The Best Video Games of 2026 (So Far)

The most-anticipated video game of all time finally hits in November, but 2026 has delivered a slew of memorable titles in the meantime.Courtesy of Warner Bros. GamesFor our list of the best video games of 2025, click here.2026 has been a strange, strained year for the video-game industry. The squeeze of the AI industry and the Trump administration’s tariffs has driven the cost of components so high that the price of video games consoles has gone up, not down. Seeking to curb developments costs, Microsoft has announced a slew of layoffs and studio closures. Sony recently announced it will phase out physical releases of its games altogether. Nintendo, having launched the bestselling console of all time with the Switch 2 last year, has mostly squandered its lead, with a notably anemic lineup of first-party games as the system reaches its first birthday. And developers, critics, and gamers alike are preparing for the long-awaited release of what will almost to be one of the biggest video games of all time: Grand Theft Auto VI, which finally arrives in November.Amid all the industry’s hardships and reductions, rounding up 2026’s best games is more of a bummer than usual. Several of the games on this list were created by studios that have already been affected by layoffs; one studio was shuttered altogether. But at a time of great transition, there are still some remarkable games to be played, from unforgettable indies to AAA games that continue to drive the medium forward.Here are the best video games of 2026 so far:12. Life is Strange: Reunion (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)What a long, strange trip it’s been. After last year’s polarizing (and underrated!) Life is Strange: Double Exposure frustrated longtime fans by punting on the fate of fan-favorite character Chloe Price, Reunion offers a belated love letter by putting Chloe’s relationship with heroine Max Caulfield at the center of Reunion’s narrative. You are, once again, using Max’s time-travel powers to investigate a mystery: This time, a runaway fire that threatens to wipe out Max’s college campus and many of the people she loves. But after a slow start that leans a little too heavily on fan service (and contains some distracting technical snafus), Reunion comes into its own, building on the franchise’s own history by going deeper into well-drawn recurring characters and offering a thoughtful meditation on the unforeseen consequences of trying to fix the unfixable. If this is, as it seems to be, Max and Chloe’s last adventure, it’s a worthy sendoff.11. Luna Abyss (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)Luna Abyss deserved better than it got. The debut game from UK-based developer Bonsai Collective, this sci-fi/horror first-person shooter casts the player as a prisoner ordered to navigate an apparently endless lunar labyrinth, desperately scrounging valuable resources in hopes of reducing their lengthy sentence. Luna Abyss presents this dystopian world with uncommon confidence: an H.R. Giger-esque vision of grotesque monsters, coiled tubes, and the cold, cruel corruption of anything resembling human warmth or kindness. And so, of course, the entire development team was laid off just weeks after Luna Abyss dropped — the latest casualties of a video game industry that increasingly fails to offer anything resembling human warmth or kindness.10. Mixtape (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC)Mixtape seems like it was created in a lab to irritate a certain kind of gamer: the reactionary, self-identified “hardcore” type who have a depressingly narrow definition of what constitutes a “real” game (and who love to jump on X or YouTube to complain about it). For the rest of us, Mixtape—which follows Stacey Rockford, a music-obsessed teenager who leads her friends on one crazy, mixtape-fueled night—offers a lot of knowing ‘90s nostalgia in an agreeably compact passage. This is primarily a story-driven game, with gameplay limited to exploration and funny, WarioWare-esque minigames. (There’s an unforgettable one about a very gross first kiss.) But Mixtape’s real draw is how effectively it transports the player into the mindset of a precocious teenage girl. The fact that Stacey can sometimes be so insufferable, with so much unearned bravado about the world and her place in it, seems to me like the entire point — who hasn’t met, or been, a teenager like that?9. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)With Rocksteady’s acclaimed Arkham series on ice, where can the citizens of Gotham City turn for a pretty good Batman game? The answer, it turns out, is the latest Lego Batman, which borrows Arkham’s exploration, combat, and stealth mechanics while blending decades of Dark Knight movies, TV shows, and comics into an appealing kind of Batman jambalaya. The kid-friendly Lego trappings make it necessarily less complex than the best of Batman’s video game adventures — and you’ll almost certainly have more fun if you play it alongside the Batman-obsessed 12-year-old in your life — but there are also a lot of thoughtful design choices, and grin-inducing easter eggs, packed into a game that could have been a lazy cash grab.8. Pragmata (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC)When it released in April, Pragmata attracted all kinds of the wrong attention—enough so that we felt compelled, at this very website, to ask everyone to stop being so weird about it. But whatever you make of the game’s Space Dad and Robot Daughter narrative, the plot of Pragmata is probably the least interesting thing about it. On a pure gameplay level, Pragmata is a joy, asking players to juggle two characters: Hugh, an astronaut who shoots hostile robots, and Diana, an android who can make hostile robots vulnerable via a simple grid-based minigame. The result is chaotic, stylish, and satisfying, forcing players to think on their feet as they navigate a series of escalating complications.7. Perfect Tides: Station to Station (Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PC, macOS)At a time when nostalgia for the ‘90s and early ‘00s seems to be everywhere, Perfect Tides: Station to Station takes pains to get the details right. When 18-year-old protagonist Mara Whitefish moves to the big city with big dreams about becoming a writer, she winds up shuffling between classes, dive bars, messy apartments, and other mainstays of early-college life. Crafted by Merideth Gran, creator of the webcomic Octopus Pie, the game is laced with both wit and perspective as it lays out a coming-of-age tale that gives the player a surprising amount of agency about how Mara’s life turns out. This is a point-and-click adventure game in the style of classics Maniac Mansion, but it uses those mechanics for entirely different ends: Fewer obtuse puzzles, and more clear-eyed, knowing observations about a very specific time in a young person’s life.6. Saros (PlayStation 5)Saros has the courage of its convictions. A refinement of the same dodge-and-gun gameplay that defined developer Housemarque’s previous PlayStation 5 exclusive, Returnal — a game so difficult that only 10 percent of its players achieved its true ending — Saros strands players on a mysterious alien planet and challenges them to push forward into chambers of ever-more-dangerous Lovecraftian horrors. Though the story, anchored by a strong lead performance from Rahul Kohli, is twisty and compelling, it’s largely up to the player to determine how much they care to piece together from documents and audio logs. But like any good roguelike, the core of Saros comes down to its endlessly addictive gameplay loop, which gives the players a series of versatile tools to take on its parade of enemies, who seem unstoppable until the one, triumphant run where you manage to stop them.5. Forza Horizon 6 (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)As someone whose interest in cars leans closer to Mario Kart than Formula One, Forza Horizon 6 somehow managed to land right in my sweet spot. Set loose in a massive facsimile of real-world Japan, a lot of the joy in Forza Horizon 6 comes from following your own curiosity, whether that’s street-racing among the cherry blossoms, whipping through the streets of Tokyo City to make deliveries, or just taking a chill tour through one of the game’s many painstakingly detailed regions. For gearheads, there’s clearly been great technical care put into the precise handling of each of the game’s real-world cars; for the rest of us, there’s a bit where you get to race against a Gundam-esque giant mech.4. Mina the Hollower (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PC, macOS, Linux)No one does a video-game throwback quite like Yacht Club Games. Following the success of their smash-hit Shovel Knight —which lovingly riffed on NES classics like Mega Man, Zelda II, and DuckTales while modernizing everything that needed to be modernized — the indie developer set their sights on the heyday of the Gameboy Color, with particular affection for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. Mina the Hollower is denser and pricklier than Shovel Knight, but its pleasures run deeper, challenging the player to master its mechanics over the course of a surprisingly lengthy adventure (but providing an impressive array of gameplay modifiers for anyone who finds its rhythms too frustrating).3. Marathon (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)Though it hails from the studio that launched the FPS juggernauts Halo and Destiny, Marathon was never destined for mainstream success. This “extraction shooter”—in which the player is dropped into an open map populated with hostile enemies, some of which are controlled by fellow players, and tasked with completing a mission and escaping before someone kills them—is a tense, tactical experience where run-and-gun gameplay, or even a hasty mistake, usually results in failure. For anyone except the ultra-devoted, Marathon may already have peaked; the last time I logged in, I was utterly obliterated by players who were much, much better than I was. But if an (allegedly) dwindling player count means Marathon won’t last forever, it still stands out, in a sea of Call of Duty or Overwatch clones, as the most compelling online FPS I’ve played in years.2. Resident Evil Requiem (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, PC)Arriving a full 30 years after the first Resident Evil was published, the ninth mainline installment in Capcom’s survival-horror series feels like the culmination of everything that preceded it. The game’s earliest major section, in which the player controls rookie FBI agent Grace as she tracks down three keys in a terrifying, zombie-riddled medical center, is the best sustained horror sequence any Resident Evil game has produced. The later sections, which primarily switch perspectives to seasoned franchise hero Leon Kennedy, out more like an ‘80s action movie, full of cheesy quips and absurd set pieces like a motorcycle chase in which players machine-gun a pack of mutant wolves. These are the two sides of Resident Evil, and while I’ll always prefer the franchise’s scary side to its goofy, bombastic side, Requiem feels like the first Resident Evil to make them coexist in harmony instead of tension.1. 007 First Light (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC)Here’s a hot take: Until this year, there had never been a truly great James Bond game. Even Goldeneye 007—a stone-cold classic into which I’ve poured countless hours, and the gold standard by which all 007 games are measured—is a great game, but a poor approximation of one of Bond’s missions; he may have a license to kill, but he doesn’t typically leave hundreds of bullet-riddled corpses in his wake. Enter 007 First Light, a Bond game that feels, at last, like a true adaptation in the spirit of Ian Fleming’s novels and their many film adaptations. Telling a new origin story that doesn’t even give Bond his 007 designation until its closing scene, First Light is, above all, expertly paced. You get all the shootouts, the stealth sequences, and the car chases you’d expect from a blockbuster adventure. But the game really shines in its open-world missions, which give the player a mission and drop them into a small map—a sweaty nightclub, or a black-tie gala, or a desert city ruled by a tyrannical warlord—and task them with completing it using whatever combination of muscle, gadgets, or wit they see fit. “Earn the number,” says 007 First Light’s tagline, and by the time the credits roll, you’ll feel like you have.