Developer Patrick Grant was born in Australia and lives in New Zealand, but a childhood of British TV inspired him to set a comedy game in a bleak vision of the north

Something is amiss in the dingy town of Slagford, and curious scamp Pip Bunting is the only one who can find out what. So quit your mithering, it’s time to discover just how grim it truly is up north.

A Pocket Full of Slagford is an upcoming retro-styled 3D puzzle adventure game set in a surreal alternative-reality near-future northern England that never escaped the clutches of Thatcherism. The story follows the misadventures of a young local lad from the eponymous Slagford after he takes ownership of a mysterious relic that lets him wreak havoc on reality.

Developers who met through Australia’s improv scene and publishers of comedic party games have united for this slithering challenge in which you play as one extended limb

Most stealth games cast you as a spy, an assassin or a master thief. My Arms Are Longer Now dispenses with most of the criminal person, to send in just one spectacularly badly behaved limb. It slithers across floors, winds around furniture, steals things and slaps anyone within reach – finally answering the question nobody asked: what if your own arm turned to crime?

As Toot Games co-founder Matthew Jackson puts it: “You are the bad thing that happens to the people.”

PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X/S; Konami
This second collection remasters another three titles from the illustrious stealth espionage series, but their world has changed little since the original releases

‘War has changed,” claims Old Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Back in 2008, the team at Kojima Productions waxed poetic about people recruited to fight in proxy wars they have no political or ideological stake in. As these mercenaries follow their orders, traders get rich out of the so-called war economy. The more disastrous the conflict in a specific area, the higher the bidding price.

I expected my time with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol 2 to be nostalgic and, in good old MGS fashion, abundant with fictional events that sound eerily familiar to our current reality. Twenty minutes in, I was having an existential crisis.

Free from a big brand’s audience expectations, new studio GPTrack50 has created a wacky action-packed romp through a monster-filled world for its first game

Love is blind. In Stupid Never Dies, it is also frozen solid and technically dead as Davy, the weakest zombie in monster society, discovers Julia’s body in a shopping centre and falls in love at first sight. He wants to bring her back to life and take her on a date. Unfortunately, that means defeating the King of Monsters (KOM) and accidentally saving humanity along the way.

This is the gloriously ridiculous setup for this forthcoming action RPG from GPTrack50, a new studio founded by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Its world looks much like ours, except that monsters have always been part of everyday life: whereas we might find a bear in the mountains or a stray dog in the woods, residents here encounter werewolves and zombies.

Human by day, vampire by night, Coen has difficult choices to make – beginning here in the 1300s, his adventure could span centuries in upcoming sequels

The Blood of Dawnwalker could be the start of an epic saga. Created by some of the talent behind The Witcher 3, this dark fantasy role-playing game takes place in the 14th century in the fictional land of Vale Sangora, a Carpathian valley of wetlands, mountains and forests cut off from the rest of the world and under the rule of a vicious vampire clan.

The developers envisage Dawnwalker as a trilogy. And because protagonist Coen is half vampire himself, that trilogy can skip across time, culminating in the modern day.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Frogwares
Frogwares’ Lovecraftian action-horror is full of grim tenacity and pulp paperback charm, despite a few frayed edges

I’m standing in the prosthetics lab of a campy horror hospital, hunting for a preacher’s flayed face to wear so I can trick the world’s grisliest smart doorbell. Pinned to a board in the corner of the room are a dozen X-rays: shattered bones and metal splints in sepia negative, each with a note attached. It’s a stark, clinical intrusion on the theatrical gore elsewhere. It takes a beat to realise that I’m reading the stories of injuries sustained by soldiers fighting for Frogwares’ native Ukraine. Fingers amputated after severe burns. Limbs lost in mine explosions. Toes torn off by shell fire.

Like so many of my favourite PS3-era seven-out-of-tens, The Sinking City 2 is a pulpy action horror. It’s fuelled by scrappy ambition, Lovecraft fan fiction and wonderfully unhinged scenario design. A puzzle that has you determine which talking jarred brain is telling porkies. A scavenger hunt to fix a crane to move a rotting whale carcass. A gunfight amid the grisly results of a siren pop star’s fan meet-up turned battle royale.

PC; Replicant D6
This GoldenEye 007-styled retro shooter is an agreeable set of straightahead shooting missions that hark back to a simpler time, with simpler controls

With 007 First Light, 2026 has already given us the best James Bond game in more than three decades, since the release of Rare’s N64 classic GoldenEye 007. But what about those players whose loyalties lie not with the super-spy himself but the particulars of that 90s interpretation of his adventures?

Enter Agent 64: Spies Never Die. Made almost entirely by a single developer (who goes by the very cloak-and-dagger alias Replicant D6), its production values couldn’t be much further from the blockbuster First Light. There’s no voice acting, with all dialogue instead delivered via subtitles, while each location on your globe-trotting adventure is depicted by a repeating texture wallpapered over scenery so blocky you can count the individual polygons.

After the success of space horror Mouthwashing, Swedish developer Wrong Organ has created a Battlefield-inspired co-op with a supernatural twist

‘Claustrophobic”, “oppressive”, “pretty depressing” – these are the words Jeffrey Tomec and Dave van Egdom volunteer when I ask them to reflect on their work as part of Swedish indie developer Wrong Organ. I’d add “nightmare-inducing”, too. Their last game, Mouthwashing, was an acclaimed work of horror storytelling set on a scuttled space freighter, in which players uncover the horrible things its desperate crew have done to each other.

When you’re planning a follow-up to something so pitilessly nasty, how do you raise the stakes? Well, you could set the entire game in the stifling crew compartment of a heavily armoured tank, a coffin-like interior you share with two other players as you co-operatively attempt to pilot your beleaguered war machine to safety through the crumbling remains of a city in enemy territory.

PlayStation 5, PC; Arc System Works/Sony Interactive Entertainment
With tremendous visuals and accessible controls, this superhero-themed fighter has the chops to inspire a new generation of champs

Arriving at the turn of the millennium and the twilight of the video arcade, Marvel vs Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes has long been a high-water mark for fighting games, with no heir apparent; its massive, colourful roster and frenetic, spectacular combos have lured newcomers and elite competitors alike. Developer Arc System Works, a fan-favourite studio famous for its hyper-fluid and extremely technical anime-style fighting games, has been on a long journey to usurp Capcom’s throne. With Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, it may have finally achieved this difficult task.

Marvel Tōkon is less an attempt to recreate a Marvel vs Capcom-esque phenomenon out of whole cloth, and more a thoughtful evolution of the developer’s previous riffs on the formula such as 2018’s BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Dragon Ball FighterZ, building on its low-floor, high-ceiling approach. Simplified inputs allow players to execute combos and finishers with a single button, which gives novices the confidence to keep playing and inspires them to study and improve – because when anyone can pull off a flashy ultimate skill or EX attack, strategy and mastery take on a premium. And Marvel Tōkon has great depths to plumb.

Daniel Mullins explains how he plans to follow up his quirky classic without losing what made it stand out in the first place

Glitchy aesthetics. Literally collapsing menu boxes. The game taunting you by “possessing” your Steam friends. Technical tricks of this nature may sound gimmicky in 2026, but they felt excitingly unorthodox a decade ago, when Pony Island came out to critical acclaim.

Fans of Daniel Mullins, the celebrated indie developer of Inscryption, will be forgiven for forgetting that Pony Island 2: Panda Circus is in active development. After all, it’s been almost three years since the announcement – and a full decade since it was first teased as an Easter egg in Pony Island’s ARG (Alternate Reality Game) – with only a single trailer and a bunch of tunes from the soundtrack released to the public.

Explore Antarctica as a flightless bird – and dodge some earthly monsters – in this surreal adaptation of HP Lovecraft

While watching the 2006 animated film Happy Feet with his daughter, Origame Digital founder Naphtali Faulkner noticed something interesting. “[In the movie], they see the digger fall into the ocean, and it has an almost eldritch quality,” he says. Over time, and with plenty of iteration, Faulkner’s inspirations coalesced, from HP Lovecraft to the 1982 version of The Thing and the works of David Lynch. “I’m a big fan of horror that sits in your head rather than in your stomach,” says Faulkner.

In Penguin Colony, players body-switch between species of flightless birds, piecing together cryptic cosmic clues as they tail a Nazi expedition to Antarctica. In the process, Origame Digital draws on Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. “I’d always wanted to do a creature that’s a manifestation of colonial thought, energy and power, and the idea of it resting and then regrowing,” says Faulkner. “I was looking through the history of Lovecraft and him being a gigantic racist, and this idea of the Nazis sort of came out,” he adds.

Since Stardew Valley rejuvenated the farming sim genre a decade ago, games like Fields of Mistria are capitalising on its popularity with their own special touches

Farming simulator games deliver on an escapist fantasy: going off-grid from the modern work grind, in exchange for charming small-town life and a farm to call your own. While these games have had dedicated fans since the days of Harvest Moon, the most popular today, Stardew Valley, contemporised the genre with a larger range of activities and lovable townspeople to befriend and romance. Created in 2016 by independent developer Eric Barone, it has now sold more than 50m copies and become the mould for so many other indie farming sims.

Fields of Mistria is one of these farming sims in a post-Stardew world – though it updates the core formula. Created by independent developer NPC Studio, Fields of Mistria has already proven popular: it debuted in early access (a pre-release version of the game meant for early players to find bugs and give feedback) for PC players on Steam in August 2024, and in the first month the game racked up more than 4m player hours. It’s for a good reason: Mistria satisfies all of those same farming sim desires but with more expansive character creation and a story steeped in magic.

Switch 2, PlayStation 5, PC; House House
The creators of Untitled Goose Game return with an online, open-world adventure that delivers slapstick silliness and bucolic majesty in nearly equal measure

Radiant sunsets glinting on lapping waves; bushland valleys that beckon with secrets; modernist buildings sat atop craggy ridges: Big Walk’s setting is as arresting as it is beguiling – a kind of architectural fever dream transplanted to a handsome Australian wilderness – but it is the images created by players that lodge deepest in the mind. Here’s one that has stuck with me: in the black of night, cicadas kicking up an almighty din, I had lost my partner. Panic. Despair. Fear. Then, there in the far distance, I saw him signalling in my direction. He was relentlessly spamming a gigantic, ball-shaped lamp on and off, the ground around him flicking from inky dark to warm pastel pink and back again, like a single Christmas light blinking from afar.

This kind of encounter is common in Big Walk, the brilliant and whimsical new online co-op puzzler from House House, the Melbourne-based studio behind the 2019 viral hit, Untitled Goose Game. Rather than playing as a honking, mischief-making goose as you do in that game, you are a bug-eyed, gangly limbed kind of bird person (think Pingu as drawn by Mondrian) for whom getting separated from your mates is all part of the fun. That’s somewhat because this rugged terrain is dense with vegetation and cliffs to fall down, and also because the game makes ingenious use of proximity and direction-based voice audio. Step out of earshot of your party and you will find it difficult to call for one another (unless, of course, you’ve picked up a Fisher-Price-like walkie-talkie).

Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’

The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.

From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.

Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games

As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!

Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you

It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.

In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.

PC, Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PS5; SFB Games
Detective Grimoire is at it again in the long-awaited new entry to this stylish series of comedy whodunnits

In a boom time for mystery games, the Detective Grimoire series stands out for its style and sense of humour. The Mermaid Mask continues to build upon the formula laid down in Secret of the Swamp and polished in Tangle Tower, and while there is still room for further improvements this sequel is worth the seven years’ wait.

This time, the casually competent Grimoire and his smart if sarcastic sidekick Sally have been summoned to a submarine to solve the locked-room murder of its captain, Magnus Mortuga. You click around the cluttered rooms of the vessel to hear the detectives’ comedic commentary and look for clues and – closer up – click and drag to move objects around for further examination or to solve a puzzle. (For those playing on Nintendo Switch 2, the mouse controls are actually useful here, if not comfortable in the long run.)

Inspired by interactive theatre and fuelled by the motion capture tech used by VTubers, the vampire spies in Red Kiss have personality in spades

‘You look at the news and you’re like, ‘Another pointless war, another pointless bloodshed, another pointless genocide.’ And that can make you a bit hopeless.”

Roy van der Schilden, narrative designer and business director at Wispfire, speaks of a very human feeling. But the protagonist of its upcoming game Red Kiss can relate – despite being a vampire.

An autobiographical game about the devastating effects of chronic illness on an artist’s creative life gives players the chance to slow the pace right down

Bub does not look like a traditional video game. Artist and stop-motion animator Case Jernigan spends hours, days, months in his studio drawing, painting and delicately cutting out pieces of collected paper, while coder and gameplay designer Todd Anderson builds scripts and physics simulations to make them into a game.

In Bub, you play through the life of an artist in New York City, making art but also diving into his early memories and imaginative dreams. “You go from present day New York City into his childhood, or different sort of visions, which are all rendered in stop motion,” says Anderson. “His story is told in the present day, but also how he’s making sense of his past.”

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2; Undercoders
Colourful, counter-cultural and captivating – this rail riding game set in a dystopian Japan is as weird as it is exhilarating

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.