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481 games released in 2026 and reviewed here, best first.
481 reviews
A viral 30-second animation of a sword-swinging Spinosaurus grew into a full Soulslike, and the surprising part is how much of that origin-story momentum survives the transition — right alongside the rough edges you'd expect from a one-person studio's first release.
7 / 10
A tiny, genuinely one-of-a-kind dungeon crawler played entirely inside the Windows File Explorer — drag your character folder into new rooms, equip loot by dropping files into an equipment folder, fight in auto-resolved combat narrated by a console window — that earned a clean 100% positive Steam reception for an idea executed with real charm, even though the combat underneath the gimmick is thin and most runs are over in under two hours.
7 / 10
Read review of Directory Dungeon: File Explorer Dungeon Crawler
A next-generation clicker where every single upgrade unlocks its own minigame -- an RPG mage adventure, a collectible card battler built from the developer's own 20-year back catalogue of Flash games, and egg-fusion alchemy -- launched 6 August 2026 to a small but unanimously enthusiastic reception, with reviewers already flagging early balance rough edges.
7 / 10
A visually gorgeous, warmly voice-acted remake of one of the Dragon Quest franchise's most beloved and expansive entries — Very Positive on Steam, but built around a genuinely controversial decision to substantially trim the content that made the original and its 3DS remake so sprawling, a cut acknowledged even by the game's own fans rather than disputed.
7 / 10
Real chess rules underneath a board that fights back — pieces carry hit points and their own fog-of-war vision, captures aren't guaranteed kills, and a mid-turn real-time window lets you burn a cooldown spell before the clock passes to your opponent. Two days into Early Access it already has a working single-player mode against AI, up to four-player online lobbies, and eight patches.
7 / 10
A day-old precision speedrunner that makes you spend your own health bar as a resource — slow time, cut down enemies mid-air, and burn "Echoes" for shortcuts and boosts across fifteen handcrafted courses, each chasing a five-rung Bronze-through-Par medal ladder.
7 / 10
A ground-up rethink of 1999 EverQuest that solves the original's group-or-quit problem with a three-class multiclass system, then complicates its own launch week with a subscription, a cash shop and a beta that visibly shrank player storage before anyone had paid for it.
7 / 10
A 20-minute survival roguelite that lets you rebuild your creature from over 125 evolutions every run, wrapped in a living ecosystem where you're just as often the prey as the predator — sharp and addictive early, but the same handful of builds start resurfacing once the novelty wears off.
7 / 10
Read review of Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite
A hand-painted 2D desktop RPG about exploring enchanted realms, fishing quiet waters and filling out a Knowledge Book of everything you meet — released yesterday, priced under six dollars, and already dropping hints in its own patch notes that "single-player" might not stay the whole story.
7 / 10
Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.
7 / 10
A text-based football world generator where you don't pick a lineup or call a tactic — you only approve or reject the transfers clubs propose, then watch decades of invented history unfold. A genuinely different angle on football management, launched with a five-review Steam page and some sharp early complaints about its own core promise.
7 / 10
A UI-driven idle RPG blending Old School RuneScape-style skilling with Clash of Clans-style outpost building -- an Early Access release praised for its cosy pixel art and unusually responsive solo developer, undercut for some longtime players by a recent XP nerf that made progression feel punishingly slow.
7 / 10
A single-player deckbuilder in the mould of the tabletop games Ascension and Dominion -- draft a deck of gem-powered heroes and race to a victory-point target before the turns run out -- praised almost unanimously for how faithfully and cleanly it translates that board-game feel, with a real, repeated complaint that its five difficulties are cleared too easily to sustain long-term interest yet.
7 / 10
A real-time roguelike dungeon crawl where the resource system is a Picross grid — solve Nonogram puzzles fast enough and correctly enough to charge the energy that fuels every attack, shield and finisher.
7 / 10
BitBorne Studio's co-op mining survival game sends up to four goblins into a destructible mine with laser drills, rail carts and a darkness-drains-your-sanity torch system. Two months after launch it's Very Positive on Steam for exactly the reason its own reviewers keep repeating — brilliant with friends, rough around nearly every edge.
7 / 10
A goblin who robs dungeons by night and haggles over the loot by day, split between a genuinely good pixel-art Metroidvania and a shopkeeper sim that keeps overriding it — the game is at its best exactly when it lets you forget the rent is due again in three days.
7 / 10
A Greek-mythology tower defense roguelite where you draft cards to build the maze your enemies walk through. A week into Early Access, its loudest complaint — no reason to keep playing between runs — had already been directly answered by a meta-progression patch.
7 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
A satirical clicker-idle RPG about smashing pots, hiring gnome labour and sacrificing employees to demonic forces for profit -- a cheap, short, genuinely funny incremental that launched 12 August 2026 with one very literal broken-save bug and a repetitive prestige loop underneath the jokes.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike wrapped around a guild-management hub — recruit from ten heroes, send a three-person party into the abyss with permadeath on the line, and spend what they bring back on facilities that keep the next run alive.
7 / 10
A hacking game that uses the real tool names — nmap, hydra, nslookup — attached to a linear, guided mission structure. If you've never opened a terminal it's an excellent doorway. If you work in security, it's a puzzle game wearing your job as a costume.
7 / 10
A genuinely impressive Unreal Engine 5 remake of the campaign that built a franchise, shipped with one enormous, deliberate omission — every scrap of the multiplayer that kept people playing the original for twenty years.
7 / 10
Ars Goetia's solo-developed sequel adds first-person combat, a real-time-seconds twist on turn-based fighting and a forged-not-found loot system to the original Hellslave formula. Three days after launch it is loved in English and considerably more divided in the Simplified Chinese corpus that makes up nearly half its reviews, for a reason the developer had already half-fixed by the time this was written.
7 / 10
A prequel that nails the "one more turn" feeling of Heroes III closely enough to sell a million copies in a month — while its own most-upvoted critical review, from a fan who loves it, argues the developers have spent their post-launch effort on competitive PvP while single-player AI and the number-one requested feature, team co-op, keep waiting.
7 / 10
