Steam Next Fest

Five dated changes

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What the June week actually was

Next Fest demos are easy to blur into one another because the festival itself is a storefront event. This one had a single clock. You could install app 4597250 on the Monday morning and keep the same install through the first close a week later. The demo was not a limited-time score attack or a chapter select. It was the puzzle set as it stood that week, with the heroes who were already in. It also finished in the top 5 most-played single-player demos of that Next Fest.

The practical difference from the full game is the app. Searching the main app, 499170, during the festival would not drop you into the demo. The demo had its own app, 4597250. When the festival ended, the extra four days continued that same app, not a new download with a new id. If a friend says they played after Next Fest, the Friday morning close is the last hour that still counts.

Times are Pacific Time. The opening hour is also 5pm UTC. The later close and the Friday extension are 10am Pacific. Plan from that morning hour if you are reconstructing whether a save could still have been made.

The Thursday cast and puzzle drop

On 19 June the demo grew. The Bard and the Druid joined the roles you could play, and the puzzle count moved from whatever the Monday build held to more than one hundred puzzles. That is a content update inside an already public app, not a second festival. If you started on the 15th and came back on the 20th, the new rooms and the two new people are the change you would have felt.

The Bard’s lute was assembled from 1300 samples recorded with Fredrik Bock in 2022. In the demo week that fact matters because the Bard was not in the opening hours. Anyone who only played before the 19th never heard that lute in this build. The Druid arrives in the same drop. His credited work includes X-Men ’97 and Hades II, and his puzzle verb is an accidental transmute of friends and objects. Both additions sit in the north crew, the hauling party, so the midweek demo is also the first time that party’s roster matched the six names used at launch.

A larger puzzle set changes how you should talk about “the demo.” A Monday impression and a Friday impression are not the same sample. The Monday file is the smaller set. The file after the 19th includes the new roles and the rooms that pushed the count over one hundred. When someone quotes a demo length, ask which side of that Thursday they mean.

The branch, the save, and the closed app

On 10 July a public-testing branch opened for the demo. It did not ask for a password. The options on that branch are a Very Performance preset, separate volume sliders, vsync, a frame cap, antialiasing, and a control for dynamic text language. Shader model 6.5 is not part of it. Those options belong to the demo branch. They are not a minimum spec for the October Windows build, and they are not a promise that the full game hides the same preset under the same name.

On 21 July the demo was still available, and progress carries into the Steam release of the full game. That carry is for the Steam version. It does not move a demo save onto Switch 2 or PlayStation 5. By the week of the October unlock, the demo could no longer be installed. A save you already kept can still carry over, and a new player still cannot install the demo. Those are different facts. One is about a file you already have. The other is about whether a new player can still install the build.

The demo cannot be installed now. The full game is app 499170, and the October date belongs to that app. A kept June save is the only demo file that can still matter, and only on the Steam release.

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