News
Japanese gaming outlet Game*Spark tracks what its hardcore audience is actually clicking on, and this week the indie section of its access ranking was stacked. We pulled the eight most interesting indie titles from the list — co-op horror, dice roguelikes, parkour dystopias, and one free aquarium that lives on your taskbar.
1. C.U.B.E
A 1-6 player co-op horror game where you survive ten days of deadly Trials together while quietly competing to keep your own death count lowest. Only one player becomes the True Subject.
$4.79, Early Access · Full breakdown
2. PC FISH: Taskbar Aquarium
A free cozy aquarium that lives in the corner of your desktop. Raise, breed, and trade from 450+ fish, with real trading through the Steam Community Market.
Free · Full breakdown
3. Feed the Scorchpot
A Catan-influenced dice roguelike about feeding a dragon for twenty years. Build a hex-grid scoring engine, then tear it down and rebuild while it is on fire.
$11.99 · Full breakdown
4. Scavland
A hardcore top-down survival RPG in a post-apocalyptic Soviet world, drawing on Tarkov and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Ammo is scarce, weapons jam, and the Mist is always closer than you think.
Early Access September 4 · Full breakdown
5. CICADAMATA
A fast-paced first-person platformer-shooter-speedrunner with an unsettling art style and a maneuver sandbox built to be broken. Hop, skip, and jump through 15+ freeform levels.
$8.99 · Full breakdown
6. Ironsand
A 4-player co-op titan-slaying FPS roguelite on a desert planet, where colossal war platforms demand perfectly tuned builds and real coordination.
$6.74 · Full breakdown
7. Salt and Soil
RimWorld meets Crusader Kings III on the American frontier. A minimalist roguelite colony sim following one family across three centuries, 1609 to 1900.
Coming 2026 · Full breakdown
8. VHOLUME
A melancholic first-person parkour adventure through a dystopian brutalist city, where restoring your family ration tickets becomes a bureaucratic odyssey.
$7.20 · Full breakdown
The takeaway
What stands out across this list is range. A $4.79 co-op horror game sits beside a three-century family sim, a speedrunning shooter, and a free desktop aquarium — and all of them found an audience in the same week. That is the indie scene working exactly as it should.
Ranking source: Game*Spark access ranking.
