Best Indie Games of 2026 So Far, RANKED as They Drop
Mina the Hollower, Mewgenics, Slay the Spire 2, Cairn, and more. A genuinely ranked list of the best indie games of 2026, updated as the year goes on. No algorithm, no PR, just one person reading what players actually say.
TL;DR
- We're nine months into 2026 and it's already a stronger year for indies than most AAA publishers managed with ten times the budget.
- Mina the Hollower, Mewgenics, and Slay the Spire 2 are the three genuine event releases so far.
- Creature Kitchen, a three-hour cooking game from a tiny team, posted the highest review score on this list at 99.6%.
- This is 'so far', not a final ranking. Q4 still has to happen.
It's October. Three quarters of 2026 is gone and I'm already fairly confident this will end up a better year for indies than the last one, which is saying something after 2025's run. Same pattern as always: while a chunk of AAA spent the year explaining away another delay or another round of layoffs, small teams kept shipping games that actually delivered.
This is not a final ranking. Calling something the best game of a year that still has a quarter left to run would be an eejit move. Think of this as the current leaderboard, the picture as it stands today, updated as the rest of 2026 plays out.
1. Mina the Hollower
At a glance: Action-Adventure, Metroidvania. 12-15 hrs. Moderate-High difficulty. Single player.
6,348 reviews | 89.2% Very Positive | $19.99
Yacht Club Games' first genuine follow-up to Shovel Knight, and it earns the comparison rather than living off it. You whip, burrow, and dash through a gothic pixel-art world as Mina, and the movement kit is precise enough that dying to a boss pattern feels like a fair fight, not a cheap one.
Metacritic gave it a Must-Play badge within a week of launch, and the 89% positive score undersells how good the mechanical foundation is. The honest criticism, which shows up in enough user reviews to matter: some of the later dungeons lean hard into obtuse puzzle design without enough signposting, and a chunk of players who loved the combat bounced off the backtracking. Worth knowing going in.
Mina the Hollower on Steam -- $19.99
2. Mewgenics
At a glance: Roguelike, Simulation. 40+ hrs. Moderate difficulty. Single player.
30,220 reviews | 91.2% Very Positive | $29.99
Edmund McMillen spent years on this one, and the wait shows in how deep the systems go. You breed, train, and send cats into tactical roguelike combat, and the genetics system means no two runs, no two cats, ever play quite the same. It sold over a million copies in its first week and briefly pulled a bigger concurrent player count than Hades 2, which is bollocks. A cat-breeding game should not be able to do that.
Here's the honest bit: the humour is very McMillen, meaning very 2000s internet, and it will not land for everyone. A fair few reviews call it out specifically. If Binding of Isaac's sense of humour never worked for you, this won't convert you either. The systems underneath are worth pushing through it for.
Mewgenics on Steam -- $29.99
3. Slay the Spire 2
At a glance: Deck-Building Roguelike. 40-80+ hrs. High difficulty. single player, co-op (up to 4 players).
75,424 reviews | 92.0% Very Positive | $24.99 (Early Access)
Still in Early Access, and already the highest review count on this whole list by a wide margin. Set a thousand years after the original, bringing back the Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect alongside two new characters, the Necrobinder and the Regent, with 575-plus cards and 278 relics to build around. The headline addition is four-player online co-op, a first for the series.
I'm not going to pretend Early Access status doesn't matter here. The card pool is still being tuned, balance passes have shifted the meta more than once already, and some systems from the original haven't been fully ported over yet. But the foundation is exactly what you'd hope for from the studio that invented the genre building on it a second time.
Slay the Spire 2 on Steam -- $24.99
4. Cairn
At a glance: Survival Climbing, Adventure. 15-25 hrs. High difficulty. Single player.
22,030 reviews | 94.3% Very Positive | $29.99
From The Game Bakers, the studio behind Furi and Haven, and the premise is brutally simple. Climb a mountain nobody has summited, one limb at a time, planning routes, placing pitons and managing food and stamina while every handhold can end the run.
It looks gorgeous, but the best reviews are about the tension more than the scenery. Players who finish it tend to log somewhere between 14 and 28 hours.
The negative reviews are specific, and they cluster. The automatic limb selection regularly picks the worst limb at the worst moment, and Steam Deck owners report stuttering bad enough that some reviewers tell handheld players to skip it. If you want to feel a climb instead of win one, nothing else does it this well. If you want smooth traversal, it will wind you up.
Cairn on Steam -- $29.99
5. Fields of Mistria
At a glance: Farming Sim, RPG. 40-60 hrs. Relaxed difficulty. Single player.
27,030 reviews | 97.5% Overwhelmingly Positive | $13.99
Among the games on this list with a big audience behind them, the highest score belongs to a farming sim. Magic, romance, and a village to rebuild, wrapped in a pixel-art style that borrows the best parts of Stardew Valley without just copying its homework. Character writing carries a lot of the appeal here: the town's cast has real personality rather than functioning as quest-dispensers with a portrait attached.
The pacing in the first few in-game weeks is slower than genre veterans might want, front-loading a lot of tutorial-adjacent hand-holding before the game opens up. Worth pushing through. Once the magic system and relationship mechanics kick in properly, it's one of the most complete cozy games released this year.
Fields of Mistria on Steam -- $13.99
6. Creature Kitchen
At a glance: Cooking Sim, Cozy Horror. 3-5 hrs. Relaxed difficulty. Single player.
10,007 reviews | 99.6% Overwhelmingly Positive | $7.99
The highest score on this list belongs to a cooking game from a tiny team called The Rat Zone, and 99.6% across more than ten thousand reviews is a number most studios never see. You live in a strange house beside a forest, cook the favourite snacks of the local wildlife, and slowly befriend them.
The most upvoted review opens with a warning that the horror tag is misleading. The creepy is atmosphere rather than scares, and the game is cozy at heart. Recent reviewers finish it in about three to four hours.
That length is the criticism. The most common negative review is that $7.99 is a lot for two or three hours, and a few reviewers report lost saves and motion sickness from the camera. Even fans who loved it wanted more reason to cook every recipe. For one evening and the price of a sandwich, I'd call it an easy yes.
Creature Kitchen on Steam -- $7.99
7. Esoteric Ebb
At a glance: CRPG, Dialogue-driven. 20-30 hrs. Moderate difficulty. Single player.
9,810 reviews | 95.1% Overwhelmingly Positive | $24.99
A single-player CRPG built on the freedom of tabletop adventures. You unravel a political conspiracy with a goblin sidekick, roll dice in tense encounters, and build anything from a cleric of legends to something far less holy. The writing is the draw, with reactions to your traits everywhere you look.
Developer Christoffer Bodegård, published by Raw Fury. Recent reviewers have clocked a median of about 24 hours, and the top positive reviews run past 45.
Nearly every negative review makes the same comparison to Disco Elysium, and it's hard to avoid. Players who wanted Disco's writing without being CRPG fans describe a wall of text, and some call the politics preachy, with every bad choice answered by a lecture. This is a game for people who like reading, and I'd only recommend it to them.
Esoteric Ebb on Steam -- $24.99
8. How to Fish
At a glance: Physics, Sports Comedy. 8-10 hrs. Relaxed difficulty. Single player.
23,810 reviews | 95.9% Overwhelmingly Positive | $7.99
The pitch sounds like a joke and the execution is genuinely brilliant: catch a fish, fling it into the air, then shoot it mid-flight for bonus money. It peaked at 142,000 concurrent players within three days of launch at eight dollars, which is the kind of viral trajectory most publishers spend seven-figure marketing budgets chasing and never catch.
There isn't much depth once the core loop's novelty wears off, and a fair number of reviews flag the progression curve flattening out after ten or so hours. For eight dollars and a genuinely funny physics toy, that's an easy trade. Not every game needs fifty hours of content to be worth its price.
How to Fish on Steam -- $7.99
9. Big Walk
At a glance: Co-op Exploration. Varies, open-ended. Relaxed difficulty. Co-op.
25,245 reviews | 96.2% Overwhelmingly Positive | $19.99
House House's follow-up to Untitled Goose Game trades one very good bird-based joke for an open island built specifically for wandering with friends. Proximity chat, creative puzzle-solving, and genuinely no combat or fail-state pressure anywhere in the design. It's a co-op game built entirely around the pleasure of just being somewhere with people you like.
The lack of a driving structure is a real trade-off, not just a design choice to wave through. Solo players and groups without a self-directed streak will find less to hold onto here than in a more objective-driven co-op game. If your group is the type that makes its own fun, this is close to perfect for them.
Big Walk on Steam -- $19.99
10. MOUSE: P.I. For Hire
At a glance: Retro Shooter, Action. 15-25 hrs. Moderate difficulty. Single player.
15,936 reviews | 93.8% Very Positive | $29.99
Hand-drawn 1930s rubber hose animation meets a Doom-style shooter, with private investigator Jack Pepper blasting through a jazz-fuelled noir. The art is the easy win. The most upvoted positive review is a 71-year-old saying it feels like being inside an old cartoon, and the second is about a skip-cutscene button nobody ever presses.
Recent reviewers have logged a median of roughly 18 hours.
The negatives are consistent too. Enjoyment peaks after a few hours, the levels are linear, and the detective part gets sacrificed to keep the shooting tight. One of the more upvoted negative reviews cites IGN's 6/10 and agrees with it, so the split isn't only among players.
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire on Steam -- $29.99
11. Far Far West
At a glance: Co-op Shooter, Action. Ongoing, Early Access. Moderate difficulty. Co-op (1-4 players).
23,483 reviews | 96.6% Overwhelmingly Positive | $19.99 (Early Access)
Eight people made this, and it holds up against co-op shooters built by teams ten times that size. A 1-4 player Western with monsters, magic, and missions, still in Early Access but already sitting on nearly 23,500 reviews at 97% positive. That ratio, at that volume, for a team this small, is bloody impressive and worth saying plainly rather than burying in a caveat.
Being Early Access, the content roadmap still has real gaps, and some weapon balance issues show up consistently in negative reviews. Given the trajectory so far, the smart money says those get addressed before 1.0. Worth getting in now if co-op Westerns are your thing, worth waiting for 1.0 if they're merely interesting to you.
Far Far West on Steam -- $19.99
12. MOLE
At a glance: Horror, Simulation. 3-5 hrs. Moderate difficulty. Single player.
3,964 reviews | 97.4% Overwhelmingly Positive | $12.99
You pilot a monstrous post-war drilling machine down into Slavic soil, fixing failing systems, following the voices of the dead, and praying you survive whatever is sharing your coffin of a cab. The top reviews compare it to Iron Lung, Mouthwashing and Signalis, and the standard advice is to go in blind.
It's short, with recent reviewers finishing in around four hours, and a 97.4% score across nearly 4,000 reviews is an excellent result for a horror game.
Not everyone is sold. Negative reviews call it derivative or not scary, say the description sells a survival digging sim when it's closer to an interactive story, and a few report saves not persisting and a default field of view that's too narrow. If it works for you, our best psychological horror games on Steam goes further down the same hole.
MOLE on Steam -- $12.99
13. Super Battle Golf
At a glance: Party Sports, Multiplayer. 10-25 hrs. Relaxed difficulty. Multiplayer (1-8 players online).
11,846 reviews | 93.0% Very Positive | $12.99
An online golf game for one to eight players where everyone plays at the same time. Swing, shoot, sabotage and finish first by any means in a free-for-all rush to the hole. Reviewers compare it to Mario Kart with golf clubs, and one of the most upvoted positive reviews is simply a plea for workshop maps and a map editor.
Recent reviewers have a median of about 14 hours, with a long tail well past 25.
The golf isn't the problem. The lobbies are. Negative reviews describe cheaters and toxic players in public matches, a vote-kick system that punishes people who play too well, and a map pool you can exhaust in a night or two. One top negative review sums it up: unless you're playing with friends, skip it. Take that seriously, because with a group it's the version of this game that works.
Super Battle Golf on Steam -- $12.99
Thirteen games, two of them still in Early Access, all of them genuinely worth your money right now rather than "worth it once it's finished." The pattern across this list is the same one that shows up every year: small teams making something specific and finishing it, versus the alternative most of the industry keeps choosing instead.
The real headline here isn't any single entry. It's that a cat-breeding roguelike nearly out-peaked Hades 2, a fishing physics toy hit six figures in concurrent players at eight dollars, and the highest review score on the whole list belongs to a three-hour cooking game from a tiny team, not the biggest budget or the loudest marketing push. That's not an accident. That's what happens when a team gets to make the thing they actually wanted to make.
One name missing here that appears on several other best-of-2026 lists is Mixtape. Critics love it. Steam players are a lot less convinced, and we pulled that gap apart in Mixtape Has a 79% Positive Score on Steam. English Speakers Give It 66%.
Q4 still has to happen. Witchbrook, Coromon: Rogue Planet, and whatever shows up unannounced between now and December could all reshuffle this list completely. This page gets updated as that happens, not left to go stale the way "best of the year" lists usually do the moment January hits.