Leafborn Demo: Steam Next Fest 10,000 Leaves Roguelite

Leafborn (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the capsule key art.

Honestly, Leafborn has the best silhouette of this Steam Next Fest. You play a body made of more than 10,000 leaves, and it moves like it: it streams, bursts, reforms and glides across floating islands while you shred robots draining the world's life. It is a fast 3D action roguelite from Green Cat Games, a three person team based in Türkiye, and the free Leafborn demo has been live on Steam since October 16, 2026. The full game is listed as Coming soon. App ID 4247440, Windows only, no price yet.

The account behind it summed up the vibe in a Japanese post on X that pulled about 147k impressions: to be honest, in this game just moving around is ridiculously fun. Same.

Open the clip on X if the embed does not load. Cut from the official Leafborn Gameplay trailer.

What is Leafborn?

The Steam page pitches it as a fast paced action game where you command a being made of thousands of leaves. You travel through Canopy, a universe of floating islands, find new forms and abilities, and fight the Nulls, invading robots that came to drain the world of its life energy. The store line I like most: survival comes not from defense but from offense.

What the store lists as the core loop:

• Command a shapeshifting swarm of more than 10,000 leaves. Jump, shapeshift and glide with a fluid body.
• Forms rewrite your abilities. Become a tornado that sends enemies flying, or a saw that cuts straight through them.
• Every run starts from scratch, progress stays. Upgrades between runs unlock forms, expand the loot pool and open new routes.
• Tear invading robots apart. Read their moves and hit first.

Steam players tag it Action Roguelike, Roguelite, Fast-Paced, Stylized, 3D Platformer, Robots, Nature, Parkour, Third Person and Cute. No Horror tag, no content descriptors, and no AI disclosure on the store pages we checked for the full game or the demo.

The leaf body is the whole art direction

Here is why it reads so well. The silhouette is never fixed. At rest you slump into a little pile of leaves, at speed you become a green ribbon, and in a fight you swell into whatever form you picked. A dev reply on X explained that each leaf is simulated: it springs to a slot on the body mesh and gets pushed around by force fields like wind or a tornado, on CPU threads and GPU instancing. No flocking tricks. You can feel that in the little details, like the way the body slumps into a soft pile of leaves when you stand still.

Leafborn (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the tornado screenshot.

The palette is cute but sharp: saturated grass, soft blue sky, warm clay and rust on the robots, then that bright leaf green cutting through all of it. The Nulls are chunky riveted machines with round heads and little porthole faces, so you clock them instantly against the soft nature stuff. One reviewer said it reminded them of playing Crash Bandicoot as a kid. I get it. It is giving Saturday morning, with way more particles.

How combat feels in the demo

The demo is built around offense. Your basic attack is a dash, and your skills spend health when they connect, so a run is a constant trade between damage and safety. One Japanese reviewer pointed out that you do not lose HP on a miss, which makes it hard to tell at first whether enemies or your own skills are draining you. A player on X loved moving around but felt the punch lacked the weight of the dash and slam. Fair notes, and the dev clearly reads them.

Leafborn (Steam). Hover for a Voidge draft sketch inspired by a fragment of the Nulls Camp screenshot.

That screenshot shows the structure well: a Nulls Camp quest asking you to beat back a wave, a stage bar climbing from Hard toward Very Hard, and a leaf shaped wheel for your skills. At the end of each level you can visit Tavi and trade the Raw Flow you collect for permanent upgrades, per an earlier Steam update. The dev also confirmed wind tunnels for fast travel between areas.

What our clip shows

Our clip keeps three takes of pure play from the official Gameplay trailer on Steam. First, the leaf body dashes through a robot camp and lands a big SMASH hit. Second, it bursts into loose leaves over a floating island and drifts across the sky. Third, a messy brawl near a giant robot, with the swarm reforming mid hit. No menus, no logo cards.

What is in the Next Fest demo?

The Leafborn demo is free on Steam for Windows, with achievements and full controller support, and a gamepad is recommended. It supports 12 languages, including Brazilian Portuguese and Turkish. Steam Next Fest runs October 19 to 26, 2026, and our Next Fest demo checklist can help you plan the queue. On October 21, the team shipped a small demo update based on feedback: on screen hit indicators so you can see where attacks come from, small difficulty tweaks and performance improvements.

Minimum specs are a GTX 1660 or RX 5500 XT, 8 GB of RAM and 3 GB of storage on Windows 10 or 11.

Who makes Leafborn?

Hasan Tarhan started building leaf physics simulations in 2022, and his short tech demo video took off before it was ever a game, per the official press page. He now codes Leafborn with 3D artists Alperen Altıkulaç and Aysu Hoşcan. The game account on X (@LeafbornGame, about 3.3k followers) posts and replies in English, Turkish and Japanese, and the press page lists coverage from outlets like Famitsu, 80 Level and AUTOMATON.

Is the demo worth it?

Demo reviews on Steam read Positive, with 39 of 42 recommending it as of about 11:00 BRT on October 21, around 93%. Players praise the art style, the gliding and the leaf transitions, and one called it a stunning roguelike that made them forget it was a roguelike. The honest knocks: sound design that needs work, some stutter when loading new areas, the character occasionally clipping through the floor, and a wish for more enemy variety. The full game has no reviews yet.

My take: if you care about how a game moves and looks, download this one first. If you want deep build crafting on day one, wait for the full release. Different energy from the physics chaos in KILLSEC, same fest, both worth a slot.

Image credits & rights

Images on this page are hotlinks from the official Steam store assets for Leafborn, used with respect for their copyright.

• Leafborn on Steam
• Leafborn Demo on Steam
• Leafborn (@LeafbornGame) on X
• Leafborn official website and press page
• Screenshot sources remain on the Steam CDN (capsule and store screenshots for app 4247440). Voidge hosts only purple crop-inspired draft sketches for hover and fallback, plus the short blog clip.