7 Indie Games You Likely Missed in September 2026
September went by fast. Jill Grodt of The Indie Informer admits she barely noticed the month begin. She blames that partly on the flood of indie releases in recent weeks, including Well Dweller, which the site counts among the best games of 2026. Spooky season is about to take over, so the outlet rounded up seven smaller titles that may have slipped past you. Here's the quick version.
Demons and Spellbooks
Order Automatica is the darkest pick on the list. It's a tactical roguelite set on a tiny 3x3 ritual grid. You focus on positioning and synergies, and then the battles play out automatically. The pitch calls it chess with demons. That's a solid hook, and it tells you a lot in very few words.
Songs of Glimmerwick takes a very different direction. This story-driven RPG sends you to a witch academy in a musical woodland fantasy world, where you cast a spell by playing a song. You attend classes, look after the university garden, and make friends with classmates and townsfolk. You also get to explore the island's many oddities and mysteries. It sounds like a place you could get comfortably lost in.
Cozy Corners
Cat Me If You Can keeps things simple. You explore handcrafted black-and-white worlds and search for hidden cats. Each one you photograph brings its colors back into the world. If camera-focused cozy games like Toem 2 are your thing, this one deserves a look.
Dressmaker does exactly what the name promises. You pick fabric, cut out patterns, and sew the pieces together for the townsfolk. The game is inspired by real dressmaking, and you can choose to please your customers or quietly sabotage them. A cozy crafting game with a mischievous streak is hard to resist.
Feelings, Set to Music
MONOWAVE is a puzzle adventure across colorful worlds powered by four emotions. You express your feelings through song, empathize with your spirit friends, and solve puzzles to find the way forward. You can play it alone or with a friend, which makes it a good candidate for a relaxed evening on the couch.
Two Very Different Metroidvanias
Little Ghost is the laid-back option. It's a chill metroidvania built around non-linear exploration and puzzle-platforming. It has frequent checkpoints, no currency, and no combat at all. You gain friends and abilities as you go. The collectibles double as media: tarot cards, weird podcasts, and songs from more than 20 bands, all hidden in a surreal papercraft world. That last detail alone makes it stand out.
Magical Blush picks up the pace considerably. This top-down action-adventure combines fast elemental combat with Metroidvania-style exploration of the world of Wyn. You chain spell combos, exploit elemental weaknesses, rescue survivors, and face the powerful Elemental Lords. If Little Ghost is a stroll, this is more of a sprint.
Our Take
This list shows how much of September's indie output leaned toward gentle, low-pressure play. Cat Me If You Can, Dressmaker, and Little Ghost all put calm exploration or crafting ahead of challenge. Little Ghost goes further and drops combat and currency entirely. That fits a pattern we keep seeing on this blog, where cozy design increasingly shapes games well beyond farming and life sims.
Music is another thread running through the list. Songs of Glimmerwick turns songs into spells, MONOWAVE uses them to express emotion, and Little Ghost hides a whole soundtrack's worth of bands in its world. The two metroidvanias also show how flexible the genre remains, from combat-free wandering to elemental brawling. Other projects, such as this pixel art fox metroidvania currently in open beta, point the same way.
As October brings a wave of horror releases, it will be worth watching whether quieter games like these can hold on to their audience, or whether they end up buried once more.