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.
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. The pallbearers walk on their own, but you have to control how fast they move, when they jump, and how high they hold their precious (but slippery!) load to navigate busy streets filled with manholes, steep inclines, and the occasional malicious bulldog.
Fallbearers‘ demo is criminally short, but I had great time figuring out when and how to raise and lower my two chaps to bear the dead to their final resting place. It’s harder than it looks, but not as hard as it may seem if you’re just one person. Trying to figure it out with two people, though, will likely be a hoot. You can fail a certain number of times depending on the difficulty, but if the corpse flops out of the coffin, game over. The full game promises even more varied terrain including snowy landscapes that necessitate the use of skis. There’s no release date yet, but I suspect it’ll be out sometime between the Sloppy Steaks cooking sim and the Dan Flashes Dressmaker DLC.