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481 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.
481 reviews
A free-to-play incremental action RPG with zero monetisation and a genuinely likeable weapon-and-relic progression system, undercut by a fair, repeated complaint — this "idle" game leans so heavily on active clicking that its passive damage barely matters.
6 / 10
A one-day-old solo-developer idle game built around a single inversion of the genre's usual habit — your number grows faster the longer you refuse to spend it, and every purchase resets it to zero — spread across six upgrades, three currencies and two mirrored prestige ladders, for NZ$4.31 with no user reviews yet on record.
6 / 10
Game Freak's first new IP away from Pokémon is a striking-looking action RPG that launched two days ago to a Mixed score — and the negative reviews and the positive ones are, almost eerily, describing the same game.
6 / 10
A ten-minigame summer party collection from Japanese minigame specialist SAT-BOX, built around split-screen bouts with rocket fireworks, somen-noodle slides and mosquito swatting — checked on launch day against a Steam page that shows zero reviews and zero concurrent players.
6 / 10
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
A moody, RPG Maker-style psychological horror RPG about a man, a chainsaw and a city that stops being safe — with striking presentation and a real-time-interrupt combat twist, undercut by roughly an hour of Episode 1 content, scattered balance and a store page that's still openly asking players for feedback on "the demo."
6 / 10
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
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
A pixel-art survivors-like that ends every boss fight at a poker table, from a first-time solo studio with no public track record and, a day after launch, no review corpus to check its 500-node unlock ladder against.
6 / 10
A one-developer desktop pet that evolves from a slime into a dark sorceress and is allowed to shake your windows and flash your taskbar along the way — reviewed on its Early Access launch day, with zero user reviews yet to check it against and an achievement sample so small it can be read as a raw account count.
6 / 10
A free-to-play action RPG that launched with a genuinely rare promise — no gacha for characters or weapons — and won real goodwill for it, before its own launcher distributed actual credential-stealing malware to players twice in the space of a month.
6 / 10
A licensed Dynasty Warriors mobile spin-off that quietly launched days ahead of its own announced date, bringing "one versus a thousand" musou combat to phones with a gacha hero system underneath. Early App Store reviews like the combat and distrust the monetisation's timing.
6 / 10
A party-based tactical RPG that trades Expeditions: Rome's serious tone and hand-drawn portraits for a brighter, more stylised Sengoku Japan — with combat that still holds up and an art and UI overhaul that a loud share of the existing fanbase does not want.
6 / 10
A two-day-old two-player co-op puzzle platformer built entirely around a single mechanic — shooting a laser from your own eye to push or pull your partner through obstacles neither of you could clear alone — priced at NZ$2.39 with zero user reviews and zero recorded concurrent players at the time of checking.
6 / 10
A cozy incremental fishing spin-off from the Fish to Dish studio, where charm and a fair price win over most players despite a confirmed use of generative AI art that upset a vocal minority, and a specific, repeatedly confirmed design flaw — the game's essential convenience features stay locked away until right before the credits roll.
6 / 10
A first-person precision platformer that repackages the free Source-engine movement scene — surf, bhop and climb, born in Half-Life and Counter-Strike 1.6 mods — as a standalone Steam release with themed maps, Steam Achievements and leaderboards to chase. Released 6 August 2026 with no user-review corpus yet to weigh it against.
6 / 10
A medieval MMORPG that died with its studio in 2023 and came back free-to-play in June 2026 under new owners. The three-nation war it's built on is still the best thing about it — and six weeks after the relaunch, its most loyal players are documenting cheats rather than sieges.
6 / 10
A one-mechanic precision platformer where the character only falls and the player's entire job is choosing which way is down, wrapped in a 78-achievement completion ladder and a minimalist green wireframe look, released day-one with no review corpus yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A cheap, good-looking incremental about feeding a black hole until it either swallows a leaderboard spot or collapses on you, undercut by a threadbare research tree and a wave of recent reviews accusing the whole project of being thrown together with AI.
6 / 10
A solo developer's Early Access debut that grafts an upgrade tree, phase gates and a purchasable "Idle Mode" onto a classic Breakout loop — except the game's own tooltip says flatly that idle mode does not earn points while the game is closed, four days into a launch that so far has three concurrent players and one review.
6 / 10
A NZ$3.83 debut-adjacent incremental from Shadow Games Software where you crank a hand generator, sell the joules you produce into a demand-driven market, and reinvest the money into wood and steel producers that build power plants across eight declared eras — real chain depth, but the marketing never actually promises the away-from-keyboard earnings the genre is built on.
6 / 10
A turn-based idle grinder built around hiring the monsters you've just killed, with a genuinely clever risk-versus-reward twist buried under a spreadsheet-dense interface and a release so quiet that Steam has barely registered it exists.
6 / 10
A free-to-play incremental about growing a one-person garage venture into a tech empire, with a genuinely honest monetisation model let down by a midgame economy that stops making sense and a content well that runs dry fast.
6 / 10
A three-day-old solo-style release that grafts a genuine tech-tree-and-prestige incremental onto a real-time bug-catching shooter — aim a frog's tongue with the mouse, clear timed waves of insects, then spend the gold on a large branching upgrade grid — for NZ$6.29 with exactly one Steam review on record.
6 / 10
