Game Quest: The Backlog Battler (PC) Demo Preview

Never before have I been so immediately and thoroughly convinced that an entire game was developed for the sole purpose of calling me out. Game Quest: The Backlog Battler, developed and published by Nic Taylor, is the first such game I’ve encountered. Game Quest has a demo that’s available as part of the October 2025 Steam Next Fest, and I felt utterly compelled to download that demo and have a look at it as soon as I read about Game Quest’s premise. In Game Quest, your backlog of unplayed Steam games has come to life, and they’re all trying to kill you.

You find yourself dropped into a very basic combat arena. The games you own on Steam that you’ve played for more than two hours will appear on either side of the arena; these games serve as spectators who will watch your futile attempts to fight for your life. Your most-played Steam games have a chance to appear as your allies and fight alongside you. Games that you either haven’t played at all or have played for under two hours will continually spawn and attack you. Games that have high Metacritic scores are given ranged attacks and the ability to fly.

You’re armed with only a keyboard and a mouse. Every game in your library – whether it’s a spectator, an ally, or an enemy – is physically represented as a floppy disk, which I absolutely adore. You’ll have to fight until you’ve destroyed (i.e., properly played) every game in your backlog or die trying. What I think is a fantastic touch is that you’re not limited to fighting your own game backlog: You can also enter the arena to battle the backlogs owned by anyone on your Steam friends list. Out of burning curiosity, I compared fighting Mike’s backlog to battling my own.

When you die (and you will die, quite frequently), you’re given stats about the game that landed the fatal blow. These stats include the game’s age, who developed and published it, its Metacritic score, and how long you’ve spent playing it. There’s also an announcer (presumably Nic Taylor himself) who will mock you at the start of each attempt you make to battle through a game backlog. The announcer’s quips are both really funny and great at instilling me with the desire to fight on just to prove him wrong. I don’t know if I’ll ever manage to do that, but I’ve enjoyed each attempt.

I might as well address the floppy disk-shaped elephant in the room now: Game Quest, in its current state, is obviously in a very early stage of development. Game Quest is currently scheduled to launch into Steam Early Access in “Q1 2026” as of the time of writing. An Early Access launch is probably for the best, since Game Quest clearly needs quite a lot more time in the metaphorical oven before it’s even remotely ready to launch. That being said, however, I’m extremely impressed by Game Quest’s demo, and I’ll definitely keep an eye on how its development progresses.