of her customers’ addresses. Uh oh. It’s such a good way to hide creeping dread beneath smooth corporate aesthetics, and as Jeff has mentioned a thousand times in his Cyberpunk series, this is very relevant to our current world. Hae Stack is scarier than any horror game I’ve sampled this Next Fest. It currently does not have a release date.

Nocturne

As a small or solo developer, spending years on your wildly ambitious game is a massive gamble. Sometimes, these projects pay off, and you’re rewarded with a Cuphead, an Undertale, or a Fear and Hunger. It’s more common for the project to quietly vanish amongst the firehose of new game releases, finding only a small community or perhaps no player base at all. 

Nocturne is one of these games. Created by Pracy Studios, a tiny studio led by a developer who has been working on this title for a decade. It’s a top-down RPG with everything you’d expect from the genre, but what’s really interesting is the combat system. Instead of going into a turn-based battle, or parrying enemy attacks, we’re playing Guitar Hero now.

This is a rhythm based game with four tracks. Enemy attacks are launched along those tracks, and you have to hit the prompt in time. There are 101 tracks in the game that you’ll encounter over the course of the ten hour campaign, along with an arcade mode that lets you just focus on the music battles. Perhaps most impressively, the boss fights are elevated with orchestral music, recorded live by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra.

So, if you like rhythm games, that’s already really appealing. There are also four difficulties, thankfully, so even the rhythmically-challenged like me can get into the game. That’s one prong of Nocturne’s appeal; the other one is the story and world the campaign takes place in. You play as Karma, a young boy who awakes in the afterlife. You’re dead, and your consciousness has been uploaded to a digital garden of sorts. 

After awakening in the Welcome Center and gaining your bearings, you wander to the lobby. There's an administrative error, so you go for a quick walk to clear your head, and run into a little boy. The kid insists that the Welcome Center you just came from has been in ruins for a thousand years. He’s right, and worse yet, it’s surrounded by monsters.

Based off my time with the demo, Nocturne is fascinating, and I’m curious to see how the whole story unfolds. Unless Pracy Studios fumbles the ball somehow in the full game, I think this absolutely has the juice to become another indie classic. Nocturne is set to release on Sept. 24, 2026.

Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?!

Truck-kun is Supporting Me From Another World?! begins with Carissa Ward, corporate ladder climber, celebrating a huge milestone in her career. She celebrates, ecstatic, and crosses the street where she is promptly hit by a car and murdered. Before I can dwell on whether this is a metaphor, perhaps for the futility of prioritizing corporate interests, I learn that Carissa is still alive, in a sense.

The truck, you see, is magic. And it isekai’d Carissa into a fantasy world where she’s a pink-haired paladin. For those who are unaware, isekai is a fantasy subgenre where the protagonist is pulled from their home into a new, unfamiliar world. Think Inuyasha, the ‘80s Dungeons and Dragons, or Sword Art Online. 

I’m not an anime person; I’ve been watching The Apothecary Diaries with a friend, and I’ve seen a few other series, but I’m not really in on the tropes. I’m just kind of taking developer Strange Scaffold at their word that getting hit by a truck and teleported into a fantasy world is a thing big enough to reference. 

That’s okay, though, because the game is really fun even if you don’t fully get the joke. Carissa yells at me, in my superpowered truck, to keep hitting people and property so they are also teleported into the world, and she can defeat them to gain levels. Her goal is to get so strong and powerful in her alternate reality that she can return home and start her new job as planned on Monday.

All it takes is a liberal amount of murder and property destruction. It’s okay — Carissa assures us the cops take minutes to show up, especially in a low-income area, so we can go hog wild. And I do. I plow through a crowd of construction workers, drift through some sunbathing citizens and send their big umbrellas and comfy chairs flying, and launch off a ramp through a series of golden rings. It’s good, silly fun, and set to release on July 29, 2026.