
Sometimes during Steam Next Fest I enter a sort of fugue state where I download like a hundred game demos and go to town. I give them fifteen minutes to grab me. If they do, they get 15 more minutes. If they're fun for half an hour, I play until they're done or until an hour passes.
Sometimes they're good enough that I keep playing them even after that hour, which is rare, but that's how I arrived at these five games: I played 83 of this year's Steam Next Fest demos and these were my favorites, or at least the ones that stuck out most in my mind.