If there’s one thing Steam excels at it’s being a gold mine of weird and wonderful games. Of course, it has all the big blockbusters too, but if you take the time to dig a little deeper you’ll find all kinds of obscure treasures that, in my opinion, are just as much fun to play as the games your mates are always blabbering on about.

It’s not always easy finding those curios though, which is where the Steam Hype Playlist comes in. Every month it focuses on a different part of Steam to uncover the hidden gems you’ve likely never heard of, and this time we’re looking at 10 of our favourite oddball picks of 2026.

Creature Kitchen

• Released: Feb 6th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: The Rat Zone
• Genre: Creepy-cute Cooking Simulator
• Demo: Yes

This is the closest you’ll find to mainstream here and it’s one of Steam’s highest-rated games so far this year. Creature Kitchen is short, sweet and a fantastic concept: living alone in a haunted cabin in the woods, you are menaced by eyes in the darkness, cryptids and creatures lurking in the shadows, who happen to be so very hungry. So obviously you hit the cookbooks, rustle up dinner and voila, you have new friends! Despite its creepy setting there are no jump-scares and no pressure, just a casual cooking experience that benefits from pure low-fi charm and whimsical writing.

Endacopia

• Released: July 27th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Andyland
• Genre: Haunted Edutainment Adventure
• Demo: Yes

Long-awaited after a hugely successful Kickstarter, Endacopia is a gem of an old-school point-and-click adventure. Part whimsical comedy (inspired by kids’ edutainment games like the Putt Putt series), part unsettling horror, you can never be sure what it’s going to hit you with next. Balancing tension with gags, whimsy, jump scares, and some great musical numbers, it’s relatively short – around 6-7 hours if you love adventure games – but there’s enough secrets and non-linearity to give it rare replay value in a genre not known for it. Those who really dig deep will be rewarded by a hidden optional ending that’s well worth sticking around for.

Funi Raccoon Game

• Released: March 13th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Crayon & Kit/The Crayon Eating Company
• Genre: Kleptomaniac Collectathon Platformer
• Demo: Yes

Funi Raccoon Game is absolute, gleeful chaos in videogame form. You are a horrible raccoon on a quest to collect one of every object in the world for your ever-expanding dumpster home. Part dreamlike exploration adventure (think Yume Nikki), part breakneck, unhinged platformer, its world is almost entirely built out of stock 3D and 2D art assets smashed together haphazardly, so it looks really distinctive. It’s consistently hilarious too, with a story that has some sharply critical things to say, especially in the back half of the game, but it never strays too far away from the screwball comedy.

Mesmalie

• Released: July 9th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Rain (orbitaldot)
• Genre: Genre-hopping Magical Misadventure
• Demo: Yes

A short but oh-so-sweet narrative adventure with a ton of endings and secrets to discover. After developing magical powers and accidentally setting your apartment on fire, you seek the help of a local Witch’s coven to help control your skills. Unfortunately, the only person around is Mesmer, a terrifyingly chaotic yet weirdly likeable young witch with unusual speech patterns, who will come to your aid if you help her complete a ritual she’s been working on. Prepare to roll back the clock and explore alternate paths to unravel the truth as the game hops between genres and minigames, making sure that you’ll never be doing one thing for long.

Pronoun Palace

• Released: June 4th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Cadence Petersen & Hazel Fackler
• Genre: Word-Puzzle Roguelike
• Demo: No

Pronoun Palace is a sharp, satirical and painfully funny word-puzzle roguelike. Your pronouns have been confiscated by the government for being too disruptive, sending you on a quest to fight for them.You do this using a grid of Scrabble-style tiles, spelling words to attack – the more obscure letters you use, the more damage you deal. Each enemy has their own gimmicks: one might force you to use certain tiles, others might make some off-limits, while some reshape the board itself. It has fantastic music, smart art, and funny writing, and is a puzzle game you absolutely should check out.

Horsey Game

• Released: February 18th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Captain Games
• Genre: Extremely Normal Horse Betting Simulator
• Demo: No

The smartest dumb game (or dumbest smart game?) you’ll play this year. Breed and race wobbly low-fi horses to raise enough money to cure your partner’s Horse Flu. But doing it properly takes time and luck, so you might want to cut some corners by heading down to the shady research lab to gene-splice your nags (with every gene being fully simulated) to make them super powered. Or, y’know, just cross-breed them with trucks. If you let loose one of your prize mutants, their genes spread into the ecosystem, making the whole world and the horses you’re racing against even weirder still. Every playthrough is different, every player has their own approach, and every run is packed with painfully funny moments.

Vholume

• Released: August 21st, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Nathan Grange, Léonard Lemaitre & Niels Tiercelin/IronEqual
• Genre: Brutalist Parkour Fever-dream
• Demo: Yes

You’ve been running for hours through impossible structures populated by strange naked people-things that talk to you about the importance of filing your paperwork properly. Vholume is a dream-like (nightmarish?) parkour experience, with you sprinting, wall-running and butt-sliding through the narrow alleys and crumbling tunnels of an impossibly vast concrete megastructure. There’s something hazy and surreal about both the aesthetics and feel of the movement here, making it very easy to get into a focused flow state, aided further by a dreamy, ambient synth soundtrack. Lots of secrets hidden in this one too, and the community-made levels are already piling up.

Forbidden Solitaire

• Released: April 30th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Grey Alien Games & Night Signal Entertainment
• Genre: Haunted Horror Solitaire Dungeon Crawl
• Demo: No

You’ve found a rare copy of an obscure horror-themed card game that made headlines back in the ’90s. Obviously, the correct thing to do is explore its depths, even as people mail you increasingly worrying news clippings about people dying unexpectedly after playing the game. It’s a fantastic mix of retro creepypasta-style horror, tongue-in-cheek humour, and genuinely smart solitaire gameplay, with a complex magic system to master and even turn-based stealth segments played entirely with cards. The patched-in New Game+ mode, with new levels and puzzles for players with a fully powered-up character, means there’s tons to do too!

The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot

• Released: May 15th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Stéphane Le Roy
• Genre: Slapstick Immersive Sim
• Demo: Yep

Before Dishonored and Prey, Arkane gave us Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, a rough-edged but action-packed take on the immersive sim genre that provided a world full of precarious ledges to cast slippery ice spells on and pointy spike traps to punt orcs into. The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot is a tribute that fully embraces the silliness of Dark Messiah’s funniest moments. Kick people into the ocean, sneak around wearing a barrel, snack on bananas to create traps for enemies…. There’s so much to do and it’s a big ol’ laugh.

Desktop Explorer

• Released: July 17th, 2026
• Developer/Publisher: Recurring Dream/Outersloth & Indienova
• Genre:
• Demo: Yes

A mystery-filled puzzle box, part haunted computer adventure, part traditional point-and-click puzzler, and all a test of how computer literate you are. You’ll be picking through directory trees, poring through .TXT files and using smartly overlapping desktop applications to reveal hidden data as you search for secrets within an old computer your character inherited from their uncle. Not to spoil too much about the game, but it swerves into more traditional point-and-click adventure territory as you progress, unveiling extremely haunted games within less haunted games.

And that’s all we’ve got time for here, but there’s so much more to see, with our Steam Hype Playlists covering nine titles every month from the start of this year. Want more deep cuts like this? Just looking for someone to help you filter out the gems from Steam’s never-ending firehose of releases? That’s exactly what we do over on Steam Hype, the latest site on the Hookshot network.