Browse by year
320 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.
320 reviews
A party-based incremental RPG that hands you only the healer and makes that the whole point — 200-plus skill-tree nodes built around keeping a self-sufficient, self-important party alive, wrapped in a tight four-hour campaign that starts stronger than it finishes.
7.5 / 10
Overhype Studios' turn-based tactical RPG follow-up to the beloved Battle Brothers trades its predecessor's medieval mercenary band for a strike force fighting an unknown threat on a lawless sci-fi frontier — Very Positive on Steam and widely praised as a genuinely fresh spin on the XCOM formula, held back by a specific, restrictive supply system and timed-mission design that fans and critics alike agree feels at odds with careful tactical play.
7.5 / 10
A visually stunning metroidvania whose reviews split sharply on one specific mechanic — permanent health loss tied to the story — that several players call the moment the game turns from a favorite into a frustration, and others say isn't nearly as punishing as it's made out to be.
7.5 / 10
Barrel Smash Studios' two-person Early Access debut drowns the world and asks you to build a colony on whatever's still floating — rafts, sinking islands, shark attacks and a corporate conspiracy buried in scavenged bunkers, all wrapped around a Rimworld-flavoured survivor sim.
7.5 / 10
A co-op mining sim where the underground has no fixed layout, bolted onto a genuine factory-automation game — dig your own tunnels with a squad of up to four, then turn what you find into a production line with conveyor belts, robots, and delivery contracts.
7.5 / 10
Six years in Early Access, and the 1.0 landed this week. You play a broke shipbreaker with a loan and a flying coffin, building a ship out of salvage one bolt at a time. Nothing else does what it does — and its own most devoted players think it needed another year.
7.5 / 10
A properly uncompromising immersive sim — hack it, sneak it, or shoot it, in a grimy 2038 California run by a secret society. The most divisive thing in it is the save system, and that's not an oversight. It's the design.
7.5 / 10
A fully text-based, single-player MUD revival with Steam Workshop mod support — reviewed against its complete English sample plus a translated look at its small Chinese-language negative sample, whose UI complaints this review found the developer had already fixed by name.
7.5 / 10
A Seville studio's debut tactical RPG that looks like Darkest Dungeon and plays like Final Fantasy Tactics — two battle points a turn, a board that fights back, and one act of a campaign that has another year of building to do.
7.5 / 10
A decade-long Early Access project finally becomes a finished game, and it's still the only MMORPG where getting cursed into a cow is a legitimate build.
7.5 / 10
A free reading-habit companion that turns finished books into a growing pixel-art garden, tended by a Siamese cat named Grimalkin — released yesterday, built by a working novelist, and refreshingly upfront about having no ads, no energy bars and no dark patterns.
7.5 / 10
A Kickstarter-funded tactics/deckbuilding roguelike that launched to a small, entirely non-English review sample — this review translated and read all fourteen of them in full to find a genuinely praised elemental-tactics system with one sharp, specific complaint about shop RNG.
7.5 / 10
A meticulously accurate recreation of running a 1990s video rental store — verified as authentic by actual former Blockbuster employees in its own review section — undercut by a remarkably consistent complaint that nothing you build ever changes how the game actually plays.
7.5 / 10
A dark fantasy RPG that replaces turns and mana with a shared deck and a countdown clock — every card you play buys time against the enemy's next move, and every hero draws from the same pool of cards.
7.5 / 10
A dead adventurer comes back as a skeleton shopkeep and starts hiring the living to die in his place — Xtonomous's solo-developed idle sim turns that morbid joke into a genuinely connected hire-loot-sell loop, then keeps things deliberately short instead of chasing the usual idle-game grind.
7.5 / 10
A five-day-old Early Access boomer-shooter roguelite from a solo developer, blending Ultrakill-style movement combat with Risk of Rain-style item stacking and a boss roster drawn from world mythology — an unusually strong Early Access opening, read here as exactly that rather than a finished verdict.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely excellent, atmospheric successor to one of survival gaming's most beloved titles, selling two million copies in twelve hours — whose launch was immediately overshadowed by a well-documented controversy over an unusually restrictive EULA from publisher Krafton, set against a pre-existing, publicly reported dispute over developer bonuses that the community rallied around in real time.
7.5 / 10
A cozy pixel-art gathering and crafting game about rebuilding a village, sold on a shelf full of idle games and repeatedly mistaken for one. It isn't. It's a thirty-hour hand-managed crafting loop with a warm story attached, and at six dollars it's one of the easiest recommendations of the summer — for the right player.
7.5 / 10
A Scottish-flavoured Dynasty Warriors crossed with Risk of Rain 2, with genuinely praised combat, art direction and co-op carrying a large, consistent Steam review sample past a stingy meta-progression economy and some rough Early Access edges.
7.5 / 10
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
A 2D pixel-art roguelite that pairs jianghu-flavoured build crafting with creature collecting, and five months of steady free patches since its February launch.
7.3 / 10
An anime open-world action RPG that was built as a mobile gacha game, lost its publisher, won a legal fight to come back as a single-purchase Steam release, and still carries every scar of where it came from — for better and for worse.
7.2 / 10
A gorgeous, confident Bond origin story from the Hitman studio — that abandoned the sandbox design the Hitman studio is famous for, and asks NZ$99.99 for about fifteen hours you won't replay.
7 / 10
A four-dollar tower defence roguelite where the towers shoot themselves and you pick the upgrades — and whose players are averaging fourteen hours in its first week. The best value on this list, and the most repetitive thing on it.
7 / 10
