Here's some of the most-played demos during Steam Next Fest - February 2026 edition

By Liam Dawe - 1 Mar 2026 at 6:41 pm UTC

With Steam Next Fest - February 2026 nearly over, Valve recently revealed some of the most popular choices amongst gamers. The event is still ongoing, and you have until March 2nd at 10AM Pacific / 6PM UTC. A lot of games will remove their preview demos, but plenty will also be keeping them up for a while longer.

Valve sent over a short list on February 27th to mark the half-way point of what has been the most popular during the event by then. Here's what they said people were clicking on:

Marathon
Unfortunately - unplayable on Linux / SteamOS due to the anti-cheat. Not surprising from Bungie, since they refuse to allow Linux platforms on Destiny 2.

Burglin' Gnomes

Windrose

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

Far Far West

Outbound

John Carpenter's Toxic Commando

Wanderburg

Fate Trigger

Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite

What have been your most played demos during the event? Mine was easily Wanderburg. I fell in love with the modular moving castle combat idea instantly.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Listicle, Misc, Round-up, Steam, Valve

2 Likes

About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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2 comments

such 2 hours ago

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Vampire Crawlers is pure evil.

That is all.

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Nezchan 36 minutes ago

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That's funny. I played a whole bunch of demos over a few days, and *none* of them were on the top played list. Apparently my tastes are non-standard.

My list:

Approximately Up (meh)
Besmirch (interesting)
Burden Street Station (brilliant!)
Clicky Islands (pretty good)
Collector's Cove (not my style)
Dungeons of DUSK (slow pacing and navigation sucks)
Dungeon Sweeper (meh)
Garden Ink (pretty good)
Highreach (crashed)
Helix: Descent N Ascent (very good)
Hozy (fun)
Hypnos (confusing for no good reason)
Looking for Fael (very good)
Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth (very good)
Map Map - A Game About Maps (meh)
Nightfall Café (pretty decent)
Pluto (obtuse, didn't like it)
Shanty Town (very good)
Truckful (didn't recognize my controller)

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