Summer Game Fest 2026: Four indie gems from PC Gaming Show with demos you can try now
- Nate and Julie
- 33 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Our third and final day of reactions during Summer Game Fest week came with a reminder that there are No Games for Genocide and a PC Gaming Show so full of exciting reveals that it rivaled even the incredible Frosty Games Fest — our returning frontrunner for digital summer games showcases — for the pure amount of games that we immediately wanted to play once the show was over.
On stream, our hosts reacted to the live announcements as the PC Gaming Show featured around 60 games and entertained us with a cheeky sitcom framework featuring hosts Sean "Day[9]" Plott and Mica Burton. Then, as is our tradition, we ended by spotlighting three favorites of the day, sharing some extra love with Another Door (multiplayer deception-driven roguelike), Pipes.exe (co-op workplace horror), and Red Kiss (vampire dispatcher narrative RPG). Clearly, by this point, we had multiplayer fun on the brain, and, with the long days of Summer Games Mess livestreaming through, we finally had some time to start indulging in playing demos.
These four games showcased during the PC Gaming Show quickly stood out to us and are already games we think about fondly, even after just a tiny taste in our demo sessions.
So, come along and learn a bit more about these games and go play them yourself, why don'tcha.
Developer: Moving Pieces Interactive
Genre: Co-op computer horror and profanity prohibitor
Release Date: TBA
My friend group loves to get a lil' chaotic together in a game that amplifies our inherent silliness to 11. Lethal Company, PEAK, REPO. You know the type.
So when Pipes.exe was revealed, a '90s-core nostalgic horror experience that sees players digitized and tossed into their computers to do work for a totally not evil company known as System 6D, I was all over it. When you and your pals enter your computers, you're tossed into environments inspired by old-school screensavers. In the demo, you spend some time climbing around the classic intertwining colorful pipes and finally getting to explore the brick-walled maze you used to watch loop for hours on your dad's PC.
Your job is to grab data trapped in these unassuming yet horrifying locales, bring it to the trash for "processing," and get out before the digital horrors trapped within kill you. As employees at the lowest rung, you are beyond disposable. So of course, dying in the PC means dying for real.
The two most compelling things about Pipes.exe's chaotic multiplayer horror were its physics-based traversal system that asks you to use your character's physical hands to climb the world and its profanity-penalizing mechanic, which makes it so that any curse word utterance takes away from your team's earnings at the end of every shift. Just in concept alone, you can see the appeal. But in execution, it's even better than you'd think.
The tangible physicality of having to specifically make your grips, hand by hand — not unlike the indie horror hit White Knuckle — adds a ton of tension to the already tenuous pipe climbing. On mouse and keyboard, you have to alternate between the left and right mouse buttons to grip and pull your way up. Think a slightly more involved version of PEAK's climbing. Stamina dwindles, and if you let up for even a moment, the legless creature that is monkeying its way through the pipes behind you might just catch up. It takes a second to get used to it at the start and even longer to feel like you've got a handle on it, but it perfectly threads the needle between unwieldy and controlled that games like this rely on to be enjoyable for everyone playing.
And then there's the profanity filter. Pipes.exe processes your voice into text, and whenever it detects a curse word, it penalizes your team's bottom line. So when you turn the corner and bash into a monster, don't you dare drop a panicked "oh shit." When you miss a jump and start plummeting into the void, hissing a resigned "fuck" will earn you a collective berating from your teammates.
When we played, though, we were pretty confused when a friend got penalized for saying what the game labeled u*ion. We all pawed through our mental curse word rolodexes, even dipping into the darkest corners, to try and figure out what could have been said. And then it hit me. Union. Union is the curse word that a corporation would censor.
When we hopped back into the PC and confirmed it, our group lit up with laughter.
Pipes.exe is full of silly moments like that, subtle reveals of the team's stealthy genius in every corner of its world. We can't wait to see what else they have in store in the full release and what the hell the Mailer Daemon is talking about in our email inboxes.
Developer: Ludogram
Genre: Mountain climbing tactics and survival resource management
Release Date: Q3 2026
I've never thought of myself as someone who might be into mountain climbing. But after playing early GOTY contender Cairn this year, and after immediately falling in love with what Ascenders: Beyond the Peak is doing with mountain climbing in a completely different genre, I think I might be more of a climber than I expected.
Ascenders: Beyond the Peak is a mountain climbing tactics game that has you and your climbing team working together to summit a series of peaks, and finding magical relics that you can either use to amplify your alpinists or trade to one of three dueling factions to curry favor with them. The inherent dangers of climbing, slippery ice and cracking footholds, aren't the only things your team will have to battle on the way up the mountain. There are cosmic horror creatures waiting on these cliffsides. Giant spiders. Enraged climbers who have given into the whispers and see themselves as the only ones worthy of climbing the mountain.
Death is final, so confronting the mountain and these evils is a tense affair. Ascenders manages to capture the stress of climbing as Cairn did, except instead of real-time limb-focused climbing action, Ascenders achieves that pressure with a methodical turn-based system instead.
You'll need to manage the distance between each climber, because rope is limited. You'll need to gather resources on the climb, because your packs can only carry so many bundles of food for the multi-day journeys you'll embark on. And you'll need to keep an eye on each climber's stamina, because all it takes is lingering on the wall for one turn too long for one of your crew to fall to their doom.
Use tools like rope to yank a teammate to your side when they're close to death or a pickaxe to break through a rock to find a new path to safety. And when worst comes to worst, grab your scissors to cut a climber loose when you've got no other options. Each turn is important and one tiny mistake can ruin you.
Ascenders flips the turn-based tactics game on its side, literally, and manages to leverage all of the tools of the genre to perfectly emulate the tension of the climb. It's the kind of genre-concept mashup that feels obvious in retrospect but Ludogram are (to my knowledge) the first to make it. And I'm more than happy to be among the first to fall in love with it.
Ascenders will release in Q3 of this year, and between this and the Cairn DLC in August, 2026 might just be the Year of the Climb for me.
Developer: Mizar and Alcor Interactive
Genre: Competitive/cooperative deception game show
Release Date: Q3 2026
You ever want to play a game that makes you hate your friends? A game that asks you to betray, gaslight, and otherwise lie to your pals? Well do I have the game for you!
Okay, it's much more fun than I made it sound just then. Another Door is a game all about taking risks and finding the right moment to fuck over your friends, all in service of winning a game show for epic prizes like... a cutesy red tricycle.
Another Door is a roguelike deception game that sees players facing off through a series of encounters that play out like thought experiments: a series of Prisoner's Dilemmas that require clever collaboration (or connivance) to avoid the worst circumstances as you each attempt to accumulate the most gems and avoid losing all of your HP.
These encounters are purposefully written to be a bit confusing at times, obscuring the most obvious path to glory as your team puzzles out how to best succeed, either for the collective or for yourself. For example, "If at least one of you does not choose this card, take 10 damage" versus "If everybody chooses this card, take 25 damage." Some will be about taking a gamble on big damage or taking luck out of the equation and receiving a smaller but certain hit, i.e. "90% chance to take 10 damage vs 10% chance to take 90 damage."
You'll need to communicate with your friends to figure out what they might do, maybe even try to convince them one way or another to further your ends. What's most interesting is the fact that you can show or hide your player cursor at any time, revealing your intentions or obscuring them with a button press.
After each round of encounters, players are asked if they'd like to continue through another door, risking their gems earned for bigger payouts, or if they'd like to exit and bank everything they've earned up to that point. Even this decision can result in wildly different outcomes. The fewer players there are to weigh in on decisions, the easier it might be for someone to go on a gem-earning run. Leaving the room might even result in someone else getting paid out big time, because they've got a token that earns them a 3x multiplier on their gems if they leave the room at the same time as someone else.
It's a series of fascinating choices laid one after the other, asking players to constantly be thinking five steps ahead. Whether you want to be the honest player or you're ready to throw all of your friends under the bus to get the most gems on the path to victory, it's the game for you.
Developer: The Water Museum
Genre: Fishing game in the styling of Twin Peaks
Release Date: 2026
No fishing game is safe from being devoured by me. Or maybe it's the other way around, because the About Fishing demo experience was more than I bargained for, in the absolute best way. I settled in expecting a brief introduction to its unique, if slightly chaotic, fishing mechanic and alluring retro polygonal style. Then I blinked and four hours had passed as I clung to the game and sniffed out every last quest and upgrade I could afford before accepting my fate and pursuing the final beats of the (apparently 40–60 minute) demo's main storyline.
Every game of a certain tone seems to get a "Lynchian" marketing sticker slapped over it, and I hate to be that guy, but from where I stand, this is one game actually deserving of the Twin Peaks comparison.
It is a game About Fishing, but there's much more to it than standing at the water's edge and soaking up the simultaneously calm and eerie atmosphere of its murky waters and foggy town.
Along with fishing, inventory (tacklebox) management, selling fish, buying upgrades like weights and lures, and a fileting minigame that can increase your sell price if done well, you can explore a small town full of oddities, curious characters, and unsettling mysteries.
A mystery surrounding a dead body that first surfaced in our yellow-clad fisher's childhood is reeling her back in again. There's a church-turned-prison and portentous hallucinations of yellow tang. Curly fries on the shore. A mermaid in the depths. A goose in the pews.
About Fishing comes from the developer of Arctic Eggs, another game that asks you to get incredibly focused on doing one (mostly) ordinary activity in a strange, surreal, and captivating world. Like the wonky and wild egg-frying in The Water Museum's last release, About Fishing's core mechanic is physics based, and slightly chaotic in a way that I love.
Using the motion of your mouse, you swing back your rod and then send it forward from any angle — the classic over the shoulder downswing for distance, or maybe you send it whizzing from a low diagonal and then continue to tweak the direction with additional mouse movements after it's airborne to clear some obstacle, like sending it under a pier or around a gravestone poking up from the water's surface.
It just might have you making frantic last-second corrections and overcorrections, watching your line snake comically through the air. But the chaos makes it just enough of a challenge to wrench control of your rod that it feels like a flex when you start to master it.
After casting into the water near your target, you wait for a bite and watch the action unfold from within the depths, seeing your hook's POV instead of your character's, which is a fun twist. This is not only necessary for the moments when you're nabbing a fish or revealing some... other... secrets lurking below the surface, but also the tête-à -tête with the fish weirdly made me feel more emotionally in tune with them? I like knowing that I've looked with respect into the face of every fish that finds its new — and final — home in my tacklebox.
If any of these games caught your eye, try out the demos or playtests yourself now, and give it a wishlist if it tickles your fancy. Wishlisting helps indie developers get traction on Steam and eventually reach more gamers.