I did not expect the most promising turn-based tactics game of Steam Next Fest to star the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but here we are - Related to into, star, my, makers, ninja

How do you turn an ant nest into a factory? A chat with the makers of Microtopia

Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.

Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors. Harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies "think" while meeting expectations for management sims.

While you can direct ants individually, the game is all about laying down pheromone trails that tie resources or facilities together. While also dictating the behaviour of the ants that follow them. Echoing academic research into how ant nests may resemble computer networks - aka the "anternet" - Microtopia portrays these trails as circuits, with logic gates that, say, limit how many ants can join a particular trail, or send an equal number of ants down each branch in a forking path.

Developers Cordyceps stumbled on the "anternet" concept care of a Kurzgesagt documentary series. And were immediately captivated by how scent trails "naturally" organise the behaviour of individual ants. "'Explorer' ants wander around randomly until they find food or another point of interest," they told me over email, responding appropriately as a group. "Once they do, they follow their own scent trail back to the colony, reinforcing the path for other ants to follow.

"The more successful trips ants make. The stronger the trail becomes," the developers continued. "As food gets depleted, the scent fades, and the process naturally redirects resources elsewhere. In essence, this behavior functions like an algorithm, where simple rules lead to complex, adaptive solutions, similar to how slime molds find efficient pathways. It seemed like the perfect match to replace this algorithm with player interaction." The idea of these being cyborg ants, meanwhile, stemmed from art director Floris Kaayk's old film project The Order Electrus. A fictional documentary about mechanical insects spawned by derelict industrial areas.

As an occasional fan of factory sims, I've relished being Microtopia's tycoon hivemind. While there's a lot in the game you'll recognise from other sims, with stockpiles, workshops, and smelters forming hierarchies of increasingly specialised building commodities, the 'pheromone logic' both puts a spin on the fundamentals and. Invites reflection on the conventions of factory management games.

Before I get into all that, a couple of more drive-by observations. Firstly, the controls are nicely elastic: once you've pegged out a pheromone trail, you can seize nodes and threads and drag them about, which makes it easy both to adjust your factory layout, and. To confuse yourself by doing so.

Secondly, one critical structural element is that your ants are mortal, with different categories of worker having different lifespans. Accordingly, your scent trails will eventually develop a grisly embroidery of bleached and curled-up husks. If you're fond of factory sims, this might sound like a recipe for frustration, but in practice, you can set things up so that newly grown ants join your networks continuously, and feeding your queen regularly enough to maintain your population is an enjoyable challenge.

If Microtopia stands up well as a genre piece, what makes it intriguing as a development story is how Cordyceps' understanding of ant behaviour has worked with or against those genre expectations. To say nothing of the idea of ants as machines.

Sometimes, the game's mingled inspirations agreed with one another. Take those worker categories. They're not just germane to the needs of a factory sim, but derived from "ant castes. A feature unique to eusocial insects where members of the same species have a different appearance from each other". The devs also wove their campaign around the real-life process of queens producing gynes, or younger queens, to fly out and form colonies in other biomes.

At the project's most ambitious. Cordyceps experimented with, as it were, letting the ants take over the simulation. "For quite some time we initially went with making the game revolve around realistic ants and went through quite a few iterations," they noted. "Though from a gameplay perspective they were required to construct buildings, smelt iron and the like." They also thought about giving the ants "culture and intelligence", a fascinating prospect, though I'm not sure what these terms mean in the context - how does one define or measure the culture or intellect of an insect collective?

Ultimately. However, the devs decided to set limits on the antsiness of the ants for practical purposes. Microtopia's scent trails consist of straight paths between nodes, for example, because real-life 'anternets' are too "organic and painterly" for humans to follow, bulging and. Scribbling through soil, bark and leaf. "It allowed for easier adjustments and made larger networks clear and comprehensible," Cordyceps commented.

Cordyceps also decided against martial elements. Or simulating real-life clashes between rival ant colonies or other insects. "Even though robot soldier ants would be very cool to have, Microtopia is not a game about destruction," they explained. "Building the inner workings of a colony takes time and is a very involved process. After hours of work, it wouldn't be fun to have to start over after some rude neighbor had to come and raid your larvae."

While I don't think Microtopia needs a conflict element. This does feel like a slight missed opportunity - I can't help thinking of the scientists who've used Age Of Empires as a reference point for 'invader' ant behaviour. I'm also curious about how the element of competition might have affected Microtopia's portrayal of scent trails as algorithms: apparently, certain species of ant can hijack the trails laid by ants from other nests. Rather than hunting down food data themselves. Hacker ants, perhaps?

Above all, though, I'm interested to discuss what it means for our understanding of ants to portray these creatures and their homes as motherboards or factories. With all the associated cultural baggage. How does bolting together all these ideas contribute to our ability to live alongside them?

Cordyceps hope that Microtopia resists the "more classical view of ants" as "pests", and presents them instead as "industrious" beings - "an interconnected structure of different ranks of ants within a colony. All cooperating with such grace, as if they were one big organism." But it's not just about modulating our attitudes toward ants. On another level, Microtopia is, of course, parodying the effects of the industriousness of human beings. It unfolds against the backdrop of a sprawling neon landfill, and the ants themselves are pieces of self-propagating electronic waste.

For Cordyceps, Microtopia "is a satire in a way, where even in an environment polluted by humankind, life will find a way to survive and thrive." At once appreciative and cautionary, it "showcases the incredible achievements of nature and holds a mirror to our own human society, in both its successes and. Failures."

It turns out that the Shawn Levy directed, and potentially Ryan Gosling led, Star Wars movie will be the first one set post Rise of Skywalker.

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I did not expect the most promising turn-based tactics game of Steam Next Fest to star the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but here we are

We all change as we age, but one thing I did not necessarily expect for myself in the downward slope of my 30s is that I would become a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles guy. I am a great believer, however, in embracing destiny—so when I saw a new TMNT turn-based tactics game demo in Steam Next Fest, what could I say but "Cowabunga"?

Tactical Takedown (previously featured in our PC Gaming Show) is almost like a board game take on the series. Turning battles against waves of Foot Clan ninjas into miniatures clattering into each other on an ever-shifting battlefield grid. Each turn, you can spend your turtle's action points across an arsenal of abilities, trying to keep enemy numbers manageable and. Move quickly through the level as areas fall away behind you. Why the streets of New York keep materialising and dematerialising as you fight I don't know, you'll have to take that up with the city council.

The demo levels only let you control a single turtle at a time, and. It seems like that will be the case in the final game too. That does seem an odd choice for one of the most iconic teams in pop culture, but you certainly don't feel lacking in tactical options. As you'd expect, the turtles are highly mobile, able to leap over foes multiple times each turn—that's key to lining up perfect uses of your offensive abilities, which on top of simply dealing damage give you tools such as pushing enemies back (potentially crashing into each other or sailing over the edge of the battlefield), "juggling" them (a stun that also sets them up for bonus damage), or immobilising them.

Limited but effective animation makes each of these turns particularly charming. With the semi-static miniatures switching between different poses depending on how things play out—your turtle flipping to a heroic leaping pose when you jump, and ninjas going into cartoonish recoiling poses as they're struck.

Each turtle's moveset creates its own unique playstyle. Leonardo, for example, can gain either a damage bonus or a free dodge when he knocks an enemy out, based on which attack finished them. Allowing him to play much more dangerously than the others—either chain-killing through crowds, or picking off weak enemies to let him avoid the hits of more powerful ones. Donatello is the opposite, playing keep-away with AoE shoves, immobilising kunai throws, and electric bombs that create fields of hazardous terrain.

All four feel fun and interesting in their own ways—but as it stands. Not brilliantly balanced. Michelangelo, for example (who specialises in mobility and juggling skateboard dashes through lines of foes) is the turtle you start the demo with, and. His levels feel like an uphill battle. Leonardo and Donatello come in the second half, where things should be getting trickier, but instead they're a breeze to play, avoiding damage with ease and. Well-equipped to take out whole groups at once.

I think it's a sign that this is quite an early demo, with a load of kinks still to be worked out. On top of that character imbalance, a lot of ability tooltips simply don't do what they say they do (a poison attack actually being an ice attack, for example), leading to some annoying trial and error in a genre where you really want to have all the info at your fingertips.

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But it's a testament to how compelling the core strategy already is that those problems didn't really impede my fun. There's something particularly satisfying about its one-vs-many setup, particularly combined with the very simple enemy AI—you're constantly outsmarting the Foot Clan goons, and. They love putting themselves in spots that give you opportunities to punt them off a ledge or slam them into each other. Even if the classic turtle teamwork is missing, you otherwise do really feel like one of the turtles using their brains and agility to take on overwhelming odds.

With some time to smooth out those rough edges—currently the release date is just "TBA", so hopefully the team is allowing itself plenty—I think this'll be a really exciting tactics game. And the roughly hour long demo certainly left me wanting more. The currently inaccessible loadout screen is particularly tantalising, suggesting you'll be able to customise each of the turtles' abilities to suit different playstyles.

TMNT: Tactical Takedown's free demo is available now to try for yourself, but. Just make sure to play it before Steam Next Fest ends on March 3—that's when it'll be disappearing from the store.

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I played 83 Steam Next Fest demos and these are my top 5

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.

This was the biggest Next Fest 2025 surprise for me, a game I didn't really expect to do anything special. I figured that after Bomber Crew and then the sort-of-tired Spaceship Crew I'd seen everything developer Runner Duck had going. Except it seems like they've found the perfect theme for their game mechanics: Wasteland warfare. You build up your war rig and take it on the road, running down caravans of enemy cars and. Blowing them to pieces while keeping your own in running shape. You set up speed and steer, but also use your crew's special powers on foes while you micromanage the crew to repel boarders, put out fires, and. Make repairs.

If it were just that simple then I'd be interested but not impressed. The thing that clinched this as a top-5 demo for me is how the post-apocalyptic-badlands setting has potential for interesting variety in what you'll get to do. You'll escort valuable civilians from one point to another, take down marauding gangs, and conquer other crews' fortresses to expand your territory and demand tribute from them—all while trying to keep your previous conquests satisfied and. In line.

Skin Deep is a brilliant mess of a concept from a wildly diverse, veteran studio: Blendo Games. It's an immersive sim, and this is your job: You're the guy who gets put in frozen storage on a spaceship hauling valuables. If pirates take the ship, you get thawed out in your secret spot and take the ship back. You against an army of pirates. You have a pistol, but you have no shoes, so that kind of balances out. Blendo says it's a game where you "sneak, subvert, and sabotage to survive" which yeah. That's exactly right.

You can sabotage the security checkpoints to shock people. You can jump on a dude's back and choke him out. You can go outside a ship in your spacesuit and then blow out a window and watch everyone get sucked out and then casually float inside the ship and. Trigger the emergency shutters and laugh your ass off. You can walk on broken glass and get it stuck in your feet which sucks. You can free the ship's cats to help you. This is some real Blendo Games vintage is what I'm saying and I like it.

Shape of Dreams is a promising, yet subtly surprising. Mix of MOBA and action roguelike gameplay. It's something like an isometric Risk of Rain in format but with much more focused, combo-driven game mechanics. It's playable in roguelike runs alone or with friends, with your characters taking on more generalist roles if you're playing alone or specializing if you're playing with pals, as in a MOBA—tanking and. Crowd control suddenly become options when you've got buddies along. The characters themselves are weirdly varied in that way modern MOBA designs are, too: Lizard with a shotgun, knight in full plate, floating wizard fox. You know the drill.

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The gameplay is surprisingly smooth. Which is what really sells it. You've got standard attack and dash type movement you'd expect from action roguelikes, but. On top of that you're stacking and customizing a set of skills that you pick up along the way. Each of those gets its own slots for gems, all of which do weird stuff: Add a bonus to the attack every 10 seconds, or let you use it to steal life. Or blow you up for extra damage. I foresee some groups losing a month or more to playing this co-op when it releases.

My final two Next Fest 2025 favorites are both king related. They're also both in a similar genre and have similar mechanics, but pressed to choose between the two I wouldn't do it. Even the developers have recognized the similarities enough to offer a bundle of the two.

In 9 Kings, you're plopping down buildings and. Armies on the grid of your kingdom. You get to play one card, building or unit, from your hand each round before an enemy army attacks and. Your troops fight theirs in a little autobattle. 9 Kings is a deckbuilder of sorts, except your pool of cards is determined by your own chosen king's cards combined with those of the enemy kings you fight. Your job is to figure out how to combine your chosen card pool with the other guys' card pools to make an absolutely busted combo of some kind that snowballs out of all control and runs down armies until an enemy king reveals up and you whoop their butt in person.

It's a fun combination of limited time—you can only play one or two cards—with limited resources—you're not sure if you'll get more units. Enchantments for the units, buildings that buff over time, or towers that take down enemies. Layer on top of that the spice of roguelike life: Weird, run-defining artifacts that'll do stuff like spit out a ton of free units. Or fundamentally alter how a unit works. I think this one's going to be something special to watch for on release.

This second royal choice started a bit slow, but. It grew on me fast once I realized how it wanted me to play. In The King is Watching, you drop buildings from your little stable of cards, then use them to generate resources and units in real time. The twist? A little box on the map represents your king's gaze, and only the buildings actively under your attention do anything at all.

That's where it turns frantic, as balancing your resource incomes and. Unit production in real time is a kind of delicious chaos that few games pull off well. You have to figure out how to build a combination of units that can keep you defended while you get the piles of resources you need to build advanced buildings and climb your tech tree—oh, and find the resources in there somewhere to expand your gaze area and. Repair the walls and expand your army size.

You can even find random magic spells to throw at enemy waves, which are also interspersed with events that let you pick nice bonuses in addition to being comedic pixel fantasy versions of popular memes. There's a lot of character here that's really attractive, and I must recommend it.

Those were my top five, but here's one more for good measure: Cauldron is a turn-based RPG where you're a little witch and. Adventuring party who battle and win primarily through… minigames. It's an oddly compelling mix of filling out a big ol' tree of upgrades and playing funny minigames that'll appeal to the incremental-idle crowd and. The RPG crowd at the same time. To those of you who like the keywords I've dropped above this is guaranteed, absolute catnip.

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