Believe it or not, we’re already over halfway through 2026 – I know, I know, try not to panic. But while the months are breezing by, there are still many, many indie horror games to release this year, including the plethora of titles announced at this summer’s Horror Game Awards Showcase.
So, if you’re looking for something new to shake your bones with, you’re in luck because we’ve compiled a list of 15 upcoming indie horror games that are still due to release this year (according to their Steam pages or as confirmed in recent showcases).
1. Liminal Point
If you’re looking for some old school survival horror, HideWorks’ Liminal Point might just be for you. Lyra was once a rising rockstar until her bandmate, Mira, disappeared. After receiving a strange voicemail, Lyra is led to Ashen Point, a now-abandoned island where her band’s downfall started.
Working her way through the thick fog that now blankets the town, Lyra finds it infested with monsters that she must survive against to uncover the truth and find out what happened to Mira.
Liminal Point promises a return to classic survival horror, with limited resources, inventory management, map navigation, and intense combat encounters.
2. Phase Zero
Continuing the theme of old school survival horror is Spina Studio’s Phase Zero, which really puts the “old” in “school” with its PlayStation 1-style graphics (sorry Millennials).
Phase Zero dives back into survival horror classics, most notably Resident Evil, set in 1994 in the town of Flint Peak, which is plagued by a strange illness. Survival horror fans will be right at home with the game’s pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed cameras, puzzles, and combat against the monsters that infest the streets of Flint Peak.
3. RetroSpace
You’ve probably heard of steampunk, cyberpunk, and atompunk – but have you heard of a discopunk space horror? This is what The Wild Gentlemen will be delivering with RetroSpace, an immersive sim where players take on the role of a janitor on Aurora 5, a space station designed to drift in space in search of a new home for humanity while its convoy of humans sleep in cryostasis, attended to by robots and janitors. Aurora 5 has now been swallowed up by a sentient black hole. Strange side effects have occurred as a result, with mutants now prowling the ship’s corridors, which you can take out either via stealth or going in guns blazing, and time has been affected too, with the ship now stuck between two time periods – just the cherry on top of the whole situation, really!
The Wild Gentlemen promises varied enemies in RetroSpace, not just in appearance but also behaviour, abilities and weaknesses – you’ll need to study and learn from them in order to work out the best way to defeat them. Aurora 5 acts as a semi-open world, allowing players to freely explore it and unlock new areas and shortcuts as they progress.
And it’s not just the creatures on board the Aurora 5 that get all the mutation fun, the player can use Mutamods to gain new abilities, including tentacles and mind control. And if Bioshock wasn’t a clear enough warning that you shouldn’t just go around injecting yourself with whatever substance you can find, Mutamods in RetroSpace also come with their own side effects. And while an easy death is one survival horror aspect used to increase tension, in RetroSpace, Aurora 5 will clone your character upon death — however, this does come with a price, as each clone is a more impure version of the original.
4. Shutter Story
Have you ever been spooked simply by an image? They are said to be worth a thousand words after all. Maybe those that claim to prove ghost sightings, or those images taken just moments before something tragic occurred? Sometimes when you’ve been staring at an image for longer than a moment or two, you start to spot things that the subject wouldn’t have been aware of when the picture was being taken, maybe something in the background, or someone…
Frostwood Interactive’s Shutter Story is based on this premise. You will be staring at plenty of pictures from a family’s photo album, using a photo editor to adjust the exposure, contrast, and noise of these images to reveal signs of paranormal activity. Spotting and correctly identifying these entities could save the fate of this family.
Shutter Story is due to release on PC in Q3 of 2026.
5. Silver Pines
Metroidvania fans have been eating well with last year’s Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Wych Elm brings another highly anticipated title to the genre with Silver Pines. This survival horror metroidvania follows Private Investigator Red Walker, whose search for missing musician Eddie Velvet takes him to a small town called Silver Pines.
Silver Pines offers traditional survival horror mechanics such as a limited inventory and resources, and challenging enemy encounters, mixed with the familiar metroidvania traits of puzzle obstacles, locked doors, and hidden paths.
Silver Pines is due to be released on all platforms on October 8, 2026.
6. Tenebris Somnia
FMVs have been slowly making a comeback in the horror genre with Immortality and Dead Take. Tenebris Somnia will be the latest of these, developed by Andrés Borghi and Saibot Studios.
While a lot of FMV games have a fairly low budget for filming, which shows in the production quality, Tenebris Somnia is set to form a new standard with its impressive cutscenes, which, by the looks of its trailer, wouldn’t look out of place in an indie feature-length film. It also mixes its FMV cutscenes with traditional, retro-style 2D survival horror gameplay, making it stand out within a rapidly growing genre.
Tenebris Somnia is due to release on all platforms on October 16, 2026.
7. The Dropouts
Set at a boarding school in Switzerland, Naraven Games’ The Dropouts does what many of us wish we could do: it travels back to 2004. Students have been disappearing at Noirmont High for over 100 years. We take on the role of Lou, a transfer student who decides to get to the bottom of the disappearances.
The Dropouts is a narrative adventure game, with the majority of its gameplay revolving around the various choices we can make that affect the story, including our starting skills and fears. Its art style is based on comic book panels, and it features an original soundtrack by Icarus to really take us back to the early 2000s.
8. Shadow Sacrament: The Roots of Evil
Following on the metroidvania trend is Eldritch House’s Shadow Sacrament: The Roots of Evil, a self-proclaimed ‘horrovania’ with pixelated 2D graphics and a sidescrolling camera.
Similar to Silver Pines, in Shadow Sacrament, we play as a detective in the 19th century investigating a monastery. We’ll face off against creatures haunting the ancient site with limited resources while solving puzzles and uncovering its secrets.
9. SOS Recordings
In Japan, 1989, two hikers went missing on Mount Asahi. They were located and rescued thanks to a large SOS message built from fallen birch logs. However, the search teams would soon find out that the two hikers hadn’t actually built the SOS message themselves, launching an investigation to find out who did.
The message was determined to have been in place for around two years, and nearby, a skeleton was found, along with personal belongings and an ID for a man who had been missing since 1984. Within the personal belongings was a tape recorder with recordings of a man calling for help… and anime TV show music. Police determined from the skeleton that this person would have been unable to build the SOS sign alone; they could not confirm that it belonged to the man whose ID they had found, and his parents were unable to identify that it was his voice on the recordings.
PackDev’s SOS Recordings is a low-poly horror game based on this incident, following a detective who is given the case and must now venture into the mountains to uncover answers.
10. Becrowned
Becrowned is another survival horror game on this list, this time taking players to a surreal, dream-like world that Richard Torrance finds himself in.
Tapping into Silent Hill, this psychological horror game will dive into Richard’s psyche as this world torments him with his own unfulfilled desires and ambitions. Unlike a lot of psychological horror games, which withhold the flaws of the main character to be used as reveals later on, 13th Street Studio declares from the get-go that Richard is a troubled man. The Steam page says: “Richard Torrance is a man who will do anything to get what he wants: with strong will, unbreakable character – rationality, reason, and cold-blood, fate should twist itself around his finger. But despite striving to shape the world to his liking, he has never achieved what he truly desires – happiness.” The world that Richard finds himself in is described as a “prison”, hinting that he has ended up there to face punishment for his wrongdoings, or alleged wrongdoings.
Becrowned promises all the familiar traits of a survival horror game: a varied map featuring different themed settings, puzzles, resource management, and challenging combat. But Becrowned also offers a twist on the genre by providing the player with narrative choices that can change the fates of others who are imprisoned in the world, giving you moral dilemmas on forgiving those who are imprisoned for wrongdoings, the same as you, using precious resources to save them, or leaving them to serve their time.
Becrowned is due to release on PC in Q4 of 2026.
11. T.W.I.R.L.
T.W.I.R.L. is a short narrative experience by Genie Boy Games. This psychological horror game is inspired by P.T. and follows someone who is confessing to something they did one night after sneaking out of bed at 3 AM in 2006. The trailer opens with the main character telling their confession to a priest, who gleefully torments them for it.
But what did this person do as a nine-year-old child that has haunted them for so long? In its one-hour playtime, all will be revealed in T.W.I.R.L, which is due to release August 10, 2026.
12. Lurks Within Walls
Lurks Within Walls is another survival horror game, but it has a twist. This psychological horror title by Here Be Monsters combines survival horror with a dungeon-crawling RPG, featuring turn-based combat.
We’ll fight our way through a quarantined building as some kind of disease breaks out among its residents, turning them into monsters. As well as standing out through its unique genre and gameplay mechanic combination, Lurks Within Walls’ monsters are designed by artist Trevor Henderson, responsible for iconic monster designs such as Siren Head.
Players will take control of residents trying to escape the building and police officers trying to save survivors, and in classic survival horror fashion, you’ll need to scavenge for weapons and resources to make it out alive.
13. Farsight
Writing this, I’ve actually just returned from the opticians, and how much I spent there is a horror story itself, but the 12-year-old main character in Studio Noori’s Farsight has slightly more worrying concerns. When doing a routine eye test with the autorefractor, staring out at that little house on the hill, we suddenly find ourselves pulled into the machine, surrounded by sprawling hills with our only path being towards the house at the top of the hill.
As you explore this world that feels oddly familiar, you can use the camera on your FUNTIME-GO handheld console to take pictures of things you can’t see, and you have the eerie feeling that you’re not alone here.
14. Encryptid
Funny enough, Autumn Knight’s Encryptid continues the trend of games related to taking pictures with a handheld console… This creature collector, while based on famous 1990s and early 2000s creature collectors such as Pokémon, is also an FMV horror game, with its footage recorded on the Game Boy Camera.
While in the woods, you find an abandoned camera that once belonged to a cryptozoologist. The footage recorded on it shows the cryptids that he found. It’s your job to find, identify, and catch the creatures recorded on the camera in hopes of finding out what happened to the cryptozoologist.
15. Animal Use Protocol
The Brotherhood are returning with another sci-fi horror game. This time we play as Penn, a chimp trying to help other lab animals escape a testing facility, Anchorage Station. While The Brotherhood’s previous games have been isometric point-and-click adventures, Animal Use Protocol is a first-person survival horror game. Penn has a gravity manipulation tool which he can use to navigate the facility, accompanied by a rat and fellow test subject, Trip. The trailer shows various obstacles in our path, which Penn will use the gravity manipulation tool to overcome.
But we’re not alone, as the chimera mistakenly created by failed experiments are now prowling the halls. Penn must escape with the other animals, while also uncovering the truth of how the facility fell to ruin.
What games would you add to this list? There’s plenty more to be found!
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