Publishing platform indie.io will be on hand at gamescom and PAX West in the coming weeks, and it’s bringing six games for people to try out in person. But if you’re not one of the lucky people who can be there yourself, don’t worry: all six games have free demos you can play on Steam right now, no badge or ticket required.
As tends to be the case with indie.io, their selection of games covers a wide range of genres. There’s everything from a cozy vineyard château builder to a brutal turn-based roguelite RPG. There’s a little something for all kinds of gamers, and you can try out all of them right now.
Monster Park Tycoon
If you watched IGN’s recent Indie Loop showcase, you would have seen this game under another name. Formerly called Monster Zoo Tycoon, it unveiled its new name on August 10, but the dev team and core gameplay remain the same. In Monster Park Tycoon from developer OverPowered Team, you build and manage a monster park where visitors can come see a variety of strange and terrifying abominations. But there’s a twist: your park is a front for a cult. Not a very smart cult, at that.
In order to expand your park, you’ll need to trick and capture your guests using traps disguised as park props. Once you’ve got them, you can either feed them to your monsters, brainwash them to turn them into cultists, or sacrifice them to gain Faith and unlock favors from your Dark Lord.
Different monsters require different diets (like brains, blood, or souls), conditions for their exhibits, and behaviors that can become an issue if you ignore them. As your number of monsters grows, it’s inevitable that some of them will break free of their confinement, which is when all hell breaks loose. So you’ll have to control the chaos as you try to grow both your park and your cult in this darkly funny management sim.
Monster Park Tycoon has a brand-new demo available on Steam that marks the first time anyone outside the dev team has been able to play it.
Dunebound Tactics
In this roguelite, you’ll engage in tactical turn-based combat as you try to lead a band of survivors across a perilous desert in search of a new home. Your ship is fragile and your access to an all-important resource called Elios is limited. As you travel across the dunes, you’ll gather Elios from quests, from the bodies of defeated enemies, or if things get truly desperate, from sacrificing your crew members.
This is a roguelite, so you’re expected to fail. A lot. But each run builds on the ones before it. Each time a caravan is destroyed, you’ll start again with a new one. But you can find the wreck of the previous caravan, which can reward you with modules to empower your crew or even survivors who were part of your previous run.
Your crew has a roster of 15 classes with 16 unique traits that determine their skills, stats, and abilities. Combat takes place on a grid, where cover is available but the terrain is fully destructible. So you can mold that terrain to your advantage and use it to outwit your enemies.
Dunebound Tactics was featured during Steam Next Fest, and afterward its demo was rebuilt based on player feedback. In developer Terahard Ltd.’s own words, “If you haven’t played the demo recently, it’s not the demo you remember.” You can play the new and improved demo on Steam.
We Took That Trip
Quite a tonal departure from the first two entries on this list, We Took That Trip from developer Lucito Loquito is a calm and relaxing road trip game. There are no timers or deadlines, no great quest that needs to be completed. It’s just you and your cat traveling in a van and meeting new people.
There are three game modes to choose from: Story, Zen, and Background. Story Mode tells a heartwarming tale of friendship, loss, and reunion. Zen is just about the vibe, going for a ride with no real goal in mind. And Background is an AFK mode that takes care of the driving for you, so you can just enjoy the visuals and lo-fi soundtrack.
Each trip is procedurally generated and lasts as long as you choose, so every trip is different. There are points of interest scattered across your route, like gas stations, stores, and lookout towers, where you’ll meet people and hear their stories. But the focus is always the road and your Microbus, which you customize both the interior and exterior of with paint, stickers, and other decorations.
If you’re looking for a peaceful way to de-stress after a long day, you can check out the demo on Steam.
Cozy Builder
The peaceful vibes continue with the aptly named Cozy Builder, a sandbox building sim from Pangea Game Studios where you’ll start from scratch and restore Vineyard Valley to its former glory. You’ll use modular architectural pieces to create your château and harvest grapes, herbs, and wildflowers to create your own wines and other goods to share with the townsfolk or sell to continue funding your château.
There are tons of customization options for your château, including a variety of artwork and furniture for the interior and gardens, terraces, and greenhouses for the exterior. You can connect the greenhouse to your home, giving you a place to nurture flowers and collect rare plants.
You can do all of this solo or build a shared space with your friends in multiplayer, giving each of you the chance to show off your creativity. The demo has been getting updated throughout the summer to add new features, like one-click item moving in destruct mode and full key rebinding. You can try it out for yourself on Steam.
Mayday: The Survival Island
This open-world survival crafting game from developer Pequi Studios sees you wake up alone on an island after a mysterious crash. You’re injured, disoriented, and surrounded by untamed wilderness, so you’ll have to find a way to sustain yourself and survive. To do that, you’ll need to gather resources, craft tools, hunt wild animals, catch fish, grow crops, and build a homestead that can sustain you while you try to figure out what happened to you.
As it turns out, the island you washed up on is one of 24 that make up an archipelago, and your adventure will take you to all of them, each of which has different environments, resources, and hidden treasures. So you’ll need to continuously upgrade your tools and figure out how to adapt to each island’s challenges.
There aren’t any timed objectives or linear paths, so you decide the pace at which the story unfolds. If you want to spend hours building up your base, raising animals, and tending crops, you can do that. Or you can just find what you need to keep surviving and move on to the next part of the story, it’s up to you.
That story of Mayday: The Survival Island is focused on the mysteries of the island and how you ended up there. You’ll find strange symbols, magical totems, and fragments of a lost civilization that hint these islands are more than meets the eye. And the more you explore, the more you’ll question if ending up here was an accident and if escape is even possible. You can get a taste of all this with the free Steam demo.
Esports Manager 2026
The last game on the list is the only one that’s already had its full release, but you can still play a free demo on Steam. Esports Manager 2026 from developer Neurona Games released in July and had a successful launch, peaking at more than 10,000 concurrent players and landing on Steam’s Popular New Games list.
The game is exactly what the title says: a management sim where you control the day-to-day operation of an esports organization. You’ll scout players, sign staff, manage contracts, develop talent, grow your brand, and lead your team in tournaments against the best of the best. You can take over an existing organization or build your own from scratch, and you can recruit and develop real esports players.
During tournaments, you’ll lead your team in Simulation Mode, where you control your team’s tactics and react to in-game events in real time. A major content update recently landed that rebuilds the loan system, reworks the maps in Simulation Mode, and allows retiring players to return as coaches and analysts.
The update was accompanied by a 25% discount that will last until September 8, so if you’re interested, now’s the time to try out the demo and see if it’s for you.
