The Best New Games Of 2026 (So Far)

Another year begins and that means it’s time to start our Game of the Year watch. Every year we round up the games that have resonated with us as we keep an eye out for this year’s best. 2026 has already had some certified bangers just in the first three months. We’ll be updating this list periodically as we head toward December, so watch this space.

Pokémon Pokopia

Pokémon Pokopia is a cozy game for people who are usually not big on life sims. It has a melancholy mystery at its center that will motivate those who want something with more forward momentum than your typical open-ended life sim to carry on, and collecting all 300 monsters in its Pokédex will give even those who aren’t great at building towns something to aspire to. And if you’re someone who loves the thought of working on town infrastructure, Pokopia is a dense, rewarding builder that even a non-Pokémon fan can get a lot out of. It’s easy to look at some people’s creations and get overwhelmed and discouraged, but if you give yourself over to the goal of making little guys happy with what they’ve got rather than worrying about building the most elaborate town possible, Pokopia is one of the most gratifying games in the series. — Kenneth Shepard

Marathon

I stayed up until 2 a.m. one night playing Marathon. I had work the next day. It was such a dumb thing to do. I did it again later that week. And I’ll likely do it again in the near future because I can’t stop playing and loving Bungie’s sci-fi extraction shooter. It is a difficult, annoying, incredible, gorgeous, painful, evil, splendid video game. You’ll have nights where you’re flying high, nailing runs, and loading up on gear in your vault. You’ll have nights where nothing works, you lose it all and wonder why you even play. And then you’ll join a run, kill a whole team, and leave with more gear than you can carry and think to yourself, “Oh, right, this game rules.” Accurate. Marathon fucking rules. – Zack Zwiezen

Nioh 3

Team Ninja’s Nioh games have been admirable fusions of Soulslike mechanics and Ninja Gaiden‘s arcade action, wrapped in less interesting loot grinds. With Nioh 3, the meticulously honed formula branches out into sprawling maps and more open-ended exploration. The Destiny-like mission repetition and gear score fanaticism of earlier entries have been replaced with a more coherent and satisfying constellation of RPG systems that make Nioh 3 feel like a bigger, better game that never lets its broader ambitions dilute its excellent combat. It’s brutal and thrilling, with core gameplay so good that not even the exceedingly “meh” story can hold it back. – Ethan Gach

Perfect Tides: Station to Station

It’s impossible to sum up the greatness of Perfect Tides: Station to Station within the confines of a list like this. In the simplest terms, it’s a point-and-click adventure game, though not the sort that will routinely have you stuck on puzzles. It’s about inhabiting a year in the life of college student Mara Whitefish, who’s living in post-9/11 NYC (it’s not called that in the game, but that’s what it is) and experiencing all the stuff of life: terrible breakups, dizzying new romances, incredible nights out at karaoke, aging grandparents, mindblowing books, crushing insecurity, intense desire, the awe and mystery and anguish and jubilation of being alive. Like life itself, the game can be hilarious one moment and devastating the next; like so many great books and other artistic works that make us feel connected to the larger fabric of humanity, it’s all rooted in the specificity of Mara’s life, her experiences at a particular place and time, which are, by definition, fundamentally different from our own. And yet it’s that very specificity that makes it so absorbing, so insightful, and yes, so relatable. This is, quite simply, one of the all-time greats. – Carolyn Petit 

TR-49

Inkle’s response to underground hit Type Help is an extraordinarily interesting and deeply thoughtful work of magical realism and entwining meta-concepts about the nature of narrative reality, the grotesque consumption of culture and creativity by genAI, and the ways in which our language defines our philosophy. And it’s not nearly as difficult to play as that highfalutin’ sentence implies. Set in an apocalyptic alt-history, TR-49 has you searching the archives of a giant book-eating machine, within which you must find historical documentation and catalog it appropriately, all while a dystopian regime gets closer to finding your hidden church basement. It’s bizarrely thrilling, given the methodical nature of its organizational systems, and aside from some irritating interruptions from its (superbly voiced and written) characters when you’re trying to focus, this game demonstrates yet again what masters of unique narratives Inkle truly are. – John Walker

Demon Tides

If you’re jonesing for a classic PS2-era platformer, Demon Tides is one of the best homages to the genre you can play right now. It’s slick, weighty, and full of satisfying platforming and attitude that evokes memories of early 2000s mascot platformers without feeling dated or rote in its efforts to appeal to people who are nostalgic for those games. Demon Tides is proof the genre isn’t out of gas; it just needs developers who will put in the effort to make it modern. — Kenneth Shepard

Resident Evil Requiem

The ninth Resident Evil has some of the best thrills and scares of the series’ 30 years, and deftly uses its two lovable heroes to showcase everything fans love about Capcom’s long-running franchise. It’s terrifying when you’re moving through Grace’s levels with minimal resources, and cathartic when Leon takes over and uses his giant arsenal of boomsticks to take down zombies that once kept you from safely walking through a hallway. Your mileage may vary on some of the game’s navel gazing as it contends with aspects of the series’ legacy, but it’s a damn fine Resident Evil game that will likely touch on why you fell in love with the series in the first place. — Kenneth Shepard 

Cairn

Cairn is beautiful, engrossing, frustrating, and unexpectedly rewarding. With shades of influence from GIRP and Death Stranding, the atmospheric climbing-sim adventure carefully gamifies the stress, pressure, and snap decision-making of scaling seemingly insurmountable obstacles to propel you toward stunning vistas and ever more challenging heights. The game’s heart pierces through its occasionally grinding survival mechanics and fiddly controls, delivering a narrative journey underpinned as much by philosophical introspection as emotional growth. – Ethan Gach

Big Hops

3D platformers never went away completely, but they are rarer than they used to be. So when we get one, I’m always happy. And when one of these new platformers turns out to be incredible, I’m very, very happy. That’s the case with Big Hops, a colorful 3D platformer that features some of the best movement and jumping to be found in a game not published by Nintendo. Mario doesn’t need to watch out; he’s too popular to ever be dethroned, but he could learn a few things from Big Hops and its wild power-ups and exploration. – Zack Zwiezen

Scott Pilgrim EX

Retro indie comfort food at its most colorful, crunchy, and unaffected, Scott Pilgrim EX is catnip for a certain type of millennial (me). It throws together classic game influences, a fun chiptune soundtrack, and a beloved slacker comic book IP and lights the fuse on the dynamite. The resulting explosion will echo through your dreams until you’re back in 2010 remembering playing River City Ransom on the NES back in 1990. It’s suffused with nostalgia but never deploys it cynically. Scott Pilgrim EX is a time machine that will leave you reinvigorated about the future instead of feeling trapped in the past. – Ethan Gach

Slay the Spire 2

Welp, they did it. Slay the Spire 2 feels exactly like playing more Slay the Spire (complimentary). The crude graphics have been further refined and there are new builds to play around with and new events to encounter. The sequel does everything the original did just as well, often even better, and adds more meat to the bone. It’s an unimpressive-sounding trick but one that most sequels fail to pull off. Early Access development has only just gotten started and Slay the Spire 2 already feels like a major achievement that I will sink another 100 hours into. -Ethan Gach

Mewgenics

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glailel’s team-up project Mewgenics takes the concept of the roguelite and deftly flips it on its head. Here, what feels at first like it’s going to be a deckbuilding turn-based RPG about a squad of fighting kittens turns out to be less about building decks and more about using decks once and then setting them on fire. Each run through its enormous gauntlets of challenges and encounters is a new experience, with an all-new team of cats with their own bespoke set of skills, abilities and special attacks. Once you’ve succeeded or failed with that gang, they go straight into a breeding program (hence the game’s dubious name) to create the next generation of kitties. It’s as packed with gross-out humor and dead baby jokes as you’d expect from a McMillen venture, but it’s also one of the smartest and most inventive takes on the roguelite deckbuilder format. – John Walker

Esoteric Ebb

Amidst every former (and current) ZA/UM dev announcing their own spiritual successors to Disco Elysium, one man has been hard at work creating a “Disco-like” of his own since 2018. As most solo dev projects tend to be, Christoffer Bodegård’s work on his game was a laborious process, but slow and steady finally won the race in 2026.

Esoteric Ebb is a pure translation of Disco Elysium’s identity-crisis-fueled, politically driven narrative, wrapped in a D&D skin. But for all the ways in which we can compare the game to Disco Elysium, there’s one area in which it outclasses its inspiration: it’s somehow even funnier.

I could wax poetic about the beautiful art and the incredible voice acting all day, but all you really need to know is that I haven’t laughed this hard at a game…ever. Every quest and every conversation had something that set me off. Bodegård should be writing prime-time HBO comedies, but we’re lucky he’s making silly little CRPGs instead. – Lewis Parker