Demo Disc #16: The 10 Best Demos of 2024
Season’s greetings, digital nomads!
This is it, the final Demo Disc of 2024. As I suggested might be the case last week, it’s a slightly different affair from usual. Rather than rounding up the demos of the week, I’ll be ranking the best demos of the year (well, the last three-and-a-bit-months if I’m honest, but let’s not be pedantic).
You know how this goes. I list my ten favourite demos of 2024. You email me explaining why the list is wrong. I have a crisis of confidence and give up on writing about video games entirely, leaving my house and abandoning my family for a new life dry stone walling in the Lake District.
Before all that though, two quick points of order. First, there are a few demos that probably deserve to be in the top ten, but cannot be formally listed because their demos are not currently playable. I don’t see much point in (re) recommending a demo you can’t play, but I have included these games as honourable mentions prior to the list proper. All games mentioned honourably are available to buy on Steam, and there are links to each game's relevant Steam page below if you fancy doing that.
Second, I’d like to thank you all for reading Demo Disc this year, and wish you all a Merry Christmas and an excellent end to 2024. I hope you found something to ask Santa for through the newsletter, and if not, maybe this final ranking will spur some last-minute gift ideas. Either way, hopefully you’ve enjoyed some of the less nonsensical words I’ve scribbled in between the links to obscure Steam pages.
Demos of the Year: Honorable Mentions
Wormhole
Sadly disqualified from a formal ranking because the demo is no longer playable, this wonderful elaboration on Snake nonetheless wormed its way into my heart earlier this year. Its chaotic action and impeccable retro aesthetic made it probably the most exciting find of October’s Steam Next Fest. The full game is currently less than six pounds on Steam, which is a bargain if ever I saw one.
30 Birds
Likewise delivering a fantastic demo that has since flown the coop, this kaleidoscopic, effortlessly cool adventure game about playing weird musical instruments and collecting kooky avians in a society wrapped around a giant floating cube is one of the most unusual experiences I’ve had this year. You can grab the full game here for fifteen Great British Pounds.
Grunn
The demo that helped me crack the newsletter’s probably quite annoying title formats has also gone to the great jewel case in the sky. But this Lynchian first-person gardening sim remains one of my favourite discoveries from this whole endeavour. The full game’s just over a tenner on Steam, if you fancy giving it a whirl.
The Best Demos of 2024
10. STRAFTAT
There’s an argument that STRAFTAT should be honourably mentioned alongside Wormhole and 30 Birds, since its demo is also no longer available to play on Steam. However, the full game is entirely free, so you can basically demo it yourself with no monetary outlay. Hence, putting it at the bottom of the list seems like fair compromise.
In any case, this anarchic 1v1 shooter pits you and another player against each other across dozens of daft, creative maps in tight-knit deathmatches. The action is frantic, the weapons are weird, and it switches things up at such an incredible pace that it's impossible to become bored. If you can get a pal to play this with you, I guarantee it’ll be one of the most fun experiences you’ll have in a video game this year.
9. Mindlock: The Apartment
I really jived with the demo for this adventure game about the world’s most pathetic man at war with his own apartment. It has the wry humour and surreal puzzles you’d expect from a more classically-styled adventure, but there’s also a darker streak running through the experience that refreshes those ideas. It’s also surprisingly well written and acted, and has a lot of fun asides that play with different art styles.
Download the Mindlock: The Apartment demo here.
8. DoubleWe
Delivering what is probably my favourite concept of any demo I played this year, DoubleWe is a social stealth game where you’re tasked with tracking down and killing your own clone. Cue a series of thrilling procedurally generated cat-and-mouse games where you must sniff out your doppelganger among crowds of civilians before they can get the drop on you first. The demo is procedurally generated, making it fairly replayable, and it wraps up in a manner that makes it pleasingly self-contained. A great showcase all-around.
Download the DoubleWe demo here.
7. Day of the Shell
I still can’t quite believe that Day of The Shell works. A one-person turn-based tactics game? What’s next, a one-person zombie survival sim? Yet from this colossally dumb concept, Day of the Shell conjures electrifying turn-based gunfights. The way it builds frenetic combat puzzles out of a few components is remarkable, with you dashing between cover as it crumbles beneath enemy gunfire as you try to outflank groups of numerically superior opponents. It also has the best implementation of a ricochet sound effect this year.
Download the Day of the Shell demo here.
6. River Towns
Crossbreeding Tetris with Dorfromantik is truly the work of an evil genius, and River Towns is as devilishly compulsive as you might expect from such a monstrous chimera. Frogsong Studios’ city building puzzler has you placing tetromino-shaped buildings to establish riverside settlements that rewilds the surrounding landscape at they expand. Not only River Towns look and feel fantastic, its bespoke demo afford plenty of room to explore how it elaborates upon its premise.
Download the River Towns demo here.
5. The Stone of Madness
The Game Kitchen’s take on real-time-tactics has just about everything going for it. A captivating setting in the form an 18th century Spanish monastery turned insane asylum, vivid, eerie line-drawn art, precisely crafted stealth scenarios that require careful teamwork from your characters to crack, and some properly creepy ghosts that can quite literally drive your party mad.
Download The Stone of Madness’ demo here.
4. JUICE
JUICE is by far the shortest demo to appear on this list, but the ten minutes of gaming it offers are some of the most striking and disturbing I’ve experienced this year. It’s a hyper-stylised “first-person slaughterer” that depicts an alien invasion from two very different perspectives. The demo was absent from Steam for a while following Next Fest, but has since been reinstated. So if you missed JUICE the first time, ensure to give it a shake now.
3. Scarlet Deer Inn
“A hand-embroidered adventure game reminiscent of Obsidian’s Pentiment? That’ll be a fun lark” is what I thought when I downloaded Scarlet Deer Inn. And for the first twenty minutes it was more or less that, a convincing depiction of medieval life with sharp writing and great characters. But then Scarlet Deer Inn turned into something else entirely, and I went from pleasantly distracted to utterly gripped. An incredibly accomplished demo for a game shaping up to be something special.
Download the Scarlet Deer Inn demo here.
2. Lorn’s Lure
The first ever Demo of the Week remains one of the best games I’ve discovered through the newsletter. Lorn’s Lure a climbing game that sees you scaling the colossal industrial ruins of some forsaken future civilisation. Its intricate platforming challenges are enormously satisfying to unpick, while the eerie atmosphere of its subterranean spaces is unlike anything else I’ve played this year—demo or otherwise.
Download the Lorn’s Lure demo here.
1. Sektori
The only demo I feel compelled to replay whenever I think about it, Sektori is without a doubt the best unfinished chunk of game to grace the newsletter with its presence. A scintillating, hypnotic twin-stick shooter where you blast abstract shapes into abstract smithereens as the arena itself morphs around you, Sektori is an exquisite evocation of gaming as mathematics transformed into art.