Keeping up with all the new games on Steam can be a job unto itself, and potentially disappointing if you're rushing to grab stuff the second it launches. That's why every month we wait for the dust to settle before picking the best new Steam games we've played and adding them to our Steam Hype Playlist. These are October 2026's Steam games we think genuinely deserve your time.

Because October was completely absurd and packed with great games from the very first second up until the last minutes, we're doubling up this month. Even going mad with power and spotlighting eighteen of the month's greatest games - Nine big mainstream drops and nine indie must-haves - we're still scratching the surface of what was released. Here's what we think were the best games from a scarily good spooky season:

Enshrouded PC

Sitting at the intersection of indie and AAA, Enshrouded finally left early access in October, and immediately became one of Twitch's most-streamed games again. Like a fusion of Terraria's boss-hunting, exploration-centric survival sandbox gameplay with Breath of the Wild's world scale, exploration and combat, this is a potent mix of open sandbox and quest-based action RPG goodness. And while fun solo, it truly shines with a couple friends to back you up as you hack through monsters and carve out your own NPC-populated home town through incredibly detailed voxel-based world deformation.

SULFUR PC

Another early access graduate. Sulfur takes all the good ideas from extraction shooters and injects them into a single-player roguelite FPS with an art style that feels like it's from an Adult Swim cartoon, possibly some gothic parallel to Adventure Time. You are a gunslinging priest with a ninja sword in one hand, some hideously cursed gun (there are SO many silly, customizable firearms here) in the other, and a whole lot of goblins, cultists and weirdoes to carve through on the way to settling a score with the witch who burnt your life to the ground. There's more coming, too, with online co-op and DLC on the roadmap now.

Phantom Blade Zero PC

Would you believe that this spectacular AAA wuxia action adventure started out as a scrappy little indie series made with RPG Maker? The series (and studio S-Game) has come a long way since Rainblood: Town of Death. Now a cinematic blockbuster drawing equal inspiration from Sekiro's rhythmic parry-heavy combat and God of War's absurd spectacle, blended with some beautifully animated wirework-inspired movement. As Push Square said in their review, Phantom Blade Zero isn't quite a Souls-like, but it clearly has a lot of soul. And I dare you not to grin like an idiot when you first dart in between two attacking enemies to split-kick them both without interrupting your combo.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse PC

October was a wacky month for all things Metriody (shout-outs to the time-loop puzzling Echo Weaver and the Metroid Dread-styed Moadra), but the one that people were really waiting for was the return of Castlevania. Surprisingly, Konami handed the reins/whip over to Dead Cells studio Evil Empire, and we reckon that they nailed it. While there's some discourse as to whether this could even be considered a 'true' Casltevania game (the medusa heads don't do contact damage), it's no further from the originals as Symphony of the Night was, just doing its own, gorgeously animated and lit thing. Smart, snappy movement, a zoomed out camera and a rich, cartoony color palette gives this one its own feel.

ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE PC

After a seven year wait, Ace Combat is back and most fans would agree it was worth the wait. More than fans, even - this one's the fastest-selling game in the dramatic anime dogfighting series yet. Don't mistake this one for a flight sim. This is a game where you are an unstoppable aerial god of war, often up against dozens of jets and hundreds of ground targets in a single mission, and packing enough missiles to deal with them all as you drift and twist through the air accompanied by a fantastic (often diegetic) soundtrack and a constant barrage of enthusiastic combat chatter. And once the lengthy campaign mode is over, the multiplayer is mostly co-op across missions from past games. Encore!

Silver Pines PC

In a month jam-packed with amazing horror games, Silver Pines stands out as one of the best. A fusion of Silent Hill and Twin Peaks, in a side-scrolling world with rotoscoped animation, giving this one the look of a stylish, often-silhouetted comic. It feels like the sort of thing Remedy would make if they weren't doing mega-budget blockbusters now. Tense survival horror combat meets slightly metroidy exploration, all wrapped in a hazy, dreamlike story as a private investigator tracks a missing musician through a mostly-evacuated, incredibly haunted town as a massive storm bears down, and reality starts to come apart at the seams.

Gears of War: E-Day PC

It got DDOS'd at launch and caught some flak in the Culture War (there are some people who still think women have no place in the 'chainsawing subterranean orcs' shooter series), but this prequel to the long-running Gears of War series is strong, confident stuff. The campaign gives us a look at the least-destroyed version of its world yet, and the new 12-player co-op horde mode brings the biggest, messiest battles in the history of the series as three whole squads of players try to complete their own objectives while backing up their allied teams. Of course, being under Microsoft's banner it falls under the BDS boycott, but the developers are doing their best despite terrible conditions and threats of massive layoffs.

Queen's Domain PC

When I first wrote about Queen's Domain, calling it a true successor to FromSoftware's classic King's Field series, I was only 14 hours into this sprawling first-person action megadungeon crawl. Now I'm 30 hours deep and with the end only barely within sight, I'm even more impressed. The game just keeps expanding and escalating, introducing new mechanics, ideas, environments and challenges. All in a single contiguous space. Remember how Dark Souls' whole world just linked together and made sense? It's that, but more, as the many layers of underworld beneath the island surface interconnect in dozens of unexpected ways. This one's a personal GOTY contender for sure.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer PC

Who knew that the secret sauce that we needed to revive the Burnout series was turning it into a Star Wars themed story-driven roguelite? Coming from new studio Fuse Games (featuring some talent from the Burnout games) and published by indie label Secret Mode, somehow this one's a glossy AAA production. A frantic, dramatic arcade racer where between events, you tweak and tune your character build, talk to characters and pull at plot threads in Hades-esque style. Even the multiplayer has some roguelike elements, with players customizing their rides and betting on finishing positions over a six-race cup. Plus, it has everyone's new favorite little Space Guy, the crocodilian alien racer Biddy Blas.

Curse of Resthaven PC

The dark horse pick of the month might not be very well known, but doesn't have a single negative user review to its name. Curse of Resthaven is an eldritch horror management sim about trying to get a struggling (and extremely haunted) age-of-sail frontier colony back on its feet. Unfortunately, you've only got six days until a mystical apocalypse wipes everything out and sends you tumbling back in time, equipped with another week of knowledge to unravel exactly what the hell is going wrong here. A little roguelike, a little Blue Prince, a little resource-juggling strategy, all wrapped in gorgeously grim comic art and with a fully voiced cast that all have things to say on the dozens of conversation topics you'll pick up.

Final Fantasy Resonance PC

Risen, like the Phoenix (Down), from the ashes of now-defunct mobile game Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. While the core story here is relatively boilerplate Final Fantasy stuff (specifically, the first main story arc of the mobile game - hopefully with more to come), what carries this one is a mix of tightly designed, smart combat, gorgeous 2D sprite art and a great soundtrack, plus breezy pacing and enthusiastic energy. Featuring an assortment of spectral 'Visions' of heroes from across the series (it was originally a gacha game after all) to spice up your party composition, there's a lot of room to carve out your own play-style.

Retro Space PC

System Shock 2 by way of Futurama. Everything has gone terribly wrong aboard a funky, low-fi '70s colony ship, and swarms of chimeric mutants, rogue robots and malfunctioning security systems stand between you and saving whoever's left. You, of course, are the janitor, member of the most feared and respected maintenance crew on the ship. Explore through hidden maintenance ducts and secret Janitor's Highways, use your multifunctional cleaning spray to short electronics and create traps, and maybe mutate yourself a little, as a treat. Proper immersive sim goodness, but at a higher pace than average.

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen Expansion PC

A fantastic expansion accompanied by a huge overhaul update, giving one of 2024's most underrated/review-bombed games a second wind. Now running slick and smooth on most machines, with booster DLC removed and some quality-of-life improvements, it's easier to appreciate Dragon's Dogma 2 for what it is: An '80s style 'Gold Box' D&D game with a cutting-edge monster-climbing Capcom combat engine. Create a fully custom party and follow sparse quest threads through a truly open world where you really do get to make your own story. The Dark Arisen expansion adds an extra 50% to the game world - a dense, frozen new country to explore with much of the game's best fights, dungeons and sights to see.

PAPERHEAD PC

I tossed a coin on whether to give this slot to Paperhead or Boltgun 2 - both great, gloriously indulgent high-speed shooters with a character that can slide under enemies to launch them into the air. But with absolutely unhinged aerial movement, a unique aesthetic and a surprisingly effective mid-game twist, Paperhead feels the better game to spotlight here. With a dark sense of humor, a surprisingly large and varied enemy roster and some genuinely creative mechanics (like using a pencil to erase and replace text to change reality), this one's a great time with surprising replay value.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival PC

While I might have knocked some points off Hellraiser: Revival's review score for occasional unoriginality, I can't deny that it was a fun survival horror romp start to finish, and unafraid to tackle the queer, kinky, gore-soaked and depraved universe of Clive Barker without reservation. And imperfect doesn't mean that you shouldn't play it - you can't have Hellraiser without being at least a little trashy. At the end of the day, I reckon this is the third-best piece of Hellraiser media around. Hats (and skin) off to the team for having the vision to deliver.

Penguin Colony PC

This one was probably the hardest choice of the month, because three amazing indie horror games launched on the same day. But narrowly beating out Tenebris Somnia and the tightly-woven narrative puzzling of Dreadline Express was Penguin Colony. A slightly rough-edged and janky but (fittingly) chilling reimagining of Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness. Telling the story of a doomed Nazi expedition to the Antarctic to unearth the tomb of what they believe to be the First Aryan King, while a band of Maori heroes rush to avert disaster. And in the middle of it, there's you. A penguin. An impassive observer, waddling, squawking and watching as the chaos and drama unfurls. Nothing you should be bothered about, really. It's someone else's story, right? Don't think too hard about it.

Valor Mortis PC

From the team behind the Ghostrunner series of first-person platform slash-em-ups comes... a first-person Souls-like set in a deeply cursed alternate Napoleonic history. In this universe, Napoleon's return was not met with spectacular defeat, but rather the rise of a terrible new empire fueled by a cursed, mysterious substance that bestows powers to a lucky few, but mostly just turns people into hideous mutant monsters. While the game caught some criticism for hewing a little close to Dark Souls design tropes, the gorgeously grim art and unusual historical setting make this one compelling stuff.

Afterbeat (Project Arrhythmia) PC

And lastly, Afterbeat finally leaves early access after a full decade in early access. While the full version of the game is surprisingly slight in terms of raw content (although the story mode - telling the tale of two sapient AIs in an abandoned research facility is cool), the quality on this Just Shapes & Beats-inspired musical bullet-dodger is apparent. But the real strength of Afterbeat is the community-made stuff: A Steam Workshop page packed with over 3600 user-made levels, many of them spectacular and, with more coming each day. Hurrah for PC gaming, eh?

And so we return to normality, of a sort. We theorize that October was so dense because a lot of bigger releases were getting out of the GTA 6 splash zone. I expect November's lineup to be a little more austere on the AAA front, but no less packed with indies - remember that Rockstar's mega-release is on consoles only, and most PC-centric developers aren't particularly worried. So, we'll still have plenty to pick from over the coming weeks, if you've somehow gotten through October's deluge in time.

As ever, if you reckon we missed something essential or just want to tell us that our taste is impeccable and making you buy too many games, let us known in the comments below.