Browse by year

Games released in 2026

320 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.

Browse the reviews

320 reviews

Soulmask

A survival game where you recruit tribespeople who keep working while you're logged out — a genuinely original idea, attached to a 1.0 launch so rough the developers published a public 90-day plan to fix it.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Soulmask

STAMPED

A psychological-horror bureaucracy sim that asks you to cross-check contradictory paperwork against a company terminal and stamp APPROVED or REJECTED — Papers, Please's mechanic wearing a haunted-office coat, from a developer who shipped two other small horror games the same fortnight.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of STAMPED

Starvester

A solo-developed space factory incremental with a five-hour campaign and a clean ending instead of an endless ladder. The idea is refreshing; the execution runs out of steam exactly when the prestige system should be taking over.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Starvester

StoneAge Idle Adventure

Netmarble folds its 25-year-old dinosaur-taming franchise into an idle deck-builder, and the 24-unit battles are genuinely more tactical than the "auto-play RPG" label suggests — right up until the real-time PvP mode starts pricing in who's willing to spend.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of StoneAge Idle Adventure

Swordmancy

A solo developer's entry into the Vampire Survivors mould gives its weapons a personality of their own, and arrives with a genuinely large unlock list for a two-day-old free release — the question this first look can't yet answer is how it plays at hour twenty.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Swordmancy

Take That Hill

A digital adaptation of a real tabletop primer used by Fight Club International's professional military wargaming network — a 20-minute hex-and-counter hill assault built to teach the genre's core mechanics, shipped day one with zero user reviews and no achievement data to check its claims against.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Take That Hill

The Darkened Northern Lights

A solo Finnish developer's family-friendly storybook RPG released on Steam yesterday — gentle turn-based dice combat, gnomes and fire foxes to free, a garden to tend, and a documented ascension from folk tale to playable systems — reviewed on launch-day evidence, with an achievement spread that resolves to roughly three reporting accounts.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of The Darkened Northern Lights

The Dead Await

A genre mashup its own fans call an "uncut diamond" — Fallout-flavoured post-apocalyptic exploration, Darkest Dungeon-style combat and a real card-battler deckbuilding layer — whose lifetime review score is dragged down mostly by complaints from over a year before its actual 1.0 release.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of The Dead Await

THE REF - Football Referee Simulator

A football sim that puts you on the whistle instead of the ball — full 3D matches where every foul, dive, card, penalty and VAR review is your call, marked out of ten afterward, with a four-league career and 1-4 player online co-op where friends run the lines. Launched into Early Access 6 August 2026 from a solo Swedish developer.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of THE REF - Football Referee Simulator

The Unfamiliars

A short, atmospheric first-person horror sim from a solo developer with an established following, whose genuinely effective scares and Night of the Living Dead homage were nearly undercut by real launch bugs — since addressed by nine patches in the game's first week alone.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of The Unfamiliars

Tomb of Chacal

A budget first-person stealth horror game that drops a lone archaeologist into a Mayan tomb full of patrolling "Guardians," built on a demo that spent over a year gathering feedback before the ten-level full release launched with no user reviews yet to check it against.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Tomb of Chacal

Whack-A-Monster

A three-hour clicker RPG that is better designed than it needs to be, including the rare courtesy of building the autoclicker into the game instead of expecting you to install one. The problem isn't the length or the price — it's that the skill tree eventually out-damages every weapon you spent the game collecting.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Whack-A-Monster

Whispers of the Eyeless

A dark fantasy strategy RPG that flips Darkest Dungeon's premise — you're the cult building up to destroy the hamlet, not the party defending it — wrapped in some of the most striking art in the genre and undercut by a tutorial that still can't explain its own systems more than a year after launch.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Whispers of the Eyeless

Witchspire

An open-world witch adventure that swaps the usual survival toolbox for spellwork — spirit jumps instead of ladders, conjured forests instead of chopped trees, familiars instead of tames. Seven weeks into Early Access, the magic system is the best reason to be here; the world around it hasn't caught up yet.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Witchspire

Yellowcreek Stories - The Cabin Watcher

A first-person, no-combat stealth slasher where a masked killer hunts by noise, light and movement rather than a script — built for one intense sitting, released day one with a single verified user review and a demo that had already been public for five and a half months.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Yellowcreek Stories - The Cabin Watcher

Zero To Hero Idle

A dad taught himself to code so his 8-year-old son could have a game where he "finds cool swords and fights monsters forever" — a genuinely sweet origin story wrapped around a standard-issue idle RPG that its own early players are split on once the swords run out.

6.5 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Zero To Hero Idle

BrickSpace

A solo-developer take on Breakout that swaps the usual flat 2D field for a first-person, zero-gravity paddle view across 32 fixed levels, backed by a sixteen-symbol power-up alphabet and a purely local high-score list. Released 5 August 2026 with no Steam achievements, no user reviews and no press coverage yet.

6 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of BrickSpace

Corner Market

An Early Access idle shop sim built to be ignored — it lives in the corner of your monitor, restocks its own shelves and asks for a glance every twenty minutes. Charming, three dollars, and currently carrying a save bug that can wipe a 76-hour store.

6 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Corner Market

Cultivation Idle

A cheap, three-week-old Early Access idle RPG built around the Chinese xianxia cultivation fantasy — Qi Refining, spirit fields, forging flying swords — patched almost daily by its small studio, and still rough enough that its own early players are split on whether the grind serves the theme or just gets in its way.

6 / 10

Reviewed

Read review of Cultivation Idle

Other years