These AI-free Indie Game Demos Earned an Instant Wishlist

The other day, I wrote about how nearly one in five Steam Next Fest entries disclosed the use of generative AI, and how players still can’t filter those out. Rather than dwell on the problem, here’s a list of demos that impressed for a different reason: They’re all handcrafted experiences that you can still download and play even though Next Fest has ended.

Generative A.I. in game dev is a topic I take seriously, especially in the Indie Space. This is exactly why I think it’s all the more important to highlight games that stand out in the flood of slop through their creativity, craftsmanship, and vision. Every demo featured here impressed me on its own merits, and the fact that none of them uses generative AI is simply the icing on the cake.

These aren’t necessarily ranked from worst to best or in any particular order. On the contrary, I just wanted to talk about a bunch of great games that made their way into my wishlist because of how nice they were.

Truck-Kun Is Supporting Me From Another World?!

Strange Scaffold, the developers behind many different weird and fun games, are at it again with yet another silly indie title. Truck-Kun is the secret lovechild of Crazy Taxi and GTA, featuring wild manoeuvres, an unhinged gameplay loop, and a ramping difficulty as you complete objectives.

Story-wise, it follows a delivery driver who runs over an office drone who consequently gets transported to another world (look up “Isekai”). As she got a promotion at her job, though, she makes you help her conquer this fantasy world in order to find a way back home. As such, you have to go out there and run over as many pedestrians as possible to also isekai them into the other world but as mob enemies for the office drone to fight, getting her that sweet experience needed to beat the final boss.

It’s very unhinged and filled with a lot of humour that parodies the isekai sub-genre of anime in smart and genuinely funny ways that made me laugh out loud a lot. I had a blast with this demo and was incredibly intrigued by the skill ceiling, too, giving me a lot of ways to perform tricks, escape the cops, extend the time, and navigate this crazy city.

Milki Delivery

One of my favourite developers, Doot, managed to captivate me again with Milki Delivery, a cute-and-cosy delivery simulator, where you travel around a small community delivering milk.

Look, I adore Doot’s games. They’re cute, short, affordable, and they manage to really bring home a sense of discovery and nostalgia for me, unlike any other games out there. Milki Delivery reminded me of my days doing small chores for family members and neighbours alike. You travel around on your bicycle, earning money and gathering materials, and then you get to upgrade your stuff and rebuild parts of the town in small yet meaningful ways. Also, there’s a pet cow accompanying you, which is kinda weird and adorable.

It feels uber-refreshing in a world filled with doom and gloom, and I highly recommend checking out all of their games. They’re super wholesome and offer something for gamers of all walks of life.

Garden and a Goat

With Garden and a Goat, Contemplation Games brings a Viva Piñata-inspired ecosystem recovery game to your PC. In a ruined world, it’s upon you, a small robot and your trusty goat pet (also weird and adorable), to rebuild different worlds. You start off slow, introducing fungi and grasswork which attract bees and other critters. As you go on and meet their demands, you get to do research into unlocking more and more plants and animals.

There’s a good bunch of depth in the game due to the many different rare variants you can unlock for the various critters. You also get to do a lot of decoration and farming, unlocking cosmetics, and just carrying over progress into new realms that require your attention as well.

I spent four hours playing the demo for this game and was sincerely impressed by how multifaceted the game is, offering an incremental-game-inspired gameplay loop of meeting demands, doing research, and then using that to unlock more and better plants that award you more research points. At the same time, you get to revive the fauna, pet different animals, and even release them back into the wild. It’s really adorable and chill.

Fruitbearer

In contrast to the cosier and more colourful experiences before this, Fruitbearer is a visceral and gritty dark fantasy roguelike deckbuilder based on the popular physics puzzler “Suika”. You awaken as a forgotten deity and travel across a kingdom of ruin and corruption, trying to restore balance to life.

The developers at Mangobits Studios did previously make another Suika-based deck-building game, from which they drew a lot of inspiration. Fruit Fusion!, their previous game, surprised me a fair bit through its depressing yet cute story and interesting mechanics. Fruitbearer takes many cool aspects from this and evolves it further into something dark and challenging.

Look, Fruitbearer may be simple and easy to get into but it offers a lot of depth, surprisingly. You place fruits, they merge into bigger fruits, and as you set up combos and chain reactions, you get juice that allows you to beat the various encounters you’re faced with… but then you deal with other objects that need to be destroyed, enemies sabotaging you, as well as enemies stealing my fruits or destroying my relics. I struggled so hard putting this demo out and highly recommend checking it out.

Factomancer

I like factory games. I like roguelikes. I’ve seen my fair share of games trying to combine the two into one, but I have yet to see one that manages to quite hit the itch of both of these genres at the same time like Factomancer. Voltige Games cooked with gas in this one ,and I had the time of my life building up production chains, transforming and optimising the factory as needs arose, and expanding in meaningful and fun ways.

In Factomancer, you’re tasked with building a great factory, supplying the city folks with appliances under the watchful Eye of the Order. Machines are acquired through tokens you get for meeting your quotas each day, which can be saved up over time using an interest mechanic and other bonuses. Different base materials allow you to craft a plethora of items, from potions and poisons to shields and staffs or even legendary books of the dead.

Beyond this, the game also features various factions that you get to play as, each changing the way you approach the game. One of them gave you extra time per day to meet your quota based on the water tiles you discovered, whereas another improved your machines’ production speed when they were built around trees. There are also a plethora of spells and shrines to utilise. It’s a pretty interesting game to look out for!

Note: I mistakenly thought that some of the store page assets, including the robed figure and the logo were generated using genAI, which is why I reached out to the developers, trying to get confirmation about this. As it stands, the art's done by a professional artist and I was guaranteed that no AI was employed for this title.

Snekromancy

As someone who spent way too much time as a kid playing Snake on my uncle’s phone, it should come to no surprise that I’d bite. Look, it’s snake… but as a roguelike. It’s also a lot of fun with a ton of cool units and interactions, relics to acquire, and ways to approach the game.

Snekromancy is a game where you, a Lich, are being attacked by those pesky adventurers and elves, and you transform into a snake to fend them off. On your back, you carry various minions, ranging from spectres to spiders and demons to other types of undead, each with their own attacks and combinations that might synergise well enough. It’s an interesting bullet heaven-adjacent gameplay formula with limited resources as you venture through different stages, acquire upgrades and beat bosses.

Your health deteriorates over time (and as you take damage), shrinking you in the process. When you lose segments, you also lose your means of attacking, so the gameplay incentivises good manoeuvring and planning. I had an absolutely great time with this one and am looking forward to “becoming snek” once the full game releases.

Kernel Hearts

Ephemera Games have a rather ambitious title at their hands with Kernel Hearts, a title I’ve been super excited about for a fairly long time, and I was more than positively impressed by both the singleplayer and the multiplayer modes the demo had to offer.

In Kernel Hearts, you transform into these robotic magical girls fighting angels and slaying gods in order to save humanity from an ashen curse. The setting and general presentation reminded me a lot of the NieR games (this is a compliment), whereas the core gameplay loop reminded me of Risk of Rain 2, one of my favourite games of all time. You head into each biome of this accursed tower, fighting off enemies and gathering resources to level up and unlock new attacks, spells and other perks, or collecting relics that grant you very strong power-ups. As you explore the world, the game gets more and more difficult, meaning you’ll have to fight the boss of the stage and move on to the next before you get obliterated.

The core gameplay is fun and interesting, and the demo is frankly one that I still think about long after playing it, especially due to how much it reminded me of a more combo-heavy version of RoR2. On top of that, the game’s music is phenomenal so far, and I loved hearing all the characters’ stories and dialogues while laughing about the cute and funny interactions in places. I’m so hyped for this one!

Echoes of Mystralia

Echoes of Mystralia is an action-heavy spellcrafting action roguelike with deep spell customisation akin to Noita but clad in an ARPG-esque coat. I love a lot of what the devs do. Borealys Games are also the great minds behind the wonderful strategy auto-battler card game Lunchbreak Tactics and the phenomenal spellcrafting game (and, I guess, predecessor to this) Mages of Mystralia, so I was pretty excited to try out the demo for this one.

As Mazarim, a Watcher tasked with protecting the Cycle of Memories, you have to explore the lands of Mystralia and face the Shadows of the Past. It’s a stunning action-roguelike that takes some inspiration from other games in the genre, obviously, but it innovates in meaningful ways, building upon the rune-based systems of Mages of Mystralia and expanding it through a near-infinite amount of combinations for your spells.

By defeating foes and unlocking Guardian Seals, you get to combine your spells with a ton of modifiers to create massive blizzards or fiery room-clearing chain reactions. It’s pretty darn satisfying with an almost puzzle-ish quality to the way you approach spellcrafting… not to mention that I love theory-crafting and breaking games, so this has been such a joy!

Kaido Genkai: An Anime Racing RPG

Karoshi Electric Company’s Kaido Genkai was a positive surprise amongst the large batch of games I tried out. I’m not usually a big fan of racing games, but this one provides a pretty satisfying experience, in parts due to its characters and story but also in parts because of just how ridiculously cool it is to zoom around, leap over buildings, take risky turns, and just push the pedal to the metal.

You can see the many inspirations it took from the anime aesthetic and storytelling, letting you traverse and explore a nostalgic 90s-inspired fictional Japanese countryside, delivering dango and taking part in illegal races.

There’s also a fair bit of customisation planned for the full release, but the demo already features a bunch of cool paint jobs, different vehicles, as well as some really nice ways for you to optimise time trials, express your skills, and just really show off. I really vibed with the manual gear shifting, but also like that you can turn that off if you’re more of an automatic-type of driver. There’s also a Kickstarter campaign available for this one, which you can still back if you’re interested!

Hellslave II: Judgement of the Archon

Made by the solo developer Ars Goetia, Hellslave 2 combines dark and critty fantasy dungeon crawling with Diablo-esque gear, plenty of cool effects and some truly fun combat mechanics.

Thousands of years of demonic warfare have torn the world to shreds, bringing ruin to all. Tired of this, the heavens have unleashed the Archons of Judgement set to destroy everything once and for all to bring an end to the infernal chaos… which is where you come in! Before this judgement can happen, you’re given a final chance at salvation.

Hellslave 2 is turn-based, albeit with a unique time-based combat system where most actions require real-time seconds to execute, forcing you to balance aggression and fatigue to survive the brutal fights you’ll encounter. I really dig this game, its art, the combat, and the loot. I can quite positively say that it absolutely fucks.

Ambroise Niflette & The Gleaned Bell

Ambroise Niflette & The Gleaned Bell is a stop-motion inspired investigative exploration game. Someone stole the Gleaned Bell, freezing time and, as such, preventing the annual Thyme and Apple Festival from taking place. As such, it’s upon you to investigate this mystery, question the residents of the town, and find the culprit once and for all!

I absolutely adore the aesthetic and craftsmanship in this one. The small village of Touvoir-en-Thym-et-Pomme (yes, I copied that from the store page) is beautifully crafted and houses a whole slew of charming characters to interrogate, chat up, and follow around. There is also a day-night cycle, changing the general feel of the town dramatically.

More than anything, though, I found myself absolutely in awe by the small animations and the incredibly charming miniatures-inspired villagescape, the designs of the many toy villagers, and the prospect of filling out your notebook, gathering evidence, and really becoming a sleuth. This game is way too cute.

Tokatonton: One-Armed Blacksmith

Last but most certainly not least, Tokatonton: One-Armed Blacksmith by Semo Games is a medieval blacksmith management game where you craft unique weapons, satisfy demanding customers, and risk dangerous trades for profit. You rebuild your forge, experience a grim and shocking story, and perhaps eventually even find closure to your long-lasting wish for revenge.

The gameplay reminded me a lot of other shop-sims I’ve played in the past, with you having to buy cheap and sell high, basically. The key difference here, however, is that Tokatonton features Tetris-like puzzling that allows you to add unique properties to the different tools and weapons you craft, allowing you to create excessively sharp hoes and savage axes, depending on what your customers demand.

There is an extensive skill tree to explore, a lot of mining and gathering to do, different characters to chat and interact with, and just overall, it’s a beautiful experience with perhaps the most complete-feeling systems in the entire list.

Closing Thoughts

Steam Next Fest was a bit disappointing because of the 19.5% AI-slops making it in. I love indie games because they’re built on creativity and innovation, made by humans for humans. I do this as a hobby, showcasing cool games and talking about a space I’m very passionate about… so it was more than draining to go sleuthing whenever I saw something that felt iffy and didn’t have a disclosure.

With that being the case, these games were stellar, and I really would love it if more people gave them a shot.

Fuck AI.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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