The best games of 2026 so far

By Keza MacDonald and Keith Stuart • June 11, 2026 • Culture

If you fancy roaring around Japan’s open roads, scaling impossible mountains and playing with post-apocalyptic Pokémon, this year’s highlights mean you can do so without leaving your chair

*** 007 First Light Bond sets out to earn his licence to kill in IO Interactive’s hugely enjoyable retelling of the agent’s early years. Mixing the stealth and open environments of Hitman with the narrative drive of the Uncharted games, there are fistfights, cool cars and hi-tech gadgets aplenty. Read the full review. *** Forza Horizon 6 The grand festival of car racing returns, this time bringing its automotive chaos to Japan, where bamboo forests, winding mountain roads and dense city streets play host to a wealth of driving challenges. With astonishing visuals and more than 500 beautiful vehicles, this is escapist gaming on a whole new level. Read the full review. *** Forbidden Solitaire Trapped in a hellish dungeon surrounded by monsters, your only way out is to play increasingly challenging rounds of solitaire while your sister figures out who the heck made this cursed game in the first place. A brilliant puzzler housed within a clever meta conceit. Read the full review. *** Mythmatch Cast out by the insufferable dudebros of Mount Olympus, aspiring goddess Artemis must prove her worth by helping the mortal inhabitants of a small village. Mixing the dynamics of a match-three puzzler with a warm narrative about kinship and perseverance, this is a multilayered treat. Read the full review. *** Titanium Court A fascinating combination of match-three puzzler, tower defence game and fourth-wall-breaking stage-play, Titanium Court has you crowned queen of a faerie citadel that you must defend from its mysterious enemies, matching tiles to arrange the battlefield to your advantage and exploring the court at night. Confused? You almost certainly will be. But in this spectacularly innovative game, that’s almost the point. *** Pragmata When contact is lost with a lunar research station, space cop Hugh Williams is sent to investigate – only to discover a seemingly abandoned base ruled over by a despotic AI. With the help of a charming android child, he attempts to shut it down, hacking robots and blasting drones as he goes. An engrossing sci-fi romp with a cute parental relationship at its core. Read the full review. *** Resident Evil: Requiem Rookie FBI operative Grace Ashcroft sets out to investigate a series of mysterious deaths tied to the destruction of Raccoon City many years before. Soon, she’s being stalked, spooked and kidnapped, while series hero Leon Kennedy closes in. Combining tense stealth and barnstorming action sequences, Requiem gets to have its zombie and kill it too. Read the full review. *** Saros Colonists have gone missing on a distant planet and as part of the team sent in to find them, you must battle cybernetic creatures, explore weird fractured environments and die over and over again. Saros is an action game with style and vision, placing truly uncompromising demands on brave (foolhardy) space farers. Read the full review. *** Cairn Aava is not a normal person; she is one of those fascinating maniacs obsessed with scaling places that no human ought to reach. On her trip up this forbidding mountain, you control her individual limbs, searching for hand and footholds in the rock. The higher you get, the more urgent the question becomes: why is she doing this, and what kind of person do you need to be to follow this kind of obsession? Read the full review *** Pokémon Pokopia The latest spin-off from the Pokémon series is a delightful life simulation in which you must restore a ruined planet by building, planting and exploring – all with the help of various Pokémon pals with distinct personalities. Combining elements of Minecraft, Stardew Valley and Viva Piñata, this is a cosy yet complex adventure that brings new dimensions to Pikachu and co. Read the full review. *** Honourable mentions Mario Tennis Fever Mewgenics TR-49 Marathon Pieced Together Life Is Strange: Reunion

Source: The Guardian