Another PAX East has come and gone, and I had the chance to attend the 2026 event for a few days. Like last year, I found the show to be a wonderful display of the unifying power of games and gaming. One of the highlights is to get together with folks from across the country and world to hang out and celebrate in one place. While this is reliably the first reason to attend PAX East, the second is the opportunity to sample the incredible array of games on the horizon.
This year Nintendo made a splash by bringing in dozens of stations to stir up hype for the coming Pokémon Champions alongside the new Switch 2 update for Super Mario Bros. Wonder and the recent smash hit Pokémon Pokopia. It certainly drew huge crowds and made for long lines, but as a fan of indie games, I preferred putting on my figurative miner’s helmet and started the hunt for diamonds in the rough.
I was able to sit down and play two dozen or so games and found several diamonds. The following games range from various stages of development, with a few releasing this month and others slated for the nebulous “Coming Soon” on their Steam pages.
I’ve been bold this time, maybe too bold, in that I am confident in the order of this list. Usually my opinion will change day to day on which show excites me for a future release, but this time around, this list hasn’t shifted at all.
10. Zwaard
I actually kickstarted this game in what feels like many years ago. It’s a brightly colored top-down action RPG that strongly resembles the pixel art of the beloved Hyper Light Drifter. In reality, I hardly had time with this game, and I was stumbling in the tutorial. But it’s got that charm. Clean movement, quick sword swipes, twin-stick gunplay. While its release is still out on the horizon, it felt undeniably good to play. With the fundamentals of the second-to-second gameplay locked in, Zwaard just might turn many heads when it launches.
9. Bubsy 4D
Speaking of clean movement, Fabraz has done it again. Bubsy 4D is probably the least likely sequel of all time, yet here we are, and it looks and plays better than ever in its 3D, er, sorry, 4D. The 3D graphics look amazing, and the light pastel colors expand an already vast platforming playground. Built with speed and skips in mind, within seconds I felt mastery over Bubsy’s toolkit of moves to bustle and leap around the level that was available in the demo. In the platforming genre, Bubsy 4D is set to be another winner, even if it seems like the difficulty will shoot through the roof.
8. Canvas City
Pitched as Jet Set Radio meets XCOM, one of the favorites of the PAX Rising floor, Canvas City is a grid-based, roller-skating tactics game in which graffiti, aerials, and grinding across rails meld together to form the basis of the game’s combat. Level design and action are slick, but not easy. You’ll have to carefully balance tagging walls to keep your action points up alongside the terrain as well. Roller skating is more than decoration; you get boosts and extra movement points as you ride down quarter pipes and fly over gaps. The demo featured the levels with a graph paper simplicity, but with time as it nears launch, I’m sure that things will get prettier.
7. Royalty Free-For-All
This was a strange one. I really hopped in line because it was short, and the art style felt like a middle ground between Cuphead and Fairly Odd Parents. Royalty Free-For-All is a brawler of all royalty-free, meaning public domain, characters. The roster is a wild spread of literary figures, including Lancelot, Piglet, and Toto, the dog from The Wizard of Oz, and mythical creatures like Nessie and fairy tale icons like Mother Goose. Playing a round with mostly strangers, this was a blast. The controls were simple and more forgiving than Super Smash Bros, making for an exceptionally easy and level session against others.
6. Lunarium
The initial draw here was catching a glimpse of 2B from NieR: Automata out of my eye. At least thinking I did. In a rare moment during the Saturday showcase, by far the busiest day on the floor, in an overly crowded section, there parted a path to a table of laptops lined up with one available seat. I zipped over, eager to skip a line, and took my first proper glance at Lunarium.
It’s an isometric, Dark Souls-inspired action game that takes cues from 2B, our beloved gothic queen, but ultimately is its own beast. You play as a single character, a woman with white hair clad in a black knight’s armor and her magical, floating counterpart who will aid you as you command her. With tight combat, immensely satisfying parries, and a tough-as-nails final boss, Lunarium felt incredible to play with a razor-sharp scope in its level design. Plenty to explore, not enough to get lost, and shortcuts in well-chosen corners to help you progress should you die.
5. Backyard Baseball
The endlessly enjoyable and replayable Backyard Baseball from 1997 has recently returned to Steam, and now there’s a new entry on its way this summer. The demo only featured a home run derby mode, but the charm that I remember as a kid is still there. The game looks great in 3D, and Pablo Sanchez is still one of the greatest video game characters of all time. This will likely take over my family’s play time when it releases in a few short months.
4. Well Dweller
Kyle Thompson fans, I’m happy to report that the latest game en route from the developer of Crypt Custodian and Islets is a triumph. It seems that Thompson is just now starting to flex his muscles, with Well Dweller boasting his strong art style with some terrifying enemies and bosses.
There’s a fresh coat of horror painted on this one, with immaculate detail. The metroidvania design feels right at home with the intricate level design and smart puzzles you’d expect from his previous games, and there’s really no reason to doubt that Well Dweller will show off even more cleverness when it launches later this year.
3. Kiln
Alright, yeah, this isn’t an indie game. It’s a AAA release from one of the biggest developers and publishers in the industry. But it’s a Double Fine game, which makes it still have the creativity and off-the-wall ingenuity you can expect from a non-traditionally developed game. And it plays incredibly well. I’d best describe Kiln as a party MOBA. There isn’t the stress of toxicity of hostile and competitive multiplayers here.
Instead, there are plenty of laughs and elbowing your buddies as you jump, roll, and splash your way across a truly bonkers map. Even without the brawling, the character creature is a brain massage. I could easily see myself making dozens of pots just to pass the time. Rather than this just being a fun exercise, the sheer amount of variety in how your character plays based on how you shape it is staggering. This will be a must-play when it comes out on April 23rd.
2. Tails of Fate
As a sucker for pixel art games, Tails of Fate has got the juice. I watched on the first day another player battle the demo’s boss. Unable to control myself, I spoke with one of the game’s three devs, or maybe it would be better to say that I interrogated him on how they made the animations work for the boss. It’s a cyclopic snake with unreal movement. The specific animation that wowed me was how it would coil around the branch where the player character stood. The hitboxes were perfectly aligned with the snake’s body on either side of the branch, and it seemed to defy its two-dimensional appearance as you had to stand between them and slash at them for damage.
When it was my turn, I kept the conversation going, asking how the metroidvania abilities would play across the three protagonists and how you’d go about upgrading your characters. While this is still quite a ways out, the demo left a lasting mark, and I’ll be impatiently counting down the days until this one launches.
1. Motorslice
Now I know that Motorslice has had a demo out. Fellow So Many Games writer Jesse told me as much as we met up at the Top Hat Studios booth (note that 3 of the games here are published by Top Hat), and we discussed our hopes for Motorslice.
But what was available at PAX East is not the same one that he played earlier this year, and this being my first hands-on time with the game, I was floored. There’s an oddly entangled combination of Shadow of the Colossus boss fight platforming and Dark Souls combat as you leap and zip your way through this construction vehicle hellscape with your trusty chainsaw-bladed weapon. I know that’s a dangerous duo of games to reference here, and while many may turn up their noses at the comparison, I stand by them.
Donned in the bright yellows that dump trucks are known for and steely blues, the world is highly unusual but takes its themes to heart, and it’s a stronger, more personal game for it. But all of that is secondary to how everything felt. I was most impressed with the boss fight, in which the health meter is broken down into uneven bars that represent platforming sections in which you sever critical sections of the dump truck. I loved it, and it is easily the demo that I wanted to play more of. Fortunately, the devs announced a release for May, just one month away.
Honourable Mention: Grave Seasons
Now there’s one game that I didn’t get to play, but it was clearly the indie darling of the showcase. Blumhouse made an early impression with a tall, forebodingly black booth that featured the upcoming horror farming-sim game Grave Seasons. Each time I passed by the booth, the line was never shorter than two hours.
I gazed wistfully from the side as players began their adventure in familiar farming-sim ways and watched as the creepy terror of a serial killer seeped into the screen. Speaking with one of the developers, the mystery here is resolved quickly, and the tension comes from you as the player hoping to prevent any further murders or maybe just taking matters into your own hands by winning over the killer with your charisma. Yeah, you can romance them. I’m beyond excited to see how this will play out when it launches in August of this year.
PAX East was another excellent slice of what indies are up to. The excitement rippled across the floor, and I was always eager to ask folks what games they had played that day and what I should check out. While much of this hype is replicated online in digital conventions, there’s nothing that quite compares to the word of mouth that breathes in excited whispers and seeing the general movement of people crowding booths, anticipating their crack at an upcoming game. Is it time for PAX East 2027 yet?
