6 Steam Next Fest demos to play if you love the art direction of Silver Pines

Before Steam Next Fest wraps up on 26 October, I thought I'd hunt down some demos for games with a bit of Silver Pines retro horror. One thing I loved about the 2.5D survival horror game Silver Pines when I reviewed it was how it looked: a mix of retro survival horror with comic book noir environment design and pixel art design that made it feel like a lost 16-bit game that was channelling aspects of Silent Hill and Metroid design made popular in indies like Hollow Knight and Mio: Memories in Orbit.

Silver Pines is one of the year's best games, and a reminder that you don't need another Unreal Engine 5 tech demo to make a game look good. With Steam Next Fest currently overflowing with upcoming indie games, I've been looking for demos with more personality and a bit of that Silver Pines blend of unique art, nostalgia, and fresh horror ideas, just in time for Halloween.

Below are some of the best upcoming indie games with demos worth trying before Steam Next Fest ends on 26 October.

1. The House Before: a body-horror game where you play the house

Many horror games put you in a haunted house, but The House Before takes things a step further by making you the house. It's a weird, significant shift in perspective, the kind you find in indie horror movies like Presence.

This surreal body-horror adventure turns the building into something that resembles a living organism, with pipes becoming bones, tunnels acting like veins, and rooms taking on the qualities of internal organs. It's a wonderfully strange premise that gives the developers plenty of room to experiment with the game's visual language.

The art direction shifts as you play, which is another unique twist. Rather than sticking to a single visual style, the game uses those changes to make its world feel increasingly unfamiliar, and even the interface becomes part of the experience. It's the sort of idea that could easily become a gimmick, but when the visuals are doing so much of the storytelling, it makes sense to push them further.

The idea of playing as a house is odd enough to catch my attention, especially when the walls, pipes, and rooms are all part of the horror. I'd like to see how far the developers take it.

Download The House Before demo from Steam.

2. Derelikt: PS1-style sci-fi horror on a research station

I have a soft spot for games like Derelikt (and the quirky Grease Trap '99) that feel like they escaped from the original PlayStation, back when 3D graphics were still a novelty, and developers were figuring out how to build a convincing world from a handful of polygons and that 'wobble' textures used to affect when it all moved.

Derelikt taps into that era with its retro sci-fi horror aesthetic, sending you to investigate a research station on a mysterious planetoid. Naturally, things don't go particularly well, and before long you're dealing with missing scientists, hostile environments and a growing understanding things are going to get bad before they get better.

There's also something refreshing about a game that understands how much you can do with lighting, composition and a few well-placed shadows, and this, along with Blighten, below on this list, offer that kind of unease simple but atmospheric design can deliver. You don't always need to see every little detail to be unsettled by what's lurking around the next corner.

If you grew up with PS1 horror games, or just enjoy the aesthetic of a lost 1990s sci-fi adventure, give this one a go.

Download the Derelikt demo on Steam.

3. The Road of Dust and Sorrow: anime-style pixel survival horror

I'm always interested in pixel art that gets the details right, like Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2, which nails that '90s shooter aesthetic, and The Road of Dust and Sorrow, which shows similar attention to detail and turns it into wonderfully grim places to explore. This upcoming survival-horror game follows Katherine and her daughter Ava through a post-apocalyptic world where a miracle crop has turned people into flesh-hungry creatures called Dusters.

The game's setting is filled with abandoned streets, ransacked buildings, and strange vegetation creeping back across the ruins. Katherine has bigger problems than the scenery, mind you, as she scavenges supplies, fights off Dusters, and tries to keep her daughter Ava safe.

That mother-and-daughter relationship is what sets the game apart from a straightforward 2.5D zombie adventure. Ava is more than someone to rescue at the end of a level; she's the reason Katherine keeps going, even when the world around them has become a pretty horrible place.

The game draws on '90s survival-horror classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so it hits that Silver Pines DNA, but its detailed anime-like pixel art gives the ruined world its own character. The new Steam Next Fest demo is twice as long as the previous version and includes the entire first act, so there's plenty to get stuck into before the full game arrives on 3 December.

Download the The Road of Dust and Sorrow demo on Steam.

4. Anomalith: Showa-era liminal horror

Retro horror has become a crowded corner of the indie scene, but Anomalith caught my attention for its Japanese period influences and use of liminal spaces, that in a way reminds me of the excellent Motorslice.

Anomalith follows a girl searching for her missing friend in a world warped by strange anomalies, drawing on Showa-era Japanese aesthetics to create something that feels caught between a familiar place and an unpleasant dream. The idea behind horror like this, and it's a reason Backrooms works so well, is the walls don't need to be covered in blood to make you feel uneasy – the sense of dislocation is what gives it an eerie edge.

Games that use a recognisable visual language and then start messing with it have a particular appeal. A corridor, a building, or an everyday object can become unsettling simply because it doesn't behave as you'd expect, it's why I loved aspects of Control Resonant so much, and the retro presentation gives Anomalith a distinctive identity of its own.

It's also a good fit if you enjoy horror that leaves you to work things out rather than explaining every little detail. Sometimes the most effective thing a game can do is give you a familiar place, then make you question everything you see.

Download the Anomalith demo on Steam.

5. Blighten: PS1-inspired survival horror shooter

Another PS1-inspired 3D world, Blighten embraces the way those technical limitations often forced developers to think carefully about what the player could see, and what they couldn't and explores how to redo that for modern gamers.

If you like your horror games with a bit of old-school grit and the kind of item juggling found in the Resident Evil games, Blighten is worth a look. It's a retro-styled survival horror shooter, with the sort of throwback presentation that will appeal to anyone who misses the rougher edges of the genre's PS1-era heyday.

Retro inspired graphics can give a game an immediacy that gets lost when everything is rendered in perfect detail, and there's a certain charm to seeing developers embrace that design idea. A rough texture, a blocky character model or an awkwardly lit room can become part of the experience and a way to build an uneasy atmosphere, one designed around nostalgia as much as horror imagery.

I'm always interested in games that understand this, particularly when the visual style has a purpose beyond making screenshots look nostalgic. Blighten is worth investigating if you're after another upcoming horror game that takes its cues from an earlier generation.

Download the Blighten demo on Steam.

6. Hyperarousal: psychological horror in Italy’s Camonica Valley

Hyperarousal has a nasty trick up its sleeve. This upcoming psychological horror adventure lets you stab tattoos on your own arm to reveal things hidden from ordinary sight, which seems a risky move when you're already dealing with ancestral nightmares (and if, like me, you hate needles and sharp, pointy things).

Set in Italy's Camonica Valley, a real place famous for its prehistoric rock art, the game follows Garlo as he returns to his family home looking for peace and quiet. That doesn't last long, as he becomes caught up in his ancestors' memories, travelling between the present day and different periods in the valley's history.

Hypervision, that bit where you stab yourself to see clues, is the game's strangest idea. By stabbing three ritual tattoos, Garlo can reveal hidden messages, sounds and routes through the world, but using them makes it harder to tell reality from memory and hallucination.

The real-life Camonica Valley has an estimated 8,000 years of human history etched into its rocks, making this Alps location an unusual, inspired setting for a horror game, giving Hyperarousal something more tangible to draw on than the usual abandoned hospital or haunted mansion.

Download the Hyperarousal demo on Steam.

Ian Dean is Editor, Digital Arts & 3D at Creative Bloq, and the former editor of many leading magazines. These titles included ImagineFX, 3D World and video game titles Play and Official PlayStation Magazine. Ian launched Xbox magazine X360 and edited PlayStation World. For Creative Bloq, Ian combines his experiences to bring the latest news on digital art, VFX and video games and tech, and in his spare time he doodles in Procreate, ArtRage, and Rebelle while finding time to play Xbox and PS5.