In December, we crowned our Most Overlooked Indie Games of 2025, and now we are back at it with Indie Watch: Must-See Indie Games — January & February 2026. January was especially stacked with exciting indie games that we couldn’t wait to jump into after the holidays, and now we are here to share it all with you!
As you can see from our title image on this edition of Indie Watch, the games have been very different. Our spooky bases, whether we were looking at the visceral horror in Horripilant, or jumping into something creepy and familiar like Pathologic 3. Cute and cozy was covered too, with games like Big Hops introducing adorable frogs, and Cozy Caravan offering cozy…well, everything else.
Indie Watch: Must-See Indie Games — January & February 2026 really covered all the bases, so without further ado, here are some of our top indie games from the last two months!
Cozy Caravan
Developer: 5 Live Studios
Release Date: January 8, 2026
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Played by: Lane Martin
When I tell you that Cozy Caravan is cute, I somehow don’t think that that word truly encompasses the extent to which it deploys its soft, round, chubby forest animal aesthetics. No, it’s clear that subtlety is a fool’s dream in Cozy Caravan, as it bludgeons its players with endearing critters, lovingly animated in a stop motion style that makes everything feel real, physical, and even huggable. When I see a wide-eyed, anthropomorphic highland cow do a little dance, something about the animation makes it feel real, like a toy come to life. It’s really quite magical.
As you may suspect, however, the gameplay of Cozy Caravan is pretty simple. Players go from town to adorable town doing fetch quests, participating in little mini-games, and running market stalls to make the sweet little denizens happy. Obstacles aren’t pressing, but they don’t need to be here. Players interested in having a delightful, stress-free time where they meet some sweet little guys and solve their problems will find a lot of great things in these pastoral play sessions.
Pathologic 3
Developer: Ice-Pick Lodge
Release Date: January 9, 2026
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Played by: Jordan Biordi
In Pathologic 3, players take on the role of Danile Dankovsky—much less of a prickly prick, and much less intent on burying them all this time around. If you’re familiar with the original Pathologic, this is essentially the Bachelor story, completely revamped—where Dankovsky is no longer a pawn in the machinations of the town, but an active player. I legitimately don’t think I have the paragraph space to describe the myriad ways Pathologic 3 both changes and enhances the gameplay of the original
What makes Pathologic 3 so great is how much control it simultaneously gives and takes from the player, allowing them to revisit past days, conduct better research and potentially alter future events. But time is a finite resource, and you’ll never be able to do it all—especially as Dankovski’s mental state can affect his ability to perform his duties. It’s amazing to see how far Ice-Pick has come with Pathologic, and I’m dying to see how they make a fully realized game of the Changling’s story.
Big Hops
Developer: Luckshot Games
Release Date: January 12, 2026
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5
Played by: Jordan Biordi
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times: there’s no game that isn’t immediately improved by having a frog as the main character. Big Hops embraces this philosophy wholeheartedly by utilizing all the interesting abilities of a frog for an unbelievably fun 3D platformer. I had seen a lot of people talking about the game, so I was expecting something pretty good, but I honestly didn’t expect just HOW good Big Hops would be.
Essentially taking the movement mechanics of Super Mario 64, throwing in a dash of Breath of the Wild’s climbing mechanics, Big Hops has players jumping, belly sliding and tongue-swinging across wide open platform sandboxes that are full of fun challenges. But what’s truly remarkable about the game is just how dynamic it is—constantly changing up the gameplay in unique ways to keep it fresh. While it can be a tad janky at times, it’s so unbelievably charming that once you start playing, you honestly can’t stop.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
Developer: Three Bees
Release Date: January 22, 2026
Platforms: PC
Played by: Lane Martin
Video games, especially indies, make a very special medium for autobiography. It is really common in small indie games with stuff like Coming Out Simulator and Despelote. They make for very real, intimate stories that I doubt would be as effective in any other medium. That’s what’s going on in Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides: Station to Station.
In Perfect Tides: Station to Station, players pilot Mara Whitefish as she lives her life as a college student away from home and living in the big city. It is told through nostalgic pixel graphics in a 2D point-and-click style adventure game. The visuals and gameplay are all lovely, and pitch-perfect for the sort of thing Station to Station is going for, but the real star of the show is the writing. Mara’s world is brought to life with stirring, though often long-winded prose, that manages to make another person’s life feel nostalgic.
Valkyrie Saga
Developer: Public Void
Release Date: January 26, 2026
Platforms: PC
Played by: Jordan Biordi
It was probably always obvious that the indie game, Valkyrie Saga, was going to catch my eye, primarily for its aesthetic. We’ve been seeing something of a resurgence of the PSX-inspired games within the indie scene, and I for one am HERE. FOR. IT. But while the game certainly caught my attention with its low-resolution textures and limited draw distance, it held my attention as a captivating 3D platformer that offers a lot of challenge without becoming overly complex.
Players take on the role of a Valkyrie named…Roll, who is tasked with saving the floating island of Paladia before it crashes into the land below it. It’s a fairly straightforward sequence of platforming challenges, but much like Pseudoregalia, Valkyrie Saga’s brilliance lies in its simple mechanics that require a bit of nuance to take full advantage of. Like any solid platformer, it rewards players for using their environment alongside their reflexes to get around, and once you get into it, it’s incredibly addictive.
Astro Party EX
Developer: Rusty Moyher
Release Date: January 27, 2026
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Played by: Jordan Biordi
One thing I’ll always appreciate about the indie scene is how easy it is to find good ol’ fashioned arcade-style games that prioritize fun and friendly competition. Most “mainstream” multiplayer-oriented games these days are bog-standard shooters, and gone are the days of smaller-scale, frenetically fun games that tested players’ abilities and left them wanting more. Well, Astro Party EX is the answer to that problem—an updated version of Rusty Moyher’s 2014 game of the same name
It wears its arcade sensibilities right on its sleeve, assigning players characters based on which controller they’re using, utilizing only two buttons, and having a lot of interesting ideas. Players pilot a little ship and try to blow up their opponents, but the chaos lies in the fact that they can only turn right. Precision maneuvers are somewhat out of reach, but that’s exactly what makes the game so raucous and fun. For a free game, you can certainly do a lot worse.
Dark Auction
Developer: Izanagi Games
Release Date: January 28, 2026
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Played by: Lane Martin
There’s something about the combination of visual novel-style mystery games and anime that can lead to wildly off-the-wall ideas and slick visuals. In Dark Auction main character, Noah, follows his father to the site of a shadowy (likely dark) auction, intent on bringing the man home. What he finds are a gaggle of colourful though intimidating characters, his dear old dad’s cadaver, and a fella with a bird head. It seems that the auction’s participants were invited to bid on mysterious exhibits by participating in strange experiments, and it continues to get stranger and stranger from there.
The game boasts some high-profile names working on the project. The story was penned by Rika Suzuki, who worked extensively on the DS mystery game Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and the characters were designed by Kohske, an illustrator on GANGSTA. That said, it seems like Dark Auction used generative AI in it’s art work. Through updates, Izanagi Games has been replacing that art with pieces made by Kohske, which is great. The original art all looks slick and appealing, so I look forward to the day that it no longer contains those elements.
Steel Century Groove
Developer: Sloth Gloss Games
Release Date: January 28, 2026
Platforms: PC
Played by: Jordan Biordi
I’ve been keeping an eye on Steel Century Groove ever since it randomly came across my TikTok feed back when I was still on it. There was just something about a bunch of giant robots dance battling that immediately captivated me, the same way that Mad Verse City did in the Jackbox Party Pack 5. If I could sum up Steel Century Groove as simply as possible, I would say it’s basically Pokémon meets Elite Beat Agents.
Players create a team of giant robots in order to dance battle their opponents using a combination of timed button presses and special abilities. There’s an incredible depth to it— depending on what type of robot you’re using, you can get really intricate abilities that require both skill and timing to pull off. Combine that with the ability to load your own music into the game, and you’ve got an unbelievably addictive rhythm battler that is unbelievably fun.
Horripilant
Developer: Alexandre Declos, Pas Game Studio
Release Date: February 20, 2026
Platforms: PC
Played by: Lane Martin
To be perfectly frank, I don’t know how to pronounce Horripilant. Apparently, that is the word for when your hairs bristle up from fear or irritation. After playing it for a bit, that makes sense. Horripilant is an incremental game like Cookie Clicker or Universal Paperclips. Players can click to harvest material until they can afford to buy things that will generate those materials for them automatically. Those materials can also be used to upgrade equipment so that players can descend through the dungeon, which is also largely automated. Descending through the dungeon provides meat and seems to appease the large face that lives in the abyss and claims to be a god, obviously.
Descend enough times, and players will be able to restart the game with persistent benefits and so on and so forth. Horripilant is strangely addictive. The graphics are grungy and terrifying in some real, visceral ways. The horror in Horripilant doesn’t come from loud, sudden jumpscares, but from the art, music, and filthy vibes. All of the systems naturally feed into each other, making dungeon runs surprisingly smooth. The game very literally plays itself, but I found myself coming back time and again to dive deeper and venture further.
Stay tuned for more great indie games from January and February 2026 that we add throughout the month!
