With an unmanageably colossal heap of demos on offer, a massive number of which look to be filled with AI-generated garbage, the current Steam Next Fest is a serious bummer. How on earth is any adult with limited free time supposed to muck through the stables of slop to find something worthwhile? Increasingly, people have been creating ad hoc slop-free recommendation lists on social media in addition to sharing browser plugins and other tools that people can use to filter out games that have a genAI disclosure. But even with tools to separate the good game wheat from the slop chaff, that’s still a lot of games to sift through, so I’m gonna throw my own recommendation onto the pile with the only demo I’ve made time for this Next Fest: Fallbearers.

transport a corpse through obstacles in the Victorian streets in the dark-humor co-op game Fallbearers

I found the game via Bluesky, wooed to its Steam page by the game’s trailer alone. Imagine a game that combines Bennet Foddy’s track-and-field simulator QWOP with the “Coffin Flop” bit from Tim Robinson’s HBO sketch show I Think You Should Leave—that’s Fallbearers.

In it, you—by yourself or you with a friend—control two Victorian-era pallbearers as they try to transport the dearly departed from the hearse to the grave. ) load to navigate busy streets filled with manholes, steep inclines, and the occasional malicious bulldog.

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