Steam Next Fest is back with a new batch of demos, livestreams, and spotlights on several upcoming games from indie developers. And as has become tradition, games from publishing platform indie.io are heavily featured.

There are 13 indie.io games participating, and they’re from a wide range of genres. There’s a card-based city builder (Once Upon a Kingdom), a 2D action platformer based on Mexican folklore (Dark Adelita), and a cozy gardening game where you bring plants back from the dead (Greenhearth Necromancer).

So clearly, there are lots of different gaming experiences on offer. But we decided to focus on four specific titles that you can try for yourself right now, most of which just got new updated demos as part of Steam Next Fest.

Pluto

From a dev team of two co-creators, Pluto sees you play as a less-than-heroic wizard who needs to break out of jail to attend their niece’s birthday party. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a unique spellcasting system where elemental sigils are connected to each of your fingers. Your deck is made up of spells that use different combinations of these sigils, and some spells can share sigils, meaning it’s possible for spells to overlap and combine.

So building your deck isn’t just about stacking the most powerful cards, it’s about experimenting with several different cards and finding ones that synergize well together and let you pull off gradually more complicated interactions. You’ll need them to take out the monstrosities you face as you race against the clock to get out of jail in time. Pluto recently announced it will be fully released on March 9, and it got a brand-new demo as part of Steam Next Fest, which you can download for free here.

Esports Manager 2026

As you could hopefully guess from the name, Esports Manager 2026 is a strategy-sim game where you lead an esports team and control its day-to-day operations. That means managing all facets of the team: talent acquisition, team finances, player morale, tournament performance, brand growth, leadership structure, everything.

You can scout and recruit real-life players, and you’ll need to consider market dynamics to figure out the right time to add them to your team. You’ll design training programs to help them grow, hire a staff to support them, and chat with them to make sure they’re happy and their goals are being met. Then take them into Simulation mode, where you’ll take part in esports tournaments and control your team’s tactics as you try to establish yourself as the team to beat. Esports Manager 2026 also has a brand-new free demo included in Steam Next Fest, which you can download here.

SoulQuest

Inspired by Celtic mythology and Arthurian legends, SoulQuest has you take up the sword of Alys, a woman whose husband’s soul has been taken by the gods. She’s not a fan of that and will hack and slash her way through hordes of divine servants and the gods themselves to get him back.

Combat is fast-paced and has you combine sword attacks, magic, and ultimate abilities to unleash your wrath. It’s a system designed to be easy to pick up and play quickly, but difficult to truly master. You can string certain attacks into jump strikes, allowing you to juggle enemies in the air and pull off long combos. There are also secrets to discover, using basic platforming or Alys’s ability to slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them.

Like the previous two entries on this list, SoulQuest also dropped a new demo as part of Next Fest. It adds a new zone with new enemies and the game’s first god boss fight against the pagan deity Cernunnos. It also adds a new secret mission that wasn’t possible to find before. To try it yourself, you can download the demo here.

City States: Medieval

We finish off this list with a medieval city builder from Reverie World Studios, developers of the Kingdom Wars series. In City States: Medieval, a continent lies divided, and you lead a city state as it vies for power, wealth, and status while surrounded by powerful kingdoms. You’ll be charged with leading your city state to prominence by building up trade routes across the known world, improving your economy, and protecting your land from your greedy neighbors.

Your city will also have a legendary hero to help lead it, one whose skills will develop as time goes on, expanding your options for supporting the city. They can do things like defend the city, boost construction and city growth speed, or be sent to foreign courts to engage in political intrigue. You only have one hero, though, so you need to think through how best to use them. If you keep them at home, growth opportunities could pass you by. But if you send them on expeditions, your city’s defenses will suffer. And foreign invaders will try to besiege you. You’ll need to use a combination of real-time strategy combat and tower defense mechanics to push them back and prevent your city from falling. To get a taste of these strategic possibilities, you can try the demo here.

“Zero Parades is ultimately about identity,” explains Kaspar Tamsalu, art director at developer ZA/UM. “The conflict between what you subscribe to as an individual, as a private person outside of the professional sphere, and then how that mixes with what your vocation is.”

Your vocation in ZA/UM’s latest RPG is espionage. Hershel Wilk, your protagonist, is a spy for The Superbloc, a union of left-wing republics. She was born bourgeois before ending up spying for the communists, a background story intentionally filled with blanks to allow you to shape Hershel as you see fit.

“Just because she’s from a communist country does not mean that she subscribes to the ideology,” says Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe, Zero Parades’ principal writer. “This is up to the player to decide. Spies can be spies for ideology, for money, for a sense of accomplishment, or because they are batshit insane and want to do things like that.”

Sinamäe quickly offers an example of the latter: “I’m going to subscribe to this thought called Unguided Missile Strikes, because I want to say violent things to people. I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that’s the type of spy I am.”

When Sinamäe says “subscribe to this thought”, he’s referring to Zero Parades’ Conditioning system, which reformats Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet for an espionage setting. When exploring the world and talking with characters, you’ll encounter new ideas and concepts you can “subscribe” to, rewriting your personality to unlock new dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities. But where ZA/UM’s previous game explored what it would be like for an alcoholic amnesiac detective to soak up ideas like a sponge, Zero Parades approaches the mind of a spy like a collection of masks. Which one is required for today’s task? This required a new method for thought subscription.

“You get the choice about whether or not you want to reinforce or punish the thought,” explains Nicolas Pirot, Zero Parades’ lead technical artist. “You have a branching option of, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t want that to be a part of myself. I was always a violent spy. I no longer want to be a violent spy.’ You can resist that, and then that’ll have a different impact on the way you do things.”

“It’s really framed as this violent reordering of your mind,” he concludes.

It’s All in Your Head

That violent reordering is viewed through the flickering glass screen of an old CRT television. Much of Zero Parades’ in-world technology is modelled after the gizmos and appliances of the 1990s – down at the Bootleg Bazaar, you’ll find vinyl records housed in plastic cartridges in an analogue echo of Sony’s old MiniDisc format. This approach extends past the boundaries of reality and into Hershel’s psyche. The art team needed something functional but flawed to represent this spy’s troubled mind – a mind that could tune itself into dangerous thoughts and settle into uncomfortable programming. And so the Conditioning system’s menu sits inside that box of cathode rays.

“It’s in an imperfect state,” explains Maeve Bonefacic, a technical artist at ZA/UM who helped create the system’s look and feel. “In the sense that [the television] works, it does, but there’s a slight imperfection to that tool. We worked a lot on the particular glitches and effects that a CRT might have.”

The CRT is just one example of Zero Parades’ fascinating, two-pronged approach to art design. There’s the physical – the environments you explore, the people you meet, the items you acquire – and then there’s the creations of Hershel’s mind, represented by the wild art cards assigned to each quest, the disturbing televised thoughts assessed through Conditioning, and the badges assigned to your sentient skills. ZA/UM describes this approach as representing the two realms that Hershel exists in: the objective and subjective.

The subjective side of Hershel’s reality is spearheaded by lead illustrator Anton Vill, who created the surrealist artwork for Disco Elysium, including its grotesque Thought Cabinet. Once again, he took inspiration from the work of David Lynch, particularly the ominous tone of Twin Peaks’ dark forests, reflecting the messed-up thoughts of a broken character in his bizarre, twisted, emotionally heavy artwork. In one example, a collection of five, cigarette-smoking Hershel doppelgangers face each other in an unnerving pentagon as words of insecurity, such as “abandoner”, “liar”, and “f***ing spy”, hover above them on flowing reams of paper.

“I’m a huge fan of this kind of mysterious, dark, inner world of a person,” says Vill. “I think that shines through [in Zero Parades’ subjective artwork] and I think it’s perfect for the game.”

The Portofiran Identity

While the art team understandably wanted to create a sense of warped darkness for Hershel’s interior thoughts, it needed to create a complementary vibe for the physical world. It would need to be via different techniques, though, so that subjective thoughts didn’t merge with objective reality.

“We try to subtly inject this unease for the players,” says Tamsalu. “There is a lot of detail that we put into the game, but the way we have textured these [details], and how we approach lighting for the scenes and set up these situations, there is this underlying current of something brewing.”

This thing that is brewing is, of course, why Hershel is in the city of Portofiro. But her job is very unlike that of Disco Elysium’s disaster cop protagonist, and the espionage story Zero Parades tells had a significant influence on the way the city was designed.

“When you’re a police officer looking into a crime, anybody who’s in the vicinity is a potential suspect and expected to speak with you,” Tamsalu explains. “And in a spy game, it’s kind of like the inverse of that. You don’t want to stand out. And because of that, we needed to create a slightly busier backdrop. That’s why you have these characters that go about their own business, and you have your own covert business as you navigate through that.”

While capturing the heart of spy fiction has been an important part of the project, ZA/UM has been very intentional with how it has approached a genre filled with tropes, staples, and conventions. As you’d expect from the studio, this isn’t a James Bond or Jason Bourne adventure, but nor does it aspire to be a John le Carré novel repackaged as a video game. This had to be a fresh take on this shadowy world, and so a number of rules have been set in place. For instance, Herschel is an “operant”, rather than an agent. Her mission takes her “in-theatre” rather than in the field. And her employer, the communist Superbloc, flips the typical capitalist nation perspective of classic Cold War thrillers.

“We wanted to avoid the obvious spy themes,” says character artist Liis Väljaots, who explained how this philosophy extended into the art. “One of the things we wanted to avoid was making the world look too noir-y and too oppressive, to kind of contrast the subject matter, which is quite serious.”

“There are a lot of trench coats in the game, though,” she laughs. “That’s undeniable.”

Roll Play

Your choice to wear a trench coat or not is just one of many decisions that shape the kind of spy you are – clothing, as in Disco Elysium, provides stat modifiers that boost or inflict penalties on your skills. That pool of skills has been reduced (now 15, down from Disco’s 24) with the idea of making each attribute more prominent and viable. They’ll also be tested with much more frequency.

“We have a skill check every 3,000 words, compared to Disco Elysium’s every 6,000 words,” reveals Sinamäe. “We feel this makes the player more engaged with what they’re doing and what type of spy they want to be.”

As I explored in IGN’s hands-on preview of Zero Parades, skill checks have deeper mechanical complexity this time around thanks to the Pressures system. Each of your skills fits into one of three categories – athletic, psychological, and intellectual – and those categories have corresponding “health” bars that measure your fatigue, anxiety, and delirium levels. Fail a psychological skill check and your anxiety bar will fill. Max the bar out, and you’ll take a permanent stat penalty.

Things are made even more interesting by the ability to “exert” a skill check – you can roll an extra die to increase your chances of passing the check, but at the cost of purposefully damaging the skill’s corresponding pressure bar.

“It’s like, how much more can the player take?,” says Bonefacic. “Can I afford to, for example, exert a dice roll? Am I allowed to do that? Do I have the resources to do that? I think it has added an interesting element of strategy.”

That strategy wouldn’t work if there were no method for reducing your pressure gauges. By default, a bar will reset after taking so much damage that you endure a stat penalty, but that’s hardly an approach to build a self-care system around. Instead, you can have Hershel perform a ritual.

“Rituals are a system that we have where you can reduce your pressures by doing all kinds of small things in the world,” explains Pirot. “It can be sitting on a bench and watching the sunrise that might lower your anxiety. It can be smoking a cigarette, having a cup of coffee, or yelling at someone in the street. These very small, very immersive moments, that are available in different parts of the world at different times, that can help an incredibly stressed out, anxious, fatigued, or delirious spy to keep their sanity more or less in check.”

Rather than, say, the classic health potion of other RPGs, which are clearly labelled and a genre staple, you’ll need to discover these rituals through exploration and experimentation. They also unlock further roleplay opportunities – yelling at someone in the street doesn’t exactly sound like a traditional remedy, but for an operant boiling over with rage, it may be very cathartic.

“By the player making a build choice of, ‘I want to be a very violent spy’, they would naturally seek out the rituals that complement that,” says Pirot.

Rituals, mental masks, blending into busy cities, and threats of nuclear armageddon. These are all important aspects of Zero Parades’ spy fantasy, and each is manifested within the game by a different team at ZA/UM. Writing works alongside artwork and system design to produce a world through which you can observe, bargain, and bully. A world in which you can roleplay the type of spy you think can change the world. Or, at the very least, change their place in it.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.

Vantage Studios, the Ubisoft subsidiary that now manages the publisher’s biggest brands, has announced a fresh leadership team for Assassin’s Creed.

The blockbuster historical stabathon series will now be led by Martin Schelling, a veteran Ubisoft producer who previously served senior roles on Assassin’s Creed titles such as Black Flag, Origins and Valhalla, and has recently served as Ubisoft’s Chief Production Officer.

Schelling will be assisted by Assassin’s Creed veteran Jean Guesdon, who will assume the role of Head of Content for the franchise. Looking after the series’ creative direction, Guesdon will be applying the experience he’s gained as a long-term designer on the series, working on more than a dozen titles in the franchise, back to Assassin’s Creed 1 in 2007.

Finally, François de Billy will serve as Head of Production Excellence, following previously acting as Production Director on Valhalla and Origins.

The trio will assume their new roles over the next few weeks, and steer the franchise forward following the sudden departure of Assassin’s Creed’s previous boss Marc-Alexis Côté, the veteran Ubisoft employee who announced his departure from the company last October, shortly after Vantage Studios leadership took control of the brand.

Ubisoft told staff of Côté’s departure via an internal email that discussed the need for Vantage Studios’ leadership team to be “aligned” with its core goals. At the time, IGN reported that Côté had been offered a role as part of Vantage Studios’ leadership, but declined.

Côté has since launched a lawsuit against Ubisoft that claims he was essentially replaced in his role early in 2025 by Vantage Studios’ newly-installed leadership, Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot — the cousin and son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. With this layer of management now above him, Côté alleges he then learned over the summer of 2025 that Vantage was now seeking to hire a new Assassin’s Creed franchise boss, too.

Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reaffirmed that the company had “several” Assassin’s Creed titles in development, comprised of both single-player and multiplayer experiences. Back in 2022, Ubisoft announced a raft of upcoming games including the now-launched Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the witchcraft-inspired Assassin’s Creed: Hexe (another single-player blockbuster) and Invictus (a multiplayer game). The company is also widely-expected to announce its long-awaited Black Flag remake soon.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

KPop Demon Hunters voice actor Kevin Woo has exclusively revealed a new Dead By Daylight Survivor to IGN — for which he’ll be providing the voice, if not his singing talents.

If you’ve watched or sung along to the animated Netflix phenomenon, you’ll have heard Woo as the singing voice of Mystery (the boyband member with purple hair over his eyes).

“I personally think as a Killer, Mystery Saja would thrive on psychological manipulation rather than brute aggression,” Woo said Woo, who’s set to star in a brand new chapter for the horror game, All-Kill:Comeback.

Here, he plays Kwon Tae-young, a tech designer Survivor hired to work on a virtual idol. Players will be able to check him out in a Public Test Build that will go live on Steam tomorrow, on February 24.

Woo previously worked on Dead By Daylight as a consultant on its previous K-pop storyline, which introduced the sociopathic idol the Trickster.

“Transitioning from consultant to fully embodying a character through voice was both surreal and deeply fulfilling,” Woo said. “As a consultant on the original chapter, I was involved in shaping the Trickster’s emotional identity — his ego, his obsession with artistry, and the narcissistic rage simmering beneath his polished idol exterior.

“Stepping into Kwon Tae-young’s perspective in this new release allowed me to approach the world of Dead by Daylight from the other side of that mythology. Because I understood the Trickster’s lore so intimately, his betrayal, his fixation on control, and his warped perception of performance. I was able to layer that history into Kwon Tae-young’s fear and internal conflict.”