Indie games November 2026: is Grimkeep the one to watch?

November is here, and while Grand Theft Auto 6 might have spooked most of the double A and AAA releases out of this month entirely, the indie release schedule is as rich as ever. There's a fast paced kingdom builder where you battle other monarchs into submission, a PS1 era immersive sim shooter set in the rings of Saturn, and a first person fishing game where your catch might sink the boat. My most hyped pick of the month is Grimkeep, a dark dice roguelike arriving on the 30th.

Here's how the month shapes up, in release order.

Kick and Slumber Realm open November with two games about childhood

The first one is a wholesome, nostalgic sidescroller called Kick, about a kid going to school through a series of Japan inspired levels. He kicks a football along the way, and you have to slide under signposts, vault over ledges and platform. There are miniature side quests too, like knocking a stuck kite out of a tree, kicking your ball against a giant ceremonial drum and getting your football into a basketball net.

There's a certain Ferris Bueller quality to the whole thing, and it looks like a light and breezy good time. It's out on Steam on the 3rd, and it's worth a look especially if you're a fan of Japan.

Coincidentally, the second game is also about childhood. Slumber Realm is a deck builder about fighting your worst fears, which in the case of this child are things like broccoli, school and piano practice. You draft cards between turns, then activate them by rolling dice, with many modifiers, buffs and status effects layered on top. That lets you create better builds, and better builds are what you'll need to crack the game's puzzle. I played the demo at Next Fest and I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to playing more and seeing if it sticks.

Airframe Ultra is a combat racer from the makers of Rain World, but I'm skipping it

On the 5th comes Airframe Ultra, the second game from Videocult, the makers of the esoteric Metroidvania Rain World. It's a very different proposition: a futuristic battle racing combat game with Running Man vibes, and it looks great in trailers. You pilot your airframe, a chunky hover bike, through the game's various biomes, where you explore, race, compete and fight.

If you win, you can spend the rewards on customizing and upgrading your outfits and your airframe, or even rebuilding it entirely, so there's plenty of depth and customization. But it looks like it's going to be multiplayer only at launch, or at least have no single player campaign, which means I'll be skipping it personally. I'm not much of a multiplayer guy. If you are, and you have a group that wants to play, Airframe Ultra is one to check out.

Grimoire of Blanks and Pith land on Steam on the 6th

Two interesting indies arrive on Steam on the 6th. The first is the spellcasting deck builder Grimoire of Blanks, which is distinguished by quite a unique mechanic. Its card customization system has you paste words into empty slots on your cards to make a sentence, and that sentence can then be cast as a spell. That seems like it would open the door for plenty of fun experimentation.

Also on the 6th is Pith, a cute puzzle platformer from a solo developer with endearingly simple graphics. I think it has a certain retro, nostalgic charm that will speak to people. It also has what looks like a bit of a Fez influence in how you spin the world around to reveal hidden ways forward, and, also like Fez, you can flip into first person to look around you.

I think this is an interesting looking little game that will speak to a certain kind of gamer. I'm still not fully on board with the Metroidbrainia category, but I know many people are, and Pith is one of them.

Dreadmore brings first person angling to the dark fishing genre

Dreadmore enters Steam early access on the 9th. It's another entry into the burgeoning dark fishing genre, which has taken off since Dredge was such a big hit back in 2023. The fishing here is more involved: it's closer to first person angling, complete with rod physics, then puzzling your catch into your limited inventory space and chugging back to land to cash it all in.

There's a distinctive swampy world to explore, with some survival gameplay and crafting in the mix, and it looks like you can upgrade almost everything. It has a very distinctive style, and I think it has a very meaty, swampy feel to it. I'll be curious to see where the reviews come down on Dreadmore.

The House Dreams Along with Them and Tanuki: Pon's Summer arrive on the 10th

The House Dreams Along with Them is a mouthful of a title, but a very intriguing game. It's a first person puzzler where you explore a house that, to be honest, is more of a modern mansion. Each room has a very distinctive vibe, a different soundtrack, and an escape room style logic or environmental puzzle to solve. The developer cites Myst and The Witness as influences, which I think will give you a good idea of whether it's for you.

Also on the 10th is Tanuki: Pon's Summer, a long awaited game that has been featured in many showcases and hit 100,000 wishlists on Steam around a year ago. It's a lighthearted life sim that mashes together a bunch of different mechanics, like BMX stunting, fishing and cozy building.

You play as Pon the Tanuki, delivering mail all around town at your day job. In your downtime you can play baseball and work on restoring the town's ruined shrine, hopefully in time for the summer festival everything is building towards. It's coming to PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC, making it a rare game that will be playable for everyone at launch. It's nice to see a game covering all the consoles.

Hope in the City and Eternal headline a crowded 11th

It seems like every month there's one day when a whole bunch of indie games release at once, and in November that day is the 11th, with no fewer than four interesting indies to choose from. First is Hope in the City, a narrative, nonlinear mystery game set in the Chinese city of Shenyang. Hope is a young girl who returns home one day to find her parents missing. She'll need to find the clues, piece them together and use her artistic talent to sketch out possible solutions in her sketchbook.

It seems that although this is an ostensibly peaceful city, something is going on under the surface that she's going to uncover. Hope in the City is coming to Xbox and PC, including Game Pass.

Second is Eternal, a walking sim from the maker of Gone Home. You arrive at some natural hot springs in the dead of night, pick up your key at the unmanned desk and go walking. You can check into your cabin, bathe in the springs and pools, and have flashbacks about where you think your life is going, about love, purpose and more.

The director definitely knows that feeling where you get a shiver and look over your shoulder, even when you're alone in your apartment. There's a bit of that here, a bit of low key spookiness, helped along by overhearing conversations about mysterious goings on from your fellow bathers. There is some studio drama around this game, but I'll leave it there for now.

Two unconnected Moomin games, and Monomoon, complete the 11th

I think the most confusing release on the 11th is a Moomin point and click puzzle game called Midsummer Madness. I had to do a double take, because we've already had one Moomin game this year, Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth. Amazingly, the two games are completely unconnected. I had the feeling one was DLC for the other, but they're by different studios and different publishers, and somehow they're called Midsummer Madness and Winter's Warmth.

To disambiguate the two: Winter's Warmth is a handdrawn, easygoing adventure that came out in the summer, and Midsummer Madness is a point and click puzzle game coming out as we approach winter. I'm not sure that helps much, but both games look like a cozy good time. If you're a gamer who likes the Moomins, which I am, I guess life has never been better.

Finally on the 11th is Monomoon, which, if you can believe it, stars a Moomin looking protagonist with a big white face. I think I've started seeing Moomins everywhere. It's a completely different kind of game, though: a pixel art Metroidbrainia puzzle platformer with some powerups and gated exploration. It's Steam only for now, but it looks like the ideal game for a PC handheld, and the developers have said they're testing it on Steam Deck. So I'm in when Monomoon releases on November 11th.

Ball x Pit gets its first paid DLC on the 12th

Three releases of note arrive on the 12th. The first is DLC for Ball x Pit, a game that made my games of the year list last year. It feels like a million years ago, but it came out in October 2025, and it has been receiving a steady flow of new content since. It added six new characters as free DLC, and now it's getting eight more in its first paid DLC, priced at seven dollars.

That makes 14 new characters since the original release, and I haven't tried any of them. The fun thing is that the way the characters play reinvents the rules of Ball x Pit, so they add something substantial. The DLC also brings 20 new buildings for your village, four new battlefields each with a new boss, and an expansion to the base building system.

If, like me, you fell in love with Ball x Pit when it first came out and finally managed to pull yourself out of its addictive embrace, it might be time to go back in, because "the game has grown immensely to the point where all the DLC might as well have been a sequel."

Nine Kings leaves early access, and The Totemist opens shop

Also coming out of early access on the 12th is Nine Kings. It has an interesting pitch, because fast paced and kingdom builder aren't words you see together in a sentence very often, but the trailer makes it look very snappy. You start by picking which of the nine kings you want to play as, then build up your kingdom through resource generation and defenses, then lay out your army for a battle.

So there's an element of auto battler in here, which seems to be a crazy viral trend on Steam right now. Suddenly, everything's an auto battler. If you win the war, you choose your reward, and then the pressure is on to rebuild and prepare for the next battle. My friend Charles bought me this game on Steam as a Christmas present last year. I should have played it by now, and I haven't. I'm ashamed, and maybe the 1.0 release is the perfect time to give it a try.

Then there's The Totemist, an occult shopkeeping game where you, the titular totemist, help people suffering from various maladies using rituals, alchemy and witchcraft. The visuals have some pixel art charm, including being able to bling out your crow and your frog. I think this one is for fans of Strange Horticulture.

A PS1 style shooter on an asteroid orbiting Saturn, and Deeplanders, on the 13th

Only a few weeks late for Halloween, on the 13th comes Derelict, spelled with a K. It's a narratively focused, PS1 style retro FPS inspired by classic survival horror and immersive sims. It takes place inside a scientific facility built on an asteroid orbiting Saturn, where something has started to go wrong, and it's on you to investigate.

This being an FPS, you'll be blasting your way through plenty of hostiles as you roam the corridors, but you'll also be talking to survivors and trying to untangle what they're saying, because they don't seem to be making much sense. There's plenty of story mixed in with the shooting, and it's an intriguing title for sure. It's coming to Steam.

Also on the 13th is Deeplanders, a minimalist construction puzzle game where you build silhouetted settlements for subterranean people. You make homes for these Deeplanders and make sure they have enough light to thrive. There are no time limits and no meters ticking down, so you can play at your own pace. I think that's a double edged sword: sometimes a game is too chill and you feel unguided, sometimes it's hectic and you want to chill, so let's see if Deeplanders can get it right.

There is some progression, because once a level is complete you descend to the next depth, which has another gentle construction puzzle. I like the art style here, and I think that's the game's selling point.

Dungeonbound and Milky Delivery arrive mid month

On the 16th it's time for Dungeonbound, another iteration of the auto battler trend, this time shaped as a first person roguelike dungeon crawler. Many people were vibing with this one after the last Next Fest. It has hit 20,000 wishlists on Steam, so that demo talked plenty of people into it.

I think I'm going to check it out too, because it's an incremental auto battler, and to me at least that's a juggernaut of a genre that seems to have come out of nowhere. This is one of the most interesting ones I've seen, with three different play modes and over 40 different characters to unlock and master.

On the 17th, Milky Delivery lands on Steam. It's a cozy, handdrawn countryside adventure about a girl who delivers milk to the people of her rural region. It looks like a good cozy time, but it won't launch with native controller support. That feature was reportedly cut in the run up to release, which means you'll have to sit at a desk and play with mouse and keys. That's not how I like to play. My favorite ways are with a controller on the couch or kicking back with a handheld.

Light of Atlantis brings puzzle focused exploration on the 24th

The next game comes a whole week later, on the 24th. Light of Atlantis had a demo at Next Fest. It's a light, 2D, puzzle focused Metroidvania where you play as a robot exploring the depths of the forgotten city of Atlantis, which is like a stone puzzle complex.

The demo had some fun multipart puzzles where you raise and lower the water level to access the way forward. The Steam page promises a variety of puzzle types, different robots to control with different abilities, and a story about what actually happened to sink the city in the first place.

Grimkeep on the 30th is my most hyped indie game of the month

On the 30th we finally get my most hyped pick of the month. Grimkeep is a striking, dark, Slay the Spire style game that mixes the endless risk and reward of dice rolling with the roguelike formula. I played it at Next Fest and it got its hooks into me. You roll a bunch of dice going for poker style outcomes, freeze the dice you like and reroll the ones you don't, trying for pairs, full houses, straights and so forth.

All of those hands can be powered up to do more damage. There are multipliers, stackable status effects, and artifacts that can change your play style and your build, all the good stuff that makes roguelikes so endlessly fun. Many of the demos I played at Next Fest got 10, 20 or 30 minutes of my time, but I played a full 2.5 hours of Grimkeep, "which I think tells you everything you need to know about how addictive this one is."

When I went back to play another run, the demo had been taken down, so I'll have to wait for the full release. It's coming to Steam and PS5 on the 30th.

Ocarina of Time and Grand Theft Auto 6 are November's only AAA releases

This is a crazily empty month for AAA releases. Considering we saw so many in September and October, including Onimusha, Wolverine, Dawnwalker, Control, Gears of War, Fire Emblem and Phantom Blade Zero, you have to wonder whether diving out of the way of GTA was a good idea, because it has given Nintendo a whole three weeks where the Ocarina of Time remake is basically the only thing coming out.

We get many remakes, but I think Ocarina of Time is a prime candidate. The original may have been a groundbreaking classic, but it's a bit rough to play by modern standards. One of the big improvements in this ground up remake is, drum roll please, the jump button. Even though it's a very loyal remake, I'm curious to see all the little tweaks and quality of life changes Nintendo has brought. People are divided about the art style, but I think it looks cool. I'm also curious how it will feel after Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, because the original Ocarina is quite a small game.

Then there's Grand Theft Auto 6, the impossibly hyped juggernaut on its way to becoming the biggest entertainment launch in history. Suddenly everyone feels like an expert in game economics, but I'm only interested in the game, and in whether this open world crime simulator with a Bonnie and Clyde love story at its core will be an interesting game to play.

I'm not a Grand Theft Auto appreciator. The last time I really got into one was the very first top down game on the PS1, and I think I dabbled in GTA 5 but didn't get on with it. So I'm wondering if Grand Theft Auto 6 can turn me around on the modern games in the series. I do like open worlds, so I will play it, when it lands on the 19th.