I don't usually like playing demos. Not sure why - I think investing any time in something incomplete sometimes just feels wrong to me. Demos are actually perfect for my attention span so I read some lists and tried a bunch of things from Steam's Next Fest. My experience has been largely underwhelming.

Here's a bunch of demos I didn't really like (or really didn't like) and why I didn't really like them.

Pepper Grinder has tonnes of potential. I like quirky platformers like Dandara and Flinthook, but something about Pepper Grinder just feels a little off to me. Maybe it's something I could get used to, but I'll see how much it is when it releases. Definitely one of the better ones on this list.

#DRIVE Rally is a very well-timed low-poly arcade rally game (the aesthetic is similar to art of rally, in some ways), but it seems to have binary braking (i.e. brakes are either off, or slammed on), the steering is super twitchy, and your co-driver is incredibly annoying. There's also some bits where the track forks that he specifically does not help you with, but then yells at you when you go the wrong way. This could be cool but at the moment it's annoying.

Berserk Boy is Mega Man, and it's a good Mega Man, but the combat is pretty one-dimensional and not very satisfying, and the first two bosses are identical except for the colour of their projectiles.

Balatro is a card game. One day I will get it into my head that I don't like card games.

Mullet Mad Jack is like if Hotline Miami was an FPS Japanese gameshow against robots. It reminds me of the movie Guns Akimbo for some reason. It's too difficult to distinguish the enemies from the walls so it's a pass for me.

Echo Point Nova is a bit Neon White-y, but the gameplay trailer makes it look way more fun than it is. There's a lot of mechanics here, and that makes the tutorial long and boring, and after a very short amount of time I was just done with it still being the tutorial.

Breachway is a card game where you play cards by dragging and dropping them onto spaceship animations. It made me miss FTL.

Rack and Slay is a top-down geometry sort of thing where you have to shoot pool and pot the balls except everything is weird. It could be cool as a casual thing, and I preferred it to subpar pool, but that's not really saying much.

Trash of the Titans looks like a cool pixel Final Fantasy Tactics. I say "looks like" because I couldn't actually figure out how to play it.

Raw Metal is a bit like Metal Gear Solid, except when you're spotted the game turns to a third-person brawler thing. I didn't like the stealth, and I didn't like the brawling, then I got shot by something I couldn't see, and uninstalled the demo.

Normal Fishing is a fishing game made by someone who has potentially only ever had fishing described to them. They may or may not have ever played a video game. Games are supposed to be fun.

Gatekeeper wants to be there for you if you like Risk of Rain 2 and Hades. I like both of those games but something about Gatekeeper felt really wooden and slow. It took me about 15 attempts to clear the first area of Risk of Rain 2, and 1 to clear the first area of Gatekeeper.

Artifact Seeker is another vampire survivors clone where all the women are impractically well-endowed. It makes me feel like a creep playing games like this, so I just don't. I seemed to do really well at this without trying, and then I died quickly and didn't understand why.

Never Grave could be quite cool. It has an interesting hat thing going on, which might work. But I don't get why it's ripped off so much of the Hollow Knight feel. And the first boss had an insane amount of health and appeared after about 3 minutes and I couldn't be bothered to deal with it. With a bit of balancing I'd play this again.

Arco is a quirky-looking tactical RPG that seems to have similar movement mechanics to things like Divinity, but it didn't have Steam Deck controller bindings and I couldn't figure out how to do anything so I bailed. Shame as I like Panic and the art style and tactical RPGs (even though I'm terrible at them).

Helskate is a skateboarding game where you play as some sort of demon doing skating and ugh that just doesn't work for me. Plus the controls are super jerky and twitchy and I need smoooooth for games like this. Hope the devs play Rollerdrome because that's the kind of controls I need from a game like this.