I played 10 free Steam demos this week: here are the 5 games that made it onto my wishlist

After mainlining Dune: Awakening (and nothing but Dune: Awakening) for about a month, I’m currently decompressing by playing just about every other game that comes across my desk. Since I didn’t get a chance to dive into Next Fest because it took place during the June of Dune, I’m busying myself with free demos on Steam, the best way to sample a ton of different games without spending a dime.

If you’re looking to add some games to your Steam wishlist, or maybe just want to try a bunch of cool demos over the weekend, below you’ll find a quick list of what I’ve been playing. And even though not every demo I played made it to my wishlist, that doesn’t mean I didn’t like them! Everything on this list is worth taking a look at.

Here are the 10 free Steam demos I played this week (plus some emoji descriptions to sum them up), starting with the five I added to my Steam wishlist.

🚀🛰️🪐 Star Birds

Kurzgesagt, maker of awesome animated science videos, teamed up with Toukana Interactive, maker of chill citybuilder Dorfromantik. In other words: can I add Star Birds to my wishlist twice? I had a great time in the demo exploring and exploiting asteroids, setting up factories and unlocking new tech, managing resources and supply lines—it’s delightful, and it looks for all the world like one of those great Kurzgesagt YouTube videos, only in game form.

🆒🆕🍰 Watchword

I’ll try anything with a hint of Balatro, but while “anagram roguelike” Watchword has some Balatro-like elements it is firmly doing its own thing—and it lowkey rocks. Assemble connecting words on a grid, use magic books to tweak the rules, buy artifacts to enhance letter tiles, and occasionally bribe a boss to look the other way by giving them cheesecake. I played one game and I was hooked, and I’ll be playing again as soon as I finish writing this. If you like word games, download this demo immediately.

🏪🍅🥫 Discounty

I haven’t played a Stardew-like in a while, but the short Discounty demo landed it on my wishlist immediately. Instead of a farm you’re running a discount grocery store (take that, Pierre), and what at first seems to be the sort of charming little town typical of life sims gives way to some unusual and downright seedy goings-on. Even your sweet-as-pie Aunt seems to have a beef with one of the locals. Not only do I want to manage my little shop, I want to find out what the heck is the deal in this unsettling little town.

🐃🐃🐃 Herdling 🚶‍♀️

Herding big shaggy monsters across a countryside seems like it’d be a major departure from the developer of the boat-centric Far games, but in Herdling developer Okomotive has once again crafted a beautifully detailed world with a haunting atmosphere that’s a pleasure to explore. I love the minimal on-screen instructions—you pretty much figure everything out for yourself—and I already feel protective of my small herd of critters.

💀🕷️🐍 Ball X Pit

I like it when a developer crams a handful of ideas together in an unusual way, so why not mash up Vampire Survivors and Super Breakout? Ball X Pit even has a bit of base-building and farming in it, somehow. You basically march through an oncoming tide of monsters while flinging ricocheting balls at them, collecting upgrades, powerups, and minions along the way, and when you’re finally felled you work on your base for a bit before hitting the dungeon again. Definitely a “one more run” kinda game.

Those are my wishlist picks: so, what about the other five demos? Even though these games didn’t make it onto my list, they’re still worth checking out:

🧟 Quarantine Zone: The Last Check: A zombie apocalypse management sim, which I wrote about earlier this week. I had a decent time scanning survivors for signs of zombie plague, but the base management stuff was a bit drab.

🕵️‍♀️ City of Voices: One of the devs behind The Rise of The Golden Idol has made an Idol-alike, and if you love examining scenes and puzzling together what happened, you should give it a look. I’m just more interested in the gruesome and grisly murders from the Idol games than the more family-friendly adventure here.

🐭 Morsels: I utterly love the vibes of this charmingly grotesque creature-collecting roguelite, but found it a bit tough to tell what was going on at times, even on a big monitor, due to the murky color palette and some of the effects. Not saying I won’t try it again at launch.

🐟 Scale the Depths: A casual fishing game where you chase fish around with your hook, scale ’em and chop ’em, then feed ’em to hungry customers like seals and mermaids. It’s plenty fun, I just like a shade more complexity in my fishing games.

🤺 Half Sword: It’s hilarious to lurch around hacking off enemy limbs in this physics-based medieval brawler, but this is the kind of game I’d rather watch streamers play than play myself.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.