15 Innovative Games Spotlighted Today That Deserve Your Attention

From action roguelites to painterly adventure games, your post-Sumer Game Fest indie livestream showcase is here with the perfect array of palate cleansers to restore your faith in the power of games by showing you cool stuff you’ve never seen before.

Day of the Devs has been showcasing incredible indie games for years. A joint production of Psychonauts 2 studio DoubleFine and bespoke curator iam8bit in collaboration with Summer Game Fest, the showcase is an annual reminder that amidst the endless big budget sequels and latest trending cash grabs, tons of creators are out there making beautiful games.

2023's haul looks even more impressive than usual, with follow-ups from some beloved studios and brand new experiences from teams you’ve probably never heard of before. Some are already in Early Access or coming there soon, but most are still in the thick of production. In the meantime, you can feast on some neat trailers and the pitch behind every game shown in the latest Day of the Devs summer showcase.

Greg Lobanov, the developer behind 2021 GOTY contender Chicory, is back with a completely new project that looks like Pokémon Volleyball. Beastieball is a turn-based sports RPG where you play as 2D cutouts exploring a 3D world where friendships are built and fights are settled on the court. While your Beasties can be paired up to unlock new abilities, the studio says the point isn’t to collect them all but to build deeper relationships with the ones you love.

Platform: PC
Release date: 2024

We’ve seen this one before, but not quite like this. The follow-up to top-down pixel art action game Hyper Light Drifter looked much more moody and melancholy this time around. Director Alx Preston struck a similar note in his description of the open-world roguelite, calling it “vivid but bleak” and “brutal but beautiful.” The Gearbox-published third-person action game can be played alone or with friends, and features a world that’s procedurally generated in some places and handcrafted in others, with shades of Dead Cells, Hades, and other arcade roguelikes in its build-crafting and persistent unlocks between runs.

Platform: PC (consoles TBA)
Release date: Early Access 2023

“A place from the past where you can be present.” That’s one of the ways Stone Skip Studio talks about Simpler Times, a game about delving into a woman’s past as she packs up her belongings. As playes rifle through her childhood keepsakes and special mementos, the developers hope players will find a space where they can “take a break, slow down, and enjoy something meaningful.” The trailer shows the player picking dried leaves, building a model house, and interacting with other objects to spur past memories. One more quote from the studio: “It’s like childhood is the beach and growing up is the sea.” It’s intimate interior-core and I’m sold.

Platform: PC
Release date: 2024

This is a trippy one. Announced at last year’s Game Awards, Viewfinder is an open-ended sandbox puzzler that plays with perspective in ways similar to Maquette. You find photos or snap your own and then hold them up to the world to insert completely new objects and architecture into the environment. If you bust things up in the process you can simply rewind. The developers name-dropped some high-profile inspiration like Portal, Subliminal, Antichamber, Witness, and Manifold Garden. They describe the philosophy behind Viewfinder this way: “When you actually create something you do destroy a lot of things [in the process].”

Platform: PC
Release date: 2023

Richard Hofmeier’s 2013 retail work simulator that rocked the indie world is back 10 years later and looks as good as ever. Adhoc Studio partnered with him to bring the intimate pixelated adventures of street vendors back after the developer pulled it from distribution. Cart Life is a remarkable and deeply humanizing look at the struggles of people on the margins just trying to make it day to day, and it’ll be great to have this hugely important work readily available once again.

Platform: PC
Release date: 2023

What if Tony Hawk were a hyper-stylized RPG with the structure and sensibility of Hades? That’s What Phantom Coast and designer Steve Swing, previously a developer on Tony Hawk Underground, are setting out to do with Helskate. It’s a roguelite that revolves around death and grinding, like, the cool kind. Use your skateboard to beat up demons and use the resources they leave behind to unlock permanent upgrades for your next ride. The grind revival is just getting started.

Platform: PC
Release date: Early Access 2024

Henry Halfhead is a Sims-style micromanager with a twist. Instead of lording over fake people in a video-game world as they live, laugh, and love, you control a single one consisting of just half a head. Henry can possess any object, a necessary skill when they want to do things like make the bed, take a bath, eat breakfast, and take the bus to work. A sort of Octodad meets Untitled Goose Game, it even supports co-op. “Staying in bed is tempting but only turns into regret later,” the developers note. So will not checking out this game.

Platform: PC
Release date: TBA

Geometric Interactive is a small indie studio in Denmark by former employees of Playdead, i.e. the studio behind Limbo and Inside, two of the most incredible 2D puzzle platformers ever. Cocoon is their new project and it’s a top-down adventure game where you play as a bug-like creature buzzing around an alien planet. The core mechanic is straight out of the marble scene at the end of Men in Black where our universe is revealed to just be the plaything of higher dimensional beings. Each world in Cocoon exists in an orb that you can hop out of and carry around to solve other puzzles in other worlds. The “hierarchy of worlds within worlds” is the mindfuck, but there are also Zelda-like boss fights to bring you back down to Earth. I think this one’s going to be very special.

Platform: PC, PlayStation, Xbox (Game Pass)
Release date: 2023

French for summer, Été is about taking a holiday in Montreal as a painter who can bring color to a desaturated world with the touch of a button. Free-flowing exploration will have the player roaming shops, gardens, and backstreets, splashing plaint around to reveal scenes of everyday life. Doing so unlocks stamps that you can then use to complete complex and unique 2D artworks commissioned by NPCs. If you can’t vacation with a painter’s notebook as your companion, Été might be the next best thing.

Platform: PC
Release date: Early 2024

The developers behind the Alto’s Adventure series are back with a new pastoral meditation on sheepherding. The indie studio Land & Sea calls Summerhill a “folktale about life, loss, and livestock.” You guide a shepherd and his sheepdog through bucolic Scottish Highlands near the sea as they search for their lost flock. Come for the striking landscapes, stay for the incredible folksy jams by Todd Baker (Monument Valley, Alto’s Odyssey).

Platform: PC
Release date: TBA

This one had me at “Persona-inspired apocalyptic dating sim.” We’ve seen Eternights before, and it continues to look like an impressive mashup of visual novel dating sim and JRPG hack ‘n slash. A virus is turning people into monsters while the teens are also kinda horny. Much video game fun (hopefully) ensues. Eternights will sport monsters to fight, puzzles to solve, dungeons to explore, and characters to romance as the clock ticks down toward oblivion. True love waits, except when there are mutant zombies on the loose.

Platform: PC and PlayStation
Release date: September 2023

Retro Gadgets by Evil Licorice is out in Early Access right now. You can try it for yourself. But if you’re not sure yet, consider this: Have you ever dreamed of designing your own gaming handheld and the games to go along with it? Retro Gadgets can make that a reality, inside of another game at least. The top-down soldering sim has you wiring circuit boards and programing software. I haven’t tried it yet myself but it has very positive reviews on Steam, and what could be better than harnessing the power of nostalgia to learn how to invent?

Platform: PC
Release date: Currently in Early Access

Shape Shop’s wonky physics puzzler looks like it will be the perfect game to stream. Mars First Logistics has you construct your very own rover and then pilot it to transport materials needed for the construction of a new colony on the planet’s surface. The main story quests are curated while the side jobs are procedurally generated, with new unlocks as you complete deliveries safely. It looks like Death Stranding by way of Wall-E, with tons of potential to get creative in how you approach each new journey and try to corral the objects in your care.

Platform: PC
Release date: Early Access 2023

Die Gute Fabrik, of Johann Sebastian Joust, Sportsfriends, and (most recently) Mutazione fame, is back with something new to share: Saltsea Chronicles. It’s a story-driven adventure game set in a post-flood world where a ship’s crew must search for its missing captain while exploring an archipelago. An in-universe card game will let you challenge strangers throughout your travels and encounter new house rules for the mini-game, while a missed-clue feature will transport you to whatever you missed rather than have you endure a “walk of shame” as you backtrack through the same areas in search of that one thing you accidentally overlooked.

Platform: PC
Release date: Later in 2023

Kotaku is covering everything Summer Game Fest, from the main show on Thursday to other events happening throughout the next week. Whether you’re into larger-than-life triple-A games or intimate, offbeat indies, you can keep up with all things SGF here.