Xbox held an ID@Xbox showcase today to put forward a bunch of trailers for indie games that are coming to its console, and at times Game Pass, in the coming year. The showcase overall was solid, with a healthy mix of new reveals and trailers for stuff we’ve seen before, and more games to show than I initially expected. Xbox’s initial marketing for this whole affair focused on somewhat bigger indie game names like Mistfall Hunter and Aphelion, but there were plenty of standouts beyond just Xbox’s chosen highlights for the show.
You should probably go watch the entire showcase at some point and find something that speaks to you, but in the meantime, maybe one of the games that really popped for me will similarly be of interest to you:
There Are No Ghosts at the Grand
Of all the games Xbox highlighted in advance of this presentation, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand was easily the most interesting and unique. You play as someone who inherits an old hotel from their father. When you arrive, it’s falling apart, so you equip yourself with a bunch of power tools shaped like guns (that can also talk for some reason) and start firing paint and nails and better wallpaper around until the house looks nice. So far, so Powerwash Sim, but the twist is what happens at night: you’re not just a mild-mannered heir of a vast estate; you’re a ghost hunter, and this hotel is stuffed with ghosts. Heck, the whole town is haunted! You’ve been sent here to secretly investigate the ghost problem with the help of a talking cat with questionable motives. And instead of ghost hunting supplies you have…all your power tools from the daytime bits.
I love this conceit and think there are tons of cool paths it could take, from turning into a soothing wall-painting sim to full-on, Lovecraftian horror. There Are No Ghosts at the Grand is being developed and published as the debut game from Friday Sundae, and is out sometime this year on PC and Xbox.
Lofsöng
Lofsöng caught my attention immediately because of its visual and apparent mechanical similarities to 2023’s indie hit Cocoon. The trailer was very light on details: you’re a little person in red skating over sand dunes in a black and white world, seemingly solving sound-based puzzles as you go. A curious pitch deck on developer Unrelated Studio’s website describes Lofsöng as a game about communicating with the future where you explore brutalist landscapes to “uncover traces of meaning left in stone and sound.” This is Unrelated Studio’s debut game, and there’s no release date yet. We just know it will come to Xbox and PC eventually.
Deep Dish Dungeon
Aw, man, I’m so happy about this one: they basically made the anime Delicious in Dungeon into a game! Deep Dish Dungeon is a co-op online adventure in which you navigate deeper and deeper into a very dangerous and magical dungeon full of monsters with no map to speak of. You also won’t be surfacing anytime soon, and a body’s gotta eat. So your party will collect ingredients as you descend and cook them into meals at camp, which then determine what stats and abilities you’ll have going forward. You’ll be crafting tools and solving puzzles and such to delve ever deeper, and the further you go, the better ingredients you’ll find, and so forth. Deep Dish Dungeon is out in fall of 2026 on Xbox and PC and developed by Behold Studios, published by Raw Fury.
Crashout Crew
From the deeply silly developers of Another Crab’s Treasure and Peak, we’re now about to get Crashout Crew. So yes, it’s multiplayer and cooperative, with floppy physics and silly-looking characters. You’re all working at a warehouse together, assembling orders for shipping by driving forklifts around and hauling the correct boxes into the correct positions. Naturally, there are obstacles (like…cactuses?) and hazards (fire?!) and other elements (darkness) that will make simply picking up a stack of the correct boxes and driving them from Point A to Point B a hilarious disaster. Really, after Peak, I didn’t need to be sold too hard on this one. It’s coming out May 28 on Xbox (including day one on Game Pass) and PC.
Screenbound
Screenbound has already made the rounds in a lot of spaces as an indie to watch, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a deeply trippy 3D platformer…but also a 2D platformer, and also a top-down adventure? You control the dude in the 3D platformer bit, but he’s carrying around what’s basically a Game Boy that has a 2D version of the same world you’re currently navigating on screen, and you have to use the different views of the world, from both the first-person viewpoint and on the Game Boy screen, to make it through increasingly puzzling stages. And then, as noted in this trailer, you reach another level, and the game on the Game Boy screen becomes a top-down adventure.
If absolutely none of that made any dang sense, please just watch the trailer above. I tried this out at the Game Developer’s Conference in March and it does indeed snap your brain in half in the coolest way as you try to parse what’s going on in both worlds simultaneously. When it clicks it really clicks, and the teaser on the end of this has me curious what other styles and viewpoints we might see on the Game Boy screen as Screenbound progresses. Screenbound is a triple effort from Crescent Moon Games, Those Dang Games and Radical Forge, and is coming to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. It’ll also be on Game Pass at launch.
