The number of new Steam releases keeps going up every year, and backwards compatibility on consoles means there’s no shortage of older games competing with everything new coming out each week. The flood of choices can lead to paralysis and make actually picking something out to download and play feel overwhelming. Kotaku is here to help.
Since last November, we’ve been running a weekly picks of our favorite recent indie game releases. These games are usually pretty cheap and range from old-school boomer shooters to golf course design sims. They’re often created by very small teams, maybe even just one or two people. It could be the first in a transformative career of making games or the only ones they ever ship.
While we still regularly review lots of games, whether from big publishers or small indie studios, these weekly picks are a way of sharing some bonus personal recommendations from the staff for really neat stuff that’s not already getting tons of attention. The algorithm has no sway here. Neither do Steam charts. Only the souls of the people writing the recommendations and what’s speaking to them.
Below are our first 17 weekly indie game recommendations of 2026. We’ll have a full slab of 52 picked out by the end of the year.
Survive long enough, and you’ll earn tokens which can be spent in various ways. I spent most of mine at a slot machine inside a large arcade in the hub world. That slot machine spit out tickets if I got lucky, and I could use those to buy other pieces of gear. There’s actually a lot going on in Oddcore, and after just an hour or so of playing, I could feel it start to pull me into its web. I wanted to do just one more run…earn just a few more tokens…play just a little bit more. – Zack Zwiezen
A part of me understands that what I’m doing is mindless and that I’m only doing it because, like so many gamers, I have a need to see numbers go up. And yet, I keep flipping coins, building up a massive amount of money, wiping the table clean of all coins and minions, and starting over. Every so often, I stop and use my skull points to buy a new hat for my minion. It’s my treat to them for flipping coins. Then I catch them resting on the job and have to give them a hard poke to get them back to work. Coins won’t flip themselves, you know? We all have a job to do here at Gambler’s Table. – Zack Zwiezen
While the game’s recreation of 1700s colonization hooked me at first, what kept me around until way too late the first night I played was the easy-to-understand city-building mechanics and smartly designed UI. Doing anything in Whiskerwood rarely takes more than two clicks. Each menu is easy to read, navigate, and close, which isn’t always the case in games like this. Whiskerwood also does a fantastic job, even in early access, of providing players with all the information they need to know about where mice are going, what they need, what’s missing, which resources are low, and so forth. – Zack Zwiezen
MeowGun’s voice acting is at times distracting, especially as the main character–a half cat/half demon woman named MeowMeow–speaks almost entirely in movie quotes and pop culture references. And they start to repeat pretty quickly. Thankfully, I was often blowing up so much shit that I rarely could hear these lines. But if a talking protagonist is too much for you, MeowGun might be a grating experience. On the other hand, if you love cats, there are small and very adorable kittens to find and save. Yes, before you ask, you can pet the cats you save. Oh, and there’s a dedicated button to make your character meow. I’ll let you decide how that makes you feel. – Zack Zwiezen
As with any Hotline Miami-like game, what matters more than anything else is the movement and combat. Sure, the aesthetics and atmosphere are great in Jackal. But in these kinds of games, death must come swiftly, as well as the reloads. Likewise, action needs to move fast, but you should always feel like you have at least one option to get out of the chaos alive. Jackal nails all of this.
But like the best games in this RNG triage, min-maxing roguelike genre, Omelet You Cook exists as something more than the sum of its parts that can’t simply be reduced to its obvious inspirations. There are elements of cozy sims and chillout puzzle games here, with unique and finicky patrons reminiscent of Animal Crossing villagers, each with different dietary restrictions and preferences. The emphasis on how food is positioned and empty space is managed reminds me a bit of the calming fiddliness of A Little to the Left. – Ethan Gach
Piece by Piece sets its agenda from the very first puzzle. You play as a little king dude trapped inside a single jigsaw puzzle piece. However, when you click in another piece he’s then able to run between the two—so long as there’s not a wall or obstacle blocking his path. So you’d imagine this would start with your just connecting three pieces together and running from left to right to get to grips with the conceit. But no! Piece by Piece wants you on top of things straight away, and you’re going to need to do a slightly more complicated bit of piece juggling to be able to get past a solid wall impeding your path. – John Walker
Something else I appreciate about Dark Rites is just how quickly it gets on with things. We don’t have to go through the usual scenes of people refusing to believe what they see with their own eyes, being defiantly skeptical against reason. Instead they immediately get on board with this weird world. In fact, it’s only a couple of hours before things have gone completely and utterly barmy. – John Walker
The result is a game that has all the compelling energy of a mobile merger game, but in something far larger and more involved. It’s a full story-driven adventure in a bright, cheerful world filled by lovely people. It’s combat-free RPG with beautiful art, lovely writing, and an awful lot more to offer should you happen to roll credits. – John Walker
For all the oddities and scrappiness, and you’ll definitely encounter moments of bemusement, it’s a big pleasure to start a new case, find the right number to call, receive a new packet of photographs to scour, and start piecing things together. It’s nice to have a game that makes me want to take notes on a pad in front of me (you don’t have to—every conversation is transcribed and no documents disappear—but it helps me organize my thoughts), and to allow myself to slow down. It’s good to not feel a need to immediately solve everything or demand a clue, but rather allow myself to muse, or even Google bits and pieces to see if it inspires an idea, and then come back to the game with new thoughts. – John Walker
Scritchy Scratchy’s gameplay loop isn’t the most innovative, but it does a very good job of simulating the feeling of actually scratching off a ticket. Flicking my mouse side to side to uncover the symbols on the game’s digital tickets comes pretty dang close to feeling like the real thing. And I don’t have to feel shame afterwards as I clean all the dusty material I’ve scraped off tickets from the car dashboard. – Zack Zwiezen
My only disappointment is that it is only 11 puzzles. It feels very brief, and while the game describes itself as “2 to 7 hours” long, it’s very much at the shorter end of that scale. I finished the lot easily in under three hours. I’d love a second or a third mission, although given the game’s only $10 and primarily the work of two people, I get why it’s just the one. And importantly, those three hours were all late one when evening after I should have gone to sleep: I figured I’d quickly try out the game, and then I figured I’d do just one more puzzle, and then there was another, and eventually I’d rolled credits and it was the early hours of the morning. Which hopefully conveys how engaging it all was! – John Walker
And it’s great! It’s especially good because Ffrench has created a way to let you change the difficulty of these massive puzzles on the fly with a single click, in this case opting between Classic and Advanced, the numbers on the grids changing to create a more complicated challenge without breaking your progress. And on Advanced, this usually quite procedural puzzle type becomes a big, juicy conundrum where you need to apply advanced logic to work out which tiles to color and which to mark as blank. Each section is walled off into a peculiar shape, meaning you can eat this elephant in manageable mouthfuls, chipping away at the enormous final image while receiving regular reminders of big news events and fun viral moments from 2025. Oh, and it’s free! – John Walker
This is very much a game about tin shacks and flimsy diners crammed into tiny spaces, often piled high, to make economic use of tiny spaces. But this also doubles up as a required technique for completing each level’s goals, where you upgrade each building by fulfilling all its thought-bubble requests. Not only do they transform into prettier buildings, but also offer you new bonus adornments to better decorate your little town, often vital for hitting all the targets. So a house may wish for one decorative item, one lighting feature, and one functional facility, and when it gets all three it dings and offers you the extra. Lighting could be anything from a new window to a street lamp to a string of fairy lights hung between buildings. Decorative items (a rather loose category) include plants and advertising billboards, but also washing lines and signage. A giant neon sign counts for both of these, and when hung such that it lights up multiple buildings, it’ll tick the list for them all. – John Walker
One of my favorite features of Under Par Golf Architect is the ability to play your own creation. At any point, with the simple click of a colorful button at the top of the screen, I was able to leave god mode and become a common golfer. I even walked around in a wacky manner, just like the little ants I usually lorded over. In this mode, you’re free to explore your course, interact with objects, and even play a few rounds on your own holes. – Zack Zwiezen
If you hate gacha mechanics though, please don’t fret. Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime is a very gentle, self-contained, narrative game that isn’t trying to irritate you by making you grind for better frogs. Its gacha pulls are exceedingly generous, and the randomness of them mostly serves to help vary up the kinds of decks you might build in a given game as well as encourage you to play Frogtime with Bonnie’s friends more often, since many of the matches are actually optional. I didn’t need the incentive, personally. I didn’t come to Bonte Avond’s latest expecting a highly competent little strategy game, but that’s exactly what I got. Frogtime is fun. I like collecting more frogs (though I wish I had more storage space for them), I like leveling up my self-worth by winning matches, and I like putting stupid little hats on my favorite frogs to make them look sillier. – Rebekah Valentine
As you play through the areas of the early game—which are broken up into battle areas, shops, gambling locations, puzzles, new item selections and so on—you encounter a range of characters who express an interest in returning to your base castle, and each of them is going to open up another feature of Demon Lord. There’s Lulu, an extremely upbeat and enthusiastic young imp who wants nothing more than to sell you upgrades bought with the souls of your fallen enemies, and Murphy who will open up a range of weapons that drastically change how you play any run. They’re followed by many others, including a cat who’ll add new play styles based on how many bosses you’ve beaten, and a card-playing former hero who lets you try to prioritize specific “decks” for your next trip. – John Walker
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