The Women-Led Games showcase aired on June 4 as part of Summer Game Fest week.
The full showcase is right here, but five games made our shortlist: a cooking roguelite, a soilpunk restoration sim, a gothic action RPG, a psychological horror desktop, and an occult detective adventure that has no right to be this cozy.
Arcane Eats
TL;DR
Roundguard’s creators swap bouncy dungeon crawling for a haunted kitchen and dare you to build the perfect menu before The Hunger eats the entire realm first
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Release date: 2026
- Developer: Wonderbelly Games
- Publisher: Skystone Games
- Platforms: Steam
I have a type, and that type is “roguelike deckbuilder with a strong culinary metaphor and art that makes me want to eat the UI,” apparently.
Wonderbelly Games, the studio behind the delightful pinball dungeon crawler Roundguard, spent years developing this one, and you can feel the patience in every screenshot. Managing ingredient cook times inside your deck turns each run into something genuinely distinct from every other Slay the Spire descendant I have played this year.
Publisher Skystone Games has a solid track record for lovingly strange indie games, and the demo is already live on Steam if you want to lose an afternoon.
The Regreening
TL;DR
A debut Hamburg studio hands you a handful of seeds and asks you to un-desert the whole world, which turns out to be harder and more tender than it sounds
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Release date: Coming soon
- Developer: Positive Impact Games
- Publisher: ByteRockers’ Games
- Platforms: Steam
The Regreening is the debut game from Positive Impact Games, a women-led studio out of Hamburg founded in 2024 by industry veterans, and the premise does exactly what it says on the label.
You restore a dead desert world hex by hex, seed by seed, befriending ancient spirits and hugging animals along the way. The term “soilpunk” is doing a lot of work here, and I respect it enormously.
Publisher ByteRockers’ Games has been quietly building a thoughtful catalogue of small, careful games, and The Regreening fits that vision perfectly. There is a playtest on Steam already.
Koshmar: The Last Reverie
TL;DR
Veterans of Resident Evil Village and The Witcher 2 put a mortician’s daughter in a plague city and let her fight her way through other people’s nightmares
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Release date: Coming soon
- Developer: Purple Ray Studio
- Publisher: Purple Ray Studio
- Platforms: Steam
Purple Ray Studio is a young Polish team, but their credits are anything but junior, with members who worked on Resident Evil Village, The Witcher 2, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Koshmar is their second game, a pivot from their 2023 colourful platformer Boti: Byteland Overclocked into something considerably darker, and the kind of creative swerve that genuinely excites me.
You play as Violet, a mortician’s daughter navigating a dieselpunk city consumed by a sleeping plague, sealing nightmare rifts, and slowly deciding what kind of nightmare she wants to become.
lily’s world XD
TL;DR
You find a dead girl’s laptop, start snooping through her 2004 diary and messages, and gradually realise something on the other side of the screen has noticed you doing it
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Release date: Coming soon
- Developer: SonderingEmily
- Publisher: Kwalee
- Platforms: Steam
SonderingEmily is a largely solo developer, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, and a game-dev content creator with over 300,000 followers. lily’s world XD is her first fully realised game, and it is one of those daily reminders that you have never had a single unique experience in your life.
Not because you have also found a laptop belonging to a teenage girl named Lily in 2004, read her diary, and messaged her friends to piece together what happened to her. But because this game nails early 2000s internet energy without just cashing in on the nostalgia, it gives it substance.
The game features LilyPichu and real photos from the developer’s own teenage years, which makes the horror land differently. Publisher Kwalee has a demo on Steam right now.
Inkblood
TL;DR
The publisher behind Mouthwashing sends you into 19th-century Eastern Europe with a magnifying glass that sees the past, ten cult murders, and a carriage full of terrible secrets
Psst! Click this image to get a TL;DR
- Release date: 2026
- Developer: Hey Bird!
- Publisher: Critical Reflex
- Platforms: Steam
Critical Reflex is the publisher behind Mouthwashing and Buckshot Roulette, which tells you something important about their taste: they find games that feel genuinely strange and get out of the way. Inkblood, developed by Hey Bird!, tasks you as an Inquisitor solving ten cases of occult murder in a hand-animated 19th-century Eastern European world full of secret societies, carnival masks, and mushroomfolk who may or may not be suspects.
The game has been described as The Case of the Golden Idol crossed with The Room, and the playtest has been live on Steam since April. The atmosphere is exactly as claustrophobic and beautiful as the screenshots suggest.
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