Top Ten Indies at Summer Game Fest 2026
When you think Summer Game Fest, you probably think of huge blockbuster reveals and AAA games, but there are a surprising amount of indies announced at Summer Game Fest, so here, in no order, are the top ten indie games of Summer Game Fest 2026 that we played or saw played live.
Mr Records
Day of The Devs Summer Game Fest Edition is always a highlight of the summer announcement season with so many incredible indie reveals. The highlight reveal from this year was Mr Records, a music rhythm game with a whimsical art style that felt reminiscent of The Plucky Squire. Music rhythm games feel like a genre that is constantly under serviced, which is one of the reasons that Mr Records caught our attention.
However, it wasn’t until we played it that we fell in love with Mr Records because it’s paired with a heartwarming narrative. Mr Records is about an old man named George, who finally decides to follow his dream of opening a music store before it’s too late. By day, George manages his record shop, gets to know the customers and by night, he transcends time and space to step inside each song he listens to. With over 45 original songs and an addicting gameplay that has you juggling a rhythm game with cultivating relationships at the store, I can’t wait to put on another record.
The Lost Wild
After being revealed in 2022, Great Ape Games went silent with The Lost Wild for four years. At Summer Game Fest 2026, The Lost Wild re-emerged from extinction and after seeing the game in action behind closed doors and talking with the Founder of Great Ape Games as well as talking with the Game Director of The Lost Wild, its now very high on our most anticipated games list of 2027. The elevator pitch is that The Lost Wild is Alien Isolation meets Jurassic Park with its approach to survival horror, as well as having the game designer from Alien Isolation serving as the Game Director. There appears to be much more than just survival horror with dinosaurs as you have mysteriously awoken on an island filled with monstrous creatures and abandoned compounds.
Recur
Why is no one talking about Recur? It’s a puzzle platformer that’s doing something revolutionary that hasn’t been done since Braid. Recur is a puzzle platformer where you’re stuck in a time loop at the cusp of an apocolypse. As someone who has recently discovered the power to control time, you’re the only one who can figure out what happened and possibly save humanity in the process. In Braid, for the majority of the game, you controlled time with the push of a button, but in world four, you also controlled time with movement. Recur takes that idea and greatly expands upon it as it moves it to a 3D world. Move to the right of the screen and time moves forward, but move to the left of the screen and time moves in reverse. In addition to the mechanics, Recur also features an appealing look with a cel shaded inspired art style and the promise of an engaging story as you try to discover why the world is ending.
Ballgame
The award for most addictive game that I played during Summer Game Fest 2026 was Ballgame, a pinball-golf fusion that plays like a precision platformer and controls similar to a twin stick shooter. Ballgame is easy to pick up, but very hard to master and just like Golf, Ballgame always leaves you wanting more due to the unpredictable physics and the never-ending pursuit of perfection. Ballgame is the debut from Human Computer, a small indie studio from California that began as just four people whose ultimate goal is to make playful and fun games that respect your time. In Ballgame, you play as the golf ball and your goal is simple: to get in the hole in the least amount of strokes possible.
Every year people are looking for the next Balatro or Vampire Survivors, that game that is ultra-addictive, simple to understand and very accessible and i’m pretty sure it’s Ballgame as there are a lot of parallels.
Erosion
Rogue-likes are a dime a dozen, maybe even a nickel a dozen these days. In 2026 already, there has already been over 1000 games released on Steam with the rogue-like tag. The problem is nearly none of them are innovating. Erosion, the sophomore game from Plot Twist, the team behind The Last Case of Benedict Fox, is a voxel-art Western where your daughter is kidnapped and a time loop mechanic where every death costs a decade. It’s not just lip service, because what you do will greatly change what happens in the future and greatly alter your experience or erode over time. The gameplay was satisfying as Erosion is a twin stick shooter, but during the demo, we only got to see the tip of the iceberg of how different timelines work.
Among Us Story: On Guard
I am one of the few who has never played Among Us. I was aware of the cultural moment it had when it became a phenomenon during the Covid Pandemic, but multiplayer games are moslty a thing of the past for me. Thankfully, this massive spike in popularity not only allowed Innersloth to create Outersloth, a publishing label to help unique indie games, but it also meant that people wanted more from this universe and they got it with a recently released Netflix special, but also the upcoming single player murder mystery, Among Us Story: On Guard. Having played a short demo, it was satisfying to find clues, follow leads, and solve puzzles in an experience full of cheeky humor and physics based mini games to ensure the lighthearted tone wasn’t lost.
End of Abyss
End of Abyss came out of nowhere last year and became our highlight of Summer Game Fest Play Days 2025. It might not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but for us it checked all of the boxes. End of Abyss is a sci-fi metroidvania with a dark and foreboding atmosphere featuring the mechanics of twin stick shooters.
End of Abyss is a love letter to the era of cartridge gaming and experiences like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. Sprawling action adventures that didn’t guide you, but challenged you to get lost, and become immersed with the world you’re in. Mechanics that have recently been labeled soulslike, such as enemies respawning, actually began decades earlier when your character would leave the screen and come back. All of these reasons play a huge part in why the original Metroid and The Legend of Zelda became cultural phenomenons. After playing End of Abyss again in 2026, it’s incredible to see how much more the experience has been refined and polished meaning that our sentiment hasn’t wavered as it’s still one of our most anticipated games.
Out of Words
After playing Out of Words and speaking with the Game Director at Summer Game Fest 2026, I realized this isn’t a game chasing the Hazelight asymmetrical co-op trend. Out of Words has been a dream that Johann had since he was a young kid to create a world where he didn’t lose his best friend. Out of Words is a co-op exclusive adventure where two best friends are transported to the world of Vokabulantis, have been stripped of their words and must learn to communicate and get back home. The gameplay was very fun, fluid and Johann mentioned that they whittled down the mechanics that ended up in the game from hundreds of concepts down to about a dozen that encapsulate what Kurt and Karla are going through in the moment. The entire game was also created in the real world by hand first, from the cellophane pond to the opened and carved books that look like sand dunes.
Silent Hill Townfall
Despite the iconic IP and the Konami publishing, Screen Burn, formerly known as No Code, is still an indie studio with around 30 people and only two games under their belt. However, their history with horror as well as their affinity with analog technology and small environments align perfectly with Silent Hill.
Screen Burn isn’t the only new thing, as Townfall is full of firsts. Townfall will be the first, full length entry to take place in first person, which i’ve always felt provides a greater sense of immersion in horror. However, the biggest debut is the handheld CRT, which feels like an evolution of the iconic Silent Hill radio, which was helpful, but always created unease. The video is grainy and reception is hard to find, but at the right frequency, you can see looped messages that provide clues about where you should be next. This was just the tip of the iceberg for the CRT handheld.
Despite the new studio, new perspective, new technology, and the new island town of St Amelia, Silent Hill Townfall feels like comfort food. After seeing a demo of Silent Hill Townfall behind closed doors, it felt like a spiritual successor or an evolution of Silent Hill 2
Orbitals
From a gameplay perspective, Orbitals doesn’t look to be revolutionary. At quick glance, it looks like the next Hazelight adventure, but with an anime aesthetic. Surprisingly, there’s good reason for the comparison as the Game Director of Orbitals has worked on It Takes Two, A Way Out and Split Fiction, which are all three of the Hazelight projects. Orbitals looks to be bringing all the staples over as well with loads of different gameplay mechanics, perspectives and fantastical boss fights.
In Orbitals, you play as Maki and Omura in the distant future, who must save their space station from a cosmic storm. Orbitals is the debut from Tokyo based Shapefarm, but it’s also being published by Kepler, who now have my full trust after many fantastic games from Bionic Bay, Sifu and Clair Obscur Expedition 33. My big hope is that since it’s a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive and it features a visual style that relies more on art direction over cpu power, it will run smoothly unlike Split Fiction, which felt like a massive visual and performance downgrade vs the PS5 version
Honorable Mentions
I also want to give a shout out to another indie game that looks incredible, but we didn’t get to see first hand or play. Studio MDHR is back, not with the next mainline entry in the Cuphead series, but with a spinoff from a smaller internal team within the studio. Mighty Cuphead Adventure is love letter to the side scrolling action of the 8 bit era and we can’t wait to play it.
