Steam recently hosted the latest iteration of its popular Next Fest, a digital fair during which unreleased games -- mostly from smaller, independent developers -- publish demos to get onto fans' radars. With the event steadily having grown over the last couple of iterations, a substantial amount of studios are vying for attention and it's getting harder and harder to be noticed, especially for small sports-related games.
This makes it all the more surprising that bicycle racing game Wheel World is one of the big winners of this latest Steam Next Fest, making a jump in Wishlists. Wishlists are an important tool for indie games on Steam, as the feature allows users to put games on their personal Wishlist, giving them a notification whenever the title is released. Developers can use their number of Wishlists to gauge the audience's interest in their title -- and a strong Wishlist ranking is becoming more and more popular as a marketing tool, too.
Wheel World is being developed by Messhoff, the studio behind award-winning fencing game Nidhogg, and published by Annapurna Interactive.
Players take on the role of Kat, a young cyclist with a simple goal: saving the world. Players ride through the open-world setting and explore, seeking stolen legendary parts to mod their bicycle until they can ultimately perform The Great Shift ritual. As one uncovers more of the world and upgrades their trusty ride, they'll tackle everyone from quirky rivals to elite cycling teams in exciting races, where they'll need to squeeze every second out of their performance to win.
Whatever they do, an original soundtrack from successful indie label Italians Do It Better will be accompanying them on -- and off -- the road.
The Wheel World demo available on Steam does a fantastic job to showcase the possibilities of this title, though it also proves that the developer still has work to do on the technical front -- performance is not optimal for many testers and some suffer from glitches that hinder the experience.
Fortunately, the developers still have time to make optimizations before the game's release at some point in 2025.