Steam Next Fest Is Over. Here's What the Review Data Says.
30.4K reviews found across 1854 demos released this week
Data from February 07 - February 28, 2026
This week belonged to Steam Next Fest - and one game that had nothing to do with it.
Resident Evil Requiem dropped during Next Fest week and absolutely steamrolled everything else, pulling over 90% of all Steam Reviews for the week (over 63k!) and getting a positive score of 95.9%.
It barely needs analysis: it's Resident Evil Requiem is great and everyone knows it.
But that's not what this week's report is about.
Steam Next Fest ran Feb 23 through March 2, giving players the chance to try thousands of demos before their full releases. Not all demos on Next Fest are open to reviews - that's a choice developers make when pushing their demos live. Of the 1,854 demos that did collect reviews this week, 30,400 reviews came in total.
This report covers the top 5 most reviewed demos of the fest, and what the data says about each of them.
One thing worth noting upfront: if you released a full game this week that wasn't Resident Evil, you had a very bad time. Next Fest dominates player attention. The data shows it clearly.
Steam Weekly Releases (Last 7 weeks)
Gameplainer also tracked Twitch streaming activity across all five demos during Next Fest. Windrose led on Twitch too, with 54,088 peak viewers across 1,391 streams. Two large French streamers drove the March 1 spike, but the long tail of smaller streamers covering it throughout the week suggests genuine broader interest beyond a single placement.
Summary Statistics
Review Distribution
Top Performing Demos
Windrose Demo led the fest by review volume with 6,028 reviews at 93.4% positive. Every language group hit green. English at 93.3%, German at 95.8%, Russian at 93.6%.
A PvE survival game set in the Age of Piracy with soulslike combat and ship commanding: the concept is clearly landing. The forums back it up: 92% of forum users who left a review went positive. The team response rate is low at 1.8%, but with sentiment this healthy it's not costing them yet.
Players predictably compared Windrose to other pirate games, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag leading the pack by a wide margin.
Other games mentioned in reviews
The question now is whether the full release can hold this!
The most upvoted review has a lead of over 400 votes, and is a testament to all hard work the developers have done up till now:
Far Far West Demo didn't win on volume, but it won on everything else. 5,156 reviews at 98.8% positive, the highest sentiment score of any demo this week. Brazilian Portuguese players rated it 99.7% positive. Every language group green.
The forum data tells you why. Developer Damian from Fireshine Games is the single most active poster in the Far Far West forums. The team responded to 22.3% of threads overall, and 40% of Events & Announcements threads. 93.4% of forum reviewers left positive reviews.
This is what active developer presence looks like in the data. Players notice - and the reviews reflect it. 🥇
John Carpenter's Toxic Commando Demo is the most interesting case of the fest.
2,136 reviews at 71.5% positive, John Carpenter is the lowest score in the top 5. Chinese players at 50.8%, Russian at 79.3%. No language group hit green.
The bug reports forum tells a different story:
34 threads, 30 team replies. 88.2% response rate. That's not a team ignoring their players but a team in the trenches fixing things in real time. General Discussions sits at 6.6%, but the bugs are being addressed.
36.3% of forum reviewers left negative reviews, which is high. But the trajectory matters
here. A 71.5% score with active bug response is a very different situation than a 71.5% score with silence. If the team ships fixes before the full release, this score moves.
John Carpenter's name will get people in the door. The question is whether the game can hold them once they're there.
Outbound Demo sits at 83.9% positive from 1,351 reviews, but with some regional cracks worth watching. Chinese players at 68.6%, Russian at 71.2%. German and French are both strong at 93%+.
Developer Square Glade Games is the most active poster in their own forums, with a 28.8% overall response rate. That's the highest team engagement of any game this week, beating Far Far West's 22.3%. Further to this 88.5% of forum reviewers left positive reviews.
The complaints are consistent across all three audiences (slow vehicles, limited content, performance) but the tolerance for those issues isn't. English players forgive the friction because the atmosphere carries them.
English players forgive the friction because the atmosphere carries them. Russian players are hitting lag spikes that break the experience entirely. Chinese players want narrative structure and world density that the demo simply doesn't have yet. That's three different problems with the same score.
Darkhaven Demo closes the top 5 at 76.5% positive from 851 reviews. The pedigree is remarkable - this is a next-generation ARPG from many of the original creators of Diablo and Diablo II. The expectations that come with that billing are high.
The score reflects the gap between expectation and execution. No language group broke 80% positive. English sits at 76.3%, Russian at 72.7%, Chinese at 77.4%. German is the outlier at 91.7%, though the sample size of 24 reviews is too small to read into it.
The forum picture is concerning. 17 bug threads, zero team responses. General Discussions sits at 10.9%. 25.5% of forum reviewers left negative reviews. For a demo from a team with this much goodwill in the bank from the Diablo legacy, the lack of bug forum engagement is a missed opportunity: these are exactly the players who want to believe in the game.
The foundation may be there. But the Diablo faithful are a demanding audience, and right now the data suggests the demo isn't meeting the bar they've set.
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