Steam Next Fest runs October 19–26, but these five demos are already live or dropping this week, and they’re worth your time now.

Steam Next Fest is still a couple weeks out, but a handful of standout indie demos have already landed, or are about to. From a fully simulated superhero sandbox to a worm-farming idle game, here are five worth downloading before the festival crowd arrives.

MOLTYN: A Superhero Sandbox Where Physics Actually Matters

Solo developer Andrew Hingston built a world where lasers, gravity, water, lava, storms, freezing and even a nuke all behave as real, simulated forces rather than scripted effects. That means you can flood a city, freeze the sea and throw a chunk of it, or dig underneath a structure until it physically collapses. The free demo goes live October 6 at 6am Pacific / 2pm BST, and includes five story missions, ranging from a harbor rescue to a city-sized kaiju fight and a job on the Moon, plus two sandbox worlds with a built-in editor. It runs on Steam Deck, and Early Access follows on November 12 for $9.99.

🎮 Want to go deep on physics-based games? Check out more Steam Deck-compatible sandbox titles to fill the wait until MOLTYN’s Early Access launch.

Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game: Corporate Horror, Deckbuilder Style

Giant Light Studios’ deckbuilder mixes Minesweeper-style deduction with push-your-luck roguelike play, all under the smiling, unsettling gaze of a puppet boss. You flip cards, dodge dangerous JERRY cards, and try to hit quota before anything goes wrong. The demo, out today and published by Behaviour Interactive and Gambit Digital, adds a new SHARES system, a revamped Strategy selection, and a first look at Walkabout mode, which lets you stand up from the table and explore the office itself.

Blood Covenant: A Co-op Horror Job Sim With a Night Shift From Hell

Alberta-based studio DelaJea Press makes its debut with a 1–4 player co-op horror job sim that puts you to work as a hazmat cleaner on the night shift of an abandoned psychiatric hospital. The job is simple on paper, scrub blood, seal rooms, bag samples, until the doors lock and something wakes up. Tools make noise, and so does your mic, meaning the monsters can hear you too. A solo demo is already free on itch.io, with the co-op demo landing on Steam October 8.

🎧 Playing co-op horror with friends? A noise-canceling headset might actually matter here, since Blood Covenant’s monsters react to real mic sound.

Worm Capitalist: Turning Worm Poop Into Profit

Solo developer Tikotey, based in Kyrgyzstan, debuts with an incremental game built entirely around feeding worms and converting what comes out the other end into profit. You buy food and objects for your worms to devour pixel by pixel, automate production, climb a skill tree, and reset colonies for permanent bonuses. It even has Twitch integration for streamers. The demo is out now, published by Ivy Juice, with a full Windows launch planned for 2026.

Scopa Sweep: A Roguelike Built on a Centuries-Old Card Game

Static Fire Games takes Scopa, the traditional Italian card game, and rebuilds it as a roguelike set inside a restaurant. You capture cards from the table, sweep the board to build your multiplier, and reshape each run with patrons, card enhancements and boss twists. The demo runs through Table 3, though progress doesn’t carry over to the full release, so expect to start fresh when the complete game launches.

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