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3120 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.
3120 reviews
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
An Android Repair Job That Turns Into Something Else Save My Scrap, released April 21, 2026 by developer Unio Anou and published by AMATA Games and Digital-Touch Co., Ltd., is a $1
8 / 10
A hand-drawn visual novel from Acrobatic Chirimenjako, published by Shueisha Games, casting players as Mary, an amnesiac who answers phone calls from strangers in the final moments before the Moon destroys the Earth, Very Positive across 1,109 reviews for its stunning art and devastating emotional writing — with a widely repeated complaint that the story recaps itself excessively within each chapter.
8 / 10
A decade in Early Access ends with Drilling Thunder, a genuinely substantial 1.0 update that finally gives Scrap Mechanic's celebrated building physics a full story campaign — while leaving the host-dependent multiplayer that has bugged players since 2016 exactly as it was.
8 / 10
A top-down action-roguelite from the studio behind Dungreed, built around a Tetris-style artifact inventory that turns loadout planning into its own puzzle game — dense, generous with content, and let down late by a damage-sponge final boss and a steep endgame DPS wall.
8 / 10
A solo-developer idle/incremental game about growing a server farm from a battered laptop to planet-scale compute — three genuinely distinct minigames, a finite Singularity ending that Steam's own achievement data shows a striking share of players actually reach, and no microtransactions or ads anywhere on a NZ$4.79 price tag.
8 / 10
A pure factory-automation puzzle stripped of combat, scarcity and even failure, where the only opponent is a shape's own geometry. The tightest version of this genre's core loop yet built, and a useful test of what's left once every source of friction is removed.
8 / 10
A genuinely inventive Balatro-inspired reinvention of chess, where captures build score toward combo-chasing runs against rule-bending bosses, praised nearly unanimously for its deep synergy-building despite a steep opening learning curve and some UI legibility rough edges.
8 / 10
A Swing, A Pile Of Shoes, And A World That Deserves It Shoe it All!, released September 3, 2026 from developer Amberbite and publisher Bright Gambit, opens with a premise so simple
8 / 10
A solo-developed 2D life-sim RPG about an addict artist trying to raise her little sister, striking in how honestly it portrays addiction's daily grind without romanticizing it, undercut in its English release by an uneven translation and a few logic gaps in its otherwise tightly balanced systems.
8 / 10
A brutal, Hotline Miami-inspired top-down hack-and-slasher set to a thrash-metal soundtrack, near-unanimously praised for its momentum-driven one-hit combat and stylish pixel-art presentation, though its short runtime and demanding difficulty limit its broader appeal.
8 / 10
Where's Waldo, But You're Holding a Rifle Sniper Dan launched September 17, 2026 from Denki, the veteran UK studio behind Quarrel and a long back catalogue of licensed puzz
8 / 10
Two Puzzle Genres That Have No Business Working This Well Together Sokogram is a $9.99 puzzle game from solo developer PressGtoGeorge that fuses two genres, nonogram logic grids an
8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
A ferociously fast, unanimously praised throwback to Y2K-era single-player shooters like Half-Life 2, Killzone and TimeSplitters, built by a developer with genuine goodwill from the original SPRAWL, tempered only by a handful of specific design tradeoffs longtime fans note relative to that first game and reported performance dips in the largest arenas.
8 / 10
A Free Fan Tribute Built on Someone Else's Web Series SSTWL - Sector Breach released on Steam on July 25, 2026, developed by the volunteer Sector Breach Team and published by B
8 / 10
A complete-at-launch, Skate-and-Dave-Mirra-flavoured 3D BMX game from a decade-long mobile series developer, whose overwhelmingly positive reception is tempered by a well-corroborated, unusual control scheme with a real learning curve and no keyboard rebinding.
8 / 10
A clean, modern Sudoku built on Frank Force's LittleJS engine — three difficulty tiers, notes mode, hints and a full auto-solver, with an on-screen number pad confirmed to drive cell selection and number entry entirely by touch, no keyboard required.
8 / 10
A free, gorgeously produced student-made puzzle game that reworks Portal's core idea around size- and gravity-altering television screens, praised almost unanimously for its craft and charm, with its biggest criticism being that its 30-minute runtime leaves players wanting far more.
8 / 10
A Cozy-Looking Puzzle Game That Bites Much Harder Than It Looks Tezzel: The Tilemaker's Tale, from developer and publisher Old Mayor Studios, released on Steam on April 10, 202
8 / 10
A solo-developed, first-person immersive-sim action game inspired by Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Overwhelmingly Positive across 567 English reviews for its chaotic, physics-driven combat and dark humour, with a fair complaint that its story campaign is short and some technical crashes cost lost progress.
8 / 10
A Ball With A Tongue, A Castle Made Of Trials THE CANON OF BALLS, a solo-developed release from Helios Monk, launched on Steam on August 13, 2026, priced at just $3.99. It casts th
8 / 10
Evil Trout Inc. follows The Roottrees Are Dead with a lavish remake of their own free itch.io text adventure, Type Help, adding full voice acting, hand-painted scenes, and new epilogue content to a chilling seance-machine murder mystery. The deduction is a little gentler than Obra Dinn, but the atmosphere, cast, and voice work make this an easy pick for genre fans.
8 / 10
A gothic point-and-click visual novel from solo developer ENDYSIS about a haunted suit of armour recovering its memories, unanimously positive across a large English review sample for its art, music, and emotionally devastating writing, with fair, specific complaints about text-heavy late-game pacing and a predictable early mystery.
8 / 10
