I like Next Fest, I like trying new games and I don't play most games for very long anyway.
I tried these:
Helskate Demo - Loved it - Really neat aesthetic, sort of like Tony Hawk games but a wilder aesthetic and has combat. I'm not great at skateboarding games but I enjoy playing them, and this one has swords!
Underspace Demo - Provisional Liked it - A space sim game that calls itself the spiritual successor to Freelancer. Well Freelancer didn't have giant space monsters but Underspace still looks promising. I played through the first few missions, controls were decent enough that I didn't bother to remap anything. Visual quality and style are serviceable. The fatal flaw for me is there is no mouse invert Y option so it's really hard to play for me. There are a lot of options, but not that. The dev indicates he will be adding the option. There have been more than a few space games that I never bothered with due to no invert Y option.
The Fall of Aether Station demo - Not for me - This is a tower defense with spaceships. You have to defend a space station with various ships, but for some reason enemy ships come at it along a bright green line rather than from all directions. You can only afford one ship at first and it doesn't fully destroy the enemy ships just sitting there stationary. You have to send the ship back on forth on the line by clicking destinations to try to sufficiently shoot the enemy ships before they attack your base. I got to two ships and the micromanagement of only 2 ships got to me and I moved on. Maybe it gets better later on.
Dungeonborne Demo - Dead on Arrival - This one looked like a cool first-person dungeon romp, but as soon as I hit Play I was confronted with a UAC prompt to install "ACE anticheat." For what I thought was a singleplayer game. I noped out, I've got enough invasive crap on my system. Turns out ACE is from Tencent and is a kernel-level anticheat that can access all files on your system, and persists even when you uninstall the game. They should either remove the singleplayer tag from their game or remove the anticheat requirement.
Renaissance Kingdom Wars Demo - Liked it - but not sure what I think of this one. The art style is a bit clunky, I mean it's light years ahead of what I could do but still. It seems to be a combination of a 4x and a Bannerlord or Total War game. It seems to have a lot of gameplay aspects and considerations. It has an expansive and fairly detailed overworld map that looks nice, town management, and also tactical real-time battles with a lot of units on the screen at once. I played about 20 minutes and was overwhelmed but intrigued. On the fence about it.
Millennia Demo - Loved it - This one is like Civ 6 or Humankind, but I think I might enjoy it more than both of those. I like the look and feel, and it does a few things differently than other 4x games. Like it allows limited unit stacking, and you can choose how much technology to research before advancing to the next age. And in fact advancing to the next age has a few options, like if you have defeated X enemy units you have some sort of Bloodthirsty option for the next age rather than the normal Iron Age or whatever. I got through the 60-turn time limit and wanted more.