If I were a foreman at a game processing plant, I might be wiping my brow in anticipation right now because there will be a lot of stuff on the assembly line in 2026. You may be looking at a characteristic bulge Grand Theft Autobut I'm more interested in the number of damn good horrors we have in plumbing.
My ears are glued to my ears as I hear the screeching and scurrying of otherworldly creatures, all of which are now on my 2026 bucket list. I'm ready to scare you over the next year, and here are the four games I'm going to devour, plus one non-horror game that almost certainly won't come out, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will.
Resident Evil: Requiem
As a longtime fan of the series, Resident Evil Requiem seems like exactly what I want. We have a new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, quaking in her boots as she's hunted by a big bug-eyed stalker who can crawl through walls, and Leon Kennedy returning to mutter corny one-liners and karate chop zombies in the face. In other words, Capcom is taking another step aside Resident Evil 6It's a mixture of slow-burn horror and fast-paced survival action. Admittedly, the game was a disastrous mishmash of ideas, but it had a promise: to offer the yin and yang of what makes Resident Evil special.
Capcom may have felt it in 2012, but they've spent a decade since bringing both styles to perfection. While Grace Ashcroft's first-person crawl through corridors is as tense as Resident Evil 7, and Leon's chainsaw-wielding zombie fests are as insane as Remake of Resident Evil 4So, Requiem has everything you need to make it into a delicious all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of Resi goodness.
In another sense, Requiem looks like a combo dish. It also aims to combine the first-person horror of the new age Resident Evil with the third-person action of the remastered version of Resi 4. I also get a distinct sense of the Spencer Mansion from the original game from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, which Grace explores in the trailers. It feels like Capcom is signaling the end of an era and I can't wait for a great brutal walk down memory lane, I really hope it ends that way.
Reanimal
Playing Little Nightmares 3 left me empty earlier this year. It was wonderful. It looked like Little Nightmares. Played like Little Nightmares. It was dedicated to the theme of “Little Nightmares”. But something was missing. Then I played the Steam Next Fest demo for Reanimal, the new game from Little Nightmares 1 and 2 developer Tarsier Studios, and realized exactly what was missing: Tarsier.
Reanimal are Tarsiers doing what they do best. I'm a little guy in a big world, plucked from my nightmares, and this time the world is full of slug people wearing empty human skin like fleshy robots, and decaying animal shells that come to life to devour me whole.
But behind all the grotesque settings, like dark paintings, and fast-paced chases with huge monsters, lies the mystery of children in animal masks, locked in a farm where they are livestock. I have no idea what they're doing there, but I'm so glad to know.
Mugenics
Mewgenics invites you to raise a bunch of ragged stray cats in a shack and, in order to feed them, send them on short DND campaigns around local backstreets in search of food. Each campaign is a randomized mix of skill-testing story events and turn-based combat against strays, vermin, and, of course, demons. And in between, you level up and gain magical abilities. Standard fare, for example, is the ability to fart with such force that your opponents fly into nearby objects.
Once the campaign is over, your crew will return to their hut, loot their loot, and have a hot night of post-adventure passion. A few birds and a couple of bees later, you have kittens, and look at it, they've inherited their frisky dad's magical fart. So naturally you strap armor on these pompous little bastards and send them to the front lines. It all looks disgusting. Definitely youthful. And I'm in.
I remember playing Binding Of Isaac and loving how McMillen layered his irreverent, if unnerving, animation style on top of the crushing gameplay loop. His art finds a fine line between humor and horror, and his exploration of the endlessly expanding depths of Isaac's basement vacillates between wildly frivolous and deeply unsettling in whimsy. But I never liked shooting with two joysticks in Binding Of Isaac. Turn-based strategy? Now there's something I can get behind, and I have a feeling I'm going to spend an obnoxious number of hours on Mewgenics building my elite cat fart squadron.
Ontos
I've always been a little lukewarm about Frictional Games' Amnesia series. Its sanity mechanics left me cold and its psychological stories never hit the mark. However, the studio's second project, Soma, left a lasting impression. Dark, mentally testing and deliciously dystopian, ending with one of the most impressive final episodes I've ever seen.
In Ontos, the spiritual successor to Soma, Frictional has found room for a return to sci-fi, and damn, course two looks delicious. It takes place in a space hotel filled with walls of talking rats, dismembered human heads kept alive by wires, and mysterious dark vortices to other worlds. And to top it all off, you're directed by Stellan Skarsgård, who plays a scientist who almost admits that he's a megalomaniacal madman, struggling with a god complex disguised under the veil of “progress.” When should I register?
It looks more BioShock-like than I would have imagined for a Frictional game. The broader scope intrigues me, especially since it seems to be full of creepy ideas that I can't wait to recoil from. I'm sure I'll make some kind of mess when I inevitably unleash the twitching rat monster because he asked me very nicely in his raspy human voice.
Persona 4 Rebirth
I huge A fan of Persona, and the game that got me into the series was Persona 4. When Persona 4 Revival, a complete remake from the ground up, was announced last year, I jumped out of my seat, danced around the room, and then immediately began planning how best to pass my fictional exams.
I'm damn glad that Atlus will be returning to this game with the same love and attention it gave to last year's Persona 3 remake, Persona 3 Reload. Persona 4 had a unique atmosphere that, with a little modern Atlus TLC, could really shine in 2026. The action took place not in the series' standard sprawling cityscape, but in a rural town called Inaba. Your team of brave and charming high school students must defeat a series of ritual murders, which, of course, are associated with the world of dark dungeons and mystical gods.
It has some of the best characters in the entire series, and while it's easy to follow, its whodunit mystery provides a unique hook that leads to a long and fascinating story. However, this history is in desperate need of a cultural update. Some of its subplots are misogynistic and unforgivably homophobic. If Atlus brings me back with the energetic perfection of a modern control scheme, rewrites its emotionless character arcs, and drenches it all in stylish sauce, I'll fall in love with this Japanese high school dungeon crawler anime sim all over again.
