Upcoming Games 2026: Why Everything Is Racing to Beat GTA 6

Rebel Wolves is a new studio made up of several former CD Projekt Red developers, including people who worked on The Witcher 3. Their debut is a vampire RPG set in a version of 14th century Europe, and the influence is not subtle. You play as Coen, who is human during the day and a vampire at night, with a completely different set of abilities depending on which.

The structure is the genuinely interesting part. You have thirty days and thirty nights to save your family, but there is no visible countdown ticking away in the corner. Time moves when you complete missions instead. That is a smart way to build pressure without the anxiety of a real-time clock, and it means the game is quietly asking you to choose what you are willing to skip.

The concern is simple and it applies to every debut from a new studio, no matter who works there. Ideas this good are not rare. Executing them across a full RPG is. The Witcher 3 was made by a large team with years of accumulated infrastructure behind it, and Rebel Wolves is starting from nothing.

The pitch writes itself. The studio that made the best Spider-Man games in years is making a hard M-rated Wolverine game, and the footage shown so far is considerably more violent than most people were expecting. Claws go through people. Chunks come off. This is not a family superhero game and Insomniac is clearly not interested in pretending otherwise.

What is less clear is the shape of it. Do not assume this is Spider-Man with claws. It is unlikely to be a sprawling open city built around traversal, because Wolverine cannot swing between buildings, and the traversal was half of what made those games feel good. Insomniac has to find a different reason for you to want to move around its world.

It is a PS5 exclusive, and given how the PlayStation-to-PC pipeline has slowed recently, a PC version is not something we would count on any time soon.

The original Control won a pile of awards by being strange, specific and confident, and most of that came from the Oldest House itself. It was a building that behaved like a character. Resonance abandons it. This time the weirdness has escaped into Manhattan, and you play as Dylan Faden rather than his sister Jesse, waking from a coma into a city where the rules have stopped applying.

The bigger change is combat. Control was a shooter that happened to have telekinesis. This appears to be the reverse, with the focus shifted onto fast melee in the vein of a Devil May Cry or a Platinum game, while keeping the dashing and flying that made the original feel so good to move through. Remedy is also describing the setting as larger and more open than the Oldest House, though not an open world.

That is two significant departures at once, which is either brave or a lot to ask. Remedy has earned enough trust to attempt it. But the thing people loved about Control was how tightly the setting, the tone and the systems fitted together, and that is precisely the thing being taken apart.

There is a playable demo available right now, which makes this the one game on this list where you do not have to take anybody's word for anything. Go and try it. Be aware that it hands you late-game abilities in an early-game area, so it is considerably easier than the finished game will be, and it drops you in with almost no context.

With that caveat, it feels good. Genuinely good. You play as Miyamoto Musashi in Edo-period Kyoto, wielding the Oni Gauntlet against a supernatural malice that has taken hold of the city. The combat is built around precision rather than volume, which is what the original games did well and what most modern action games have drifted away from.

This is also, quietly, the least crowded search result on this list. Onimusha has been dormant for twenty years and a lot of players have simply never encountered it. If the demo is representative, that is going to change.

E-Day goes back to Emergence Day, the moment the Locust Horde first came up out of the ground, with a younger Marcus Fenix. That framing matters. Every previous Gears game has been set in a war that humanity already understood and had organised itself around. This one is set on the day nobody knew what was happening.

The material shown so far leans noticeably towards survival horror. Collapsing cities, soldiers with no information, an enemy that has not yet been categorised into manageable types. If your concern was that the Locust have gradually become interchangeable targets over five games, this appears to be a deliberate attempt to make them frightening again.

It is launching on Xbox Series and PC together, which is worth mentioning only because a Gears game arriving on PC on day one used to be the exception rather than the assumption.

It is difficult to write about Grand Theft Auto 6 as a game, because at this point it is barely being discussed as one. It is discussed as an event. It will almost certainly be the biggest commercial launch in the history of the medium, and everyone involved knows it.

Rockstar has now revealed a great deal: the state of Leonida with Vice City at its centre, regions running from the Everglades to the Keys, two protagonists in Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, story chapters in the Red Dead 2 style, and an $80 standard edition alongside a $100 one. What has still not appeared, four months out, is a single piece of raw gameplay. We know the model name of Lucia's pistol and not what happens when she fires it.

The other thing worth remembering is that this game was originally dated for May. The six-month slip to November is the reason the rest of this calendar looks the way it does, and it is why a dozen other games are now stacked on top of each other in September.