13 Indie Games for Halloween 2026: IGR's Spooky Picks

Every October, the folks at Indie Game Reviewer (IGR) put together a Halloween list. This year they skipped the usual Top 10 and went with 13 picks, which is the more fitting number. Not every game on it is pure horror. The list goes for a broader mood instead: whimsy, a few scares and that odd feeling of wonder that shows up when the nights get longer. If you enjoyed our September roundup of overlooked indies, this one should keep you busy until the end of the month.

Cozy, Creepy and Somewhere In Between

Welcome to Elderfield (Chris Cote, published by Kwalee) gets a special mention. It mixes a cozy life sim, a tactical RPG and horror. There's autumn farming with plenty of jack-o'-lanterns, tense turn-based fights against unsettling enemies, and a cast that is charming and unnerving in equal measure.

Moonlight Peaks (Little Chicken, published by XSEED Games and Marvelous Europe) plays a similar role for Animal Crossing fans. You run errands in a village full of melodramatic vampires, and the werewolves are dateable. It's on Android, Switch, PC and Mac.

Mayor May Knott from Ravenous Images is a 3D adventure with clever inventory puzzles. The studio calls it "creepy-cozy." IGR says that label undersells how strange it is, with talking sandwiches, grabby hair braids and an awful lot of eyeballs.

Point-and-Click Frights

Bye Sweet Carole (Little Sewing Machine, Maximum Entertainment) has hand-drawn animation that sits somewhere between a Disney cartoon and a horror show. A teen girl at a miserable British school chases letters from her missing friend Carole into surreal places full of monsters. Sometimes she turns into a bunny. One tip for PC players: Inventory is mapped to a Menu button most controllers don't have, so remap it in Settings.

Riddlewood Manor by Peanut Button is a classic haunted-house adventure with tricky puzzles. It has jump scares, but you can switch them off.

Mesmalie by Rain (orbitaldot) is a witchy visual novel about joining a coven. It has chunky pixel art, an original chiptune soundtrack, and people are already comparing it to Slay the Princess.

Cards, Dungeons and Monsters

Deck-builders turn up a lot on this list. In Hungry Horrors (Clumsy Bear Studio), you survive by cooking dishes from Celtic folklore so the monsters don't eat you instead. The Spirit Lift (prettysmart games) is a roguelike deck-builder set in a haunted hotel, with a '90s feel and grid-based dungeon crawling. Prime Monster comes from Cavalier Game Studios, the team behind The Sexy Brutale. It's a card game about running a government whose voters are zombies and vampires, which suits a US election season.

Real Vampires by Those Eyes is an educational game narrated by a history professor. It covers the upiór, the vampire of Polish and Ukrainian folklore, and adds gory mini-games on top.

Shooters and Nostalgia

Twisted Tower is a five-year passion project from solo developer Thomas Brush (Atmos Games, published by 3D Realms). It's a boomer shooter set in an abandoned resort full of killer clowns, and it wears its Bioshock influence openly. Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land (Exquisite Laundry Pet, Mega Cat Studios) is a Game Boy-style RPG that you can buy as a physical Game Boy Color cartridge. Halloween 1985 (Spoonbox Studio, Pond Area) is frantic single-screen arcade action with all the pumpkins and werewolves you'd expect.

Bonus Treats

IGR also adds three Castlevania-flavoured extras. Mina the Hollower from Shovel Knight studio Yacht Club Games blends Zelda with Dark Souls. Vampire Crawlers from poncle turns the Vampire Survivors formula into a dungeon-crawling deck-builder. Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemists is solo developer Danny Garay's whip-cracking metroidvania. According to IGR, it keeps making you rethink how you use your abilities.

Our Take

The thing that stands out most is how few of these are straight horror games. Cozy sims, folklore lessons, card battlers and retro arcade games all made the cut. That suggests "Halloween game" now means a mood more than a genre, and that suits relaxed players who want the atmosphere without being scared stiff. Deck-building also shows up again and again here, from Hungry Horrors to Vampire Crawlers. It's worth watching whether that trend has peaked or still has room to grow.

The list leans heavily on solo and tiny teams too. Twisted Tower and Toziuha Night are both one-person efforts. That fits what we've been seeing in our own coverage of spooky betas, like the HAUNTED dollhouse co-op project and the night-shift horror of Stockroom Syndrome. For Halloween, small studios seem to be setting the tone.