Summer Game Fest Live and various other live events and showcases littered throughout early June have talked up dozens of upcoming games to get excited about. But just as Steam is filled with too many games for anyone to keep up with them all, it can also be hard, if not impossible, to keep up with all of these early June announcements and demos. That’s where we come in.
Below, you’ll find our picks for some of the numerous games that caught our eye but you may have missed, perhaps because it didn’t get a showing during one of the big events like Summer Game Fest Live, Nintendo Direct, or the Xbox Games Showcase, or because, again, there are so many games. Whether it’s jaunts through your hometown with a sledgehammer, a long-awaited 1.0 release of a game coming for Stardew Valley’s crown, making a deal with the devil, or trying to convince a woman that you actually are her daughter and don’t deserve to die, there’s sure to be something to add to your wishlist.
Virtue and a Sledgehammer
I’m a sucker for destruction in games. Give me a sledgehammer with robots and structures to smash with it, and I’m going to dive in. Give me that within the context of a game that appears to have a spooky vibe and explores the feeling of no longer feeling at home in your own hometown through the lens of old friends and family being replaced by robots? Now you really have my attention. — Chris Pereira
Time Strike
I’ve already noted my enjoyment of destruction in games, but Time Strike also capitalizes on my interest in messing with time and how you fundamentally interact with a game from moment to moment. Superhot excelled with its approach to how time worked in a first-person shooter, and Time Strike looks to be taking that further by letting you pause time to consider your next action, which can include causing walls, bullets, or other objects to be flung at your foes. Sign me up. — Chris Pereira
Sunset Summit
We’re seeing an incredible surge of mountain-climbing games, not to mention what’s often deemed to be friendslop (fair or not). That makes it more challenging to stand out in the space, yet Sunset Summit has still caught my eye: the 8-player limit, freeform climbing, long jumps, floating platforms, quirky-looking characters, pogo sticks, checkpoints, and edible beans that make you fly (!) all seem to combine for a more casual experience that feels like it could nicely complement my friend group’s more competitively oriented game rotation. — Chris Pereira
Into the Wind
A calm seaside town where you have to make deliveries with your motorcycle sounds nice, if perhaps unremarkable (though I should note, those deliveries can sometimes be giant, living sea creatures). But that motorcycle can also turn into a plane with guns, which can be used to fend off sky pirates as you also spend your time seeking out your missing uncle, bringing decorations back to your home (earning you bonuses), and dealing with challenges stemming from terrain, weather, the weight of your deliveries, and ensuring you have enough gas. It looks like there’s more than enough here to keep me engaged in a way that delivery games sometimes don’t. — Chris Pereira
Grave Seasons
After following its development for literal years, I finally got the chance to play Grave Seasons at this year’s Summer Game Fest. Despite building up what I presumed were impossibly high hopes for the farming-sim-meets-horror-whodunnit, I walked away from my demo absolutely elated by what I played. In Grave Seasons, the sleepy town of Ashenridge is violently awakened when a string of grotesque murders begins. Your farmer then takes it upon themselves to get to the bottom of things, using journals, polite conversation, an old crowbar, and the power of deduction to do so.
Though the killer is not randomized (a fact developer Perfect Garbage was careful to emphasize following inaccurate rumblings online), you can expect a lot of replayability from this title. According to the studio, there are multiple, year-long campaigns to play through and each one features a killer selected at random from a pre-existing pool of potential murderers–many of which you can even romance. When not witnessing grisly deaths and supernatural horrors, you’ll be able to farm and flirt to your heart’s content. In fact, Perfect Garbage admitted you could play the game as a straight farming sim and ignore the call to prevent your neighbors deaths–just don’t be shocked if your crush winds up with an axe sticking out of their skull. — Jessica Cogswell
Red Kiss
If like so many of us you finished up 2025’s Dispatch and were dismayed by the lack of games with a similar gameplay loop, Red Kiss is here to save the day. In this “seductive narrative RPG” you play as a recently turned vampire in a Cold War-era Berlin. However, you’re not just a vampire–you’re an Agur, a psychic dispatcher tasked with sending out vampiric spies to help gain influence over the city. While this conceit alone was enough to sell me on the game, Red Kiss’s trailer is hypnotizingly stylish. With its boldly lined characters, dramatic color palette punctuated by crimson and indigo, and thrumming electronic music, Red Kiss promises style on par with your favorite Persona game alongside strategic, narrative-driven gameplay. “Coming soon” can’t come soon enough. — Jessica Cogswell
Fields of Mistria
Yes, I have already put well over 60 hours into Fields of Mistria, but that doesn’t stop its 1.0 release from being my most anticipated game release of 2026. When it comes to Stardew-likes (for the love of god, let’s not make that an actual genre name please), I’d argue that Fields of Mistria is not just the best, but that it actually surpasses Stardew Valley in just about every way possible. It approaches the genre with a far more interesting angle and narrative than its competitors, and adds more variety and polish, too. Its stellar writing, swoon-worthy characters, anime-inspired art direction, and sheer amount of things to do make Mistria a world I love getting lost in. I highly suspect the 60 hours I’ve spent in this lush and lovely town will be doubled long before 2027 rolls around. — Jessica Cogswell
Super Yooka-Laylee Kart
The kart racer is a genre mainstay, and lots of developers have attempted to put their own spin on the concept. Super Yooka-Laylee Kart caught my attention by riffing on what Yooka-Laylee already is: a retro throwback. The visual style of SYLK recalls Mario Kart Super Circuit, which just isn’t a style that we often see imitated. I love modern kart racers like Mario Kart World and Sonic CrossWorlds, but the Super NES and N64 era that dawned the kart racer had its own feel that isn’t often imitated, so I’m excited to see how this will iterate on it. — Steve Watts
Hidden Folks 2
I’ve waited 10 years for the follow-up to Adriaan de Jongh’s 2017 hidden-object puzzler, Hidden Folks. Drawn by hand, the black-and-white landscapes sprawling across bustling cities, lively forests, and roaring factories set the benchmark in a sub-genre of puzzle games that you’d usually only enjoy in the backs of kids’ magazines at the dentist’s office. Clicking around an interactive environment to cause chaos and create the events in which you’d find the hidden folks on your checklist is the ingenuity of the game’s design. – David McCutcheon
Gone Feral
Turning the tides on the wave of asymmetrical horror games, Gone Feral plops you and your slasher buddies into a big sandbox, where you must hunt down the spoiled rich kids that tried to murder you all in a heinous prank gone awry. Stages—featuring horror staples like summer camps and eerie mansions—generate anew with different layouts every time you play, but the real bread and butter is the ability to off your victims with a myriad of non-weapons. No axe? Grab a turkey leg instead. Eat up. – David McCutcheon
Tenebris Somnia
I have never seen anything quite like Tenebris Somnia. Jolting from the look of a pixelated Clock Tower-style ’90s point-and-clicker to a live-action film, the game will make you feel like you’re losing grip on reality. Tenebris Somnia transforms the safe feeling of a video game (“I can just pause this and it all goes away”) into something real and visceral. You never know when these scenes will trigger, which keeps you both on edge and imagining every gruesome scene you come across in pixels as reality. The anticipation of the scare is survival horror’s most advantageous tool, indeed. – David McCutcheon
Lazy River
Looking at Lazy River, a game in which you and three friends trek down a cartoonishly colored lazy river fighting off zombies with squirt guns and pool noodles, you’d be forgiven for assuming it’s been made as a reaction to the “friendslop” trend taking over indies right now. In truth, the game has been in development for four years. Developer Mike Boxleiter told me that when games like Peak and Lethal Company started popping up, it only validated his small team’s ideas. Though Boxleiter added that he wishes his game were a bit less complicated, with players building their floats from scraps as they coast deeper into chaos, I didn’t feel like it was overly complicated. It seems primed to be the next big thing in this emerging genre that my usual gaming group and I adore. — Mark Delaney
The Road of Dust and Sorrow
I’m a sucker for story-driven games, and an intriguing-enough narrative is typically all it takes to convince me to give a chance to genres I’m normally not a fan of. That’s the case for The Road of Dust and Sorrow. Survival-horror isn’t usually for me, but ever since I saw its trailer in the Future Games Showcase, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about it. We have so few “mom games” in the space, which makes The Road of Dust and Sorrow alluring enough to wishlist it on Steam, but the way this game seems to amplify the desperation of its dystopian world by utilizing both empathetic connections with back-stabbing characters and feral-looking combat mechanics has me desperate just to try this game. Plus the pixel art is just really pretty. — Jordan Ramée
Every Wednesday
Visiting a laundromat was never something I had to do growing up, but I did start visiting them regularly once I moved out of my parents’ house to go to college in another city. I was so surprised to see that the space was like a small world, with regular customers establishing relationships and growing from strangers into something more–not quite friends in most cases, but definitely more than mere acquaintances. That experience seems to be the basis for Every Wednesday where protagonist Hideki visits his local laundromat every Wednesday and slowly becomes a mainstay in his community. The game looks charming and a whole lot of fun, placing an emphasis on goofy minigames and choice-driven dialogue. It looks like a game that will both make me laugh out loud and quietly sob, and I cannot wait to experience both emotions. — Jordan Ramée
Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists
This game seems so freakin’ cool. In it, you take on jobs from a mysterious benefactor to delve into the thousands upon thousands of layers of the underworld. With every mission, you recruit four would-be heroes and then you do your best to direct them through the challenges you come across. A guardian demon could be snuck past with a thief, for example, or taken out by a trained warrior. As you go, your party becomes more and more injured and your options narrow, leaving you scrambling to come up with the best solution you can. Your allies might not make it, and then you have to live with the consequences of your mission, whether you succeed or fail. This game looks tense, but having every outcome be determined by tactical choices instead of real-time gameplay means I don’t have to worry about my slow fingers being the reason my party members die–it will always just be my piss-poor choices. — Jordan Ramée
Burn-9
While the trailer for Burn-9 got me excited for this spy thriller, the free demo is what sold the game for me. Stylized to emulate games like Metal Gear, Burn-9 has you in the seat of the coordinator directing the soldier on the ground, not the soldier themself. This makes it easier to suggest risky plans of attack, but also endears you to the soldier under your command. It’s your job to take care of them to the best of your ability, while also weighing the cost of failing the mission and getting a reprimand from your supervisor. The demo was tense and absolutely thrilling to play through, and I cannot wait for the full experience. — Jordan Ramée
In The Drift
In the Drift seems like the type of game that will be welcome to return to after a busy day when I just want to unwind to something that is simple to play, nice to look at, and pleasant to listen to. The game has you play as a repairperson who lives with a crew of other people on an asteroid belt, and it’s your job to help the people of the solar system reconnect with each other after the space internet goes out. The game appears to be a very calming experience, though since the creators of Sable are behind it, I’m prepared for it to surprise me with a devastating emotional or introspective gut punch at some point. — Jordan Ramée
Cassette Beats 2002
I like RPGs. I like monster-collecting games. I like isekai stories. I’m going to like Cassette Beasts 2002, especially if it’s as good as its stellar predecessor. I’m most intrigued by how this game can be played as is or with your saved data from the first Cassette Beasts imported in. Will importing your character drastically change this sequel’s story? And if so, how? Regardless, I’m going to be playing this game when it comes out and spend way too much time figuring out which of the 57,000+ monster combinations are my favorite. — Jordan Ramée
Duppy Detective Tashia
I first learned about this game during the Story Rich Showcase, only to see that it then dropped right then and there. With how time-consuming Summer Game Fest week is for those of us at GameSpot, I haven’t had the chance to try this game yet but it’s sitting at a “positive” on Steam right now, so I assume it’s as good as it looks. And with a runtime of 1-3 hours, this is something that I should be able to knockout during a free weekend afternoon. I’m looking forward to it–it’s been way too long since I’ve been able to just sink my teeth into a point-and-click adventure game, and save for Voodoo Detective, I don’t get to play many games in this genre that feature characters who look and act like my family and I do. — Jordan Ramée
The Heart and Harbor
The Hearth and Harbor stole my heart during the Story Rich Showcase, rising to one of my most anticipated games. A management RPG set in a harbor city, you play as a recent immigrant who must transform a run-down restaurant into the establishment of your dreams, all while going out to attract new customers, create lasting relationships with suppliers, and beautify your building. The game reminds me of the likes of Stardew Valley or Discounty, but seems to put a bigger emphasis on the roleplay part of your business, with smart decisions and big mistakes having major consequences on what happens to you, your restaurant, and the community at large. — Jordan Ramée
Am I Nima
I love, love, love word association games but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone take that concept and run in a psychological horror direction to tell a story that deals with child neglect and gaslighting. Whether or not Am I Nima is the first to do it, I am fascinated at the idea. I don’t know if the game is having us play as a changeling, or a robot, or a clone, or something else entirely, but I am invested in this narrative of not knowing who you are, knowing your mother will kill you if you don’t figure it out, and needing to use your environment to learn new words and ideas in a desperate attempt to figure out who you’re supposed to be.
And that last shot in the trailer, where the smiling protagonist punches the mirror in a tearful rage brought about by the psychological toll to be someone they’re not just to live for one more day? Beautiful. Chef’s kiss. No notes. Please give me this game right now. Oh, the devs are saying that it’s coming out October 8? Nah, that’s not soon enough. — Jordan Ramée
Signet City
I’ll have a lot more to say about this game in a bit, having just wrapped up an interview with its developer, Gareth Damian Martin, for GameSpot but I also only need the slimmest of excuses to excitedly point at a game I really want to play. You may not know this about me but… I like tabletop role-playing games. And the creator of Citizen Sleeper knows a thing or two about making video games that pulls on an interesting TTRPG idea.
For Signet City, an upcoming first-person fungalpunk RPG, it’s the idea of “bleed,” the concept of the emotions of the character you’re pretending to be beginning to affect you in the real world. This game runs with that idea to tell a story in first-, second-, and third-person: You’re a fungal spore that must slowly assimilate into a city, bringing more and more perspectives into your consciousness and shaping how you as the player views the world, the spore views the world, and the individual citizens of the city view the world. — Jordan Ramée
Dressmaker
If not for the arrival of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, Potionomics would have been my entire personality back in 2022 and all I would have been able to talk about when it came to GameSpot’s deliberations of best games of the year. There’s just something so appealing about games in which you carefully put together something you’re proud of, sell it to customers, and befriend your regulars and the people you work with. Dressmaker seems to be just that, but it’s about designing, cutting, and sewing dresses, not potions or coffee. The art for the game looks very pretty, and I’m thrilled at the idea of losing myself in another game that somehow makes the pressures of being a struggling artisan feel rewarding. And if the devs let me smooch any of the cute characters who wander through your door, I fear Dressmaker will become just as much of an obsession for me as Potionomics was. — Jordan Ramée
Magicians: The Devil’s Deal
The first-person shooter is a genre so often associated with giant guns and dude-bro machismo that it’s easy to forget just how varied and different it can be. Case in point for Summer Game Fest Live 2026, at least for me, was Magicians: The Devil’s Deal. It certainly looks as if it’ll play like a first-person shooter, but rather than relying on firearms or bows, protagonist Jacob Menteuro is a performing magician who makes use of his wand and cards. He’s battling rival magicians who betrayed him–a premise that reminds me of one of my favorite movies: The Prestige–and the BioShock-like art style was just the icing on the cake for me. I’ll be there on launch day, asking people, “Is this your card?” before throwing it directly at their face. — Gabe Gurwin
Final Fantasy Resonance
For years, I couldn’t put down my iPad because of Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. This free-to-play gacha game was a nostalgic highlight reel that always tried to tempt me into spending extra money. Nice try! Still, it was the perfect comfort game with a surprisingly charming story at its heart. Now, it’s being remade as the first 2D-HD Final Fantasy game, similar to Octopath Traveler. What excites me most is the chance to revisit a familiar world without worrying about all the freemium hassles.Make no mistake, as much fun as it was to switch my brain off and tap away with reckless abandon in Brave Exvius, this was a mobile game through and through. Artificial limits placed on play time, confusing gameplay mechanics, and a constant reminder that Square Enix would stop at nothing to hoist me by my ankles and shake some spare change out of my pockets did sour the experience somewhat, but I’m hoping that Final Fantasy Resonance proves that a one-time fee to rejoin Rain, Laswell, Fina, and Lid is worth paying. The mobile game may have ended service a long time ago, but a full-fledged PC and console release that rebuilds the adventure from scratch is one that I can happily sink dozens of hours into. — Darryn Bonthuys
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse
Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse looks like everything I could ask for from a new game in the series. The best Castlevania adventures have been a slick blend of style and substance–cult-classics fusing tight platforming with an arsenal of monster-slaying weapons–and Curse of Belmont looks like a worthy successor to that legacy. But what excites me the most about it is the pedigree behind the game, as Evil Empire has established itself as one of my favorite studios thanks to last year’s super–and criminally underrated–The Rogue Prince of Persia.Evil Empire had already done some terrific work in Dead Cells alongside Motion Twin, but The Rogue Prince of Persia showed just how well the studio could stand on its own two feet. Combining the roguelike DNA of Dead Cells with a tight and fast-paced metroidvania, The Rogue Prince of Persia is an absolute blast that never outstays its welcome. Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse isn’t a roguelike and hews closer to the 2D metroidvania era of the franchise, but if Evil Empire can build on that foundation with combat that keeps you on the edge of your seat, we could have a new Castlevania game that was worth waiting more than a decade for. — Darryn Bonthuys
Stellar Blade: Blood Raid
Stellar Blade changed my opinion of how enjoyable a souls-like could be, especially when the framework for that genre combines an arsenal of special skills that feels like it was pulled from the Devil May Cry games. Stellar Blade: Blood Rain doesn’t look like it’ll deviate too far from the formula established in the first Stellar Blade, but it doesn’t need to. It looks action-packed, the new pint-sized powerhouse looks like a blast of fun thanks to her close-quarters combat skills, and once again, the prequel looks visually decadent with its combination of cool cyberpunk aesthetics and grotesque monsters.
I’m also hoping that Stellar Blade: Blood Rain continues to make souls-like action accessible, as the first game was terrific at doing this while still providing a decent challenge. The first game is essentially a souls-like for people who aren’t fans of souls-likes, and I can’t wait to see how Shift Up aims to improve on it. — Darryn Bonthuys