The ID@Xbox April 2026 Showcase Had No Right To Go This Hard

The ID@Xbox showcase dropped a ridiculous amount of games on us this week, and we’ve been arguing about our favorites since.

These are the seven picks from Bonus Action that we think are genuinely worth your attention, from a frozen alien planet to a haunted hotel that’s also somehow a musical.

Deep Dish Dungeon

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• Release date: Fall 2026
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S, Mac
• Genres: Dungeon Crawler, Survival, Co-op, Metroidvania
• Developer: Behold Studios
• Publisher: Raw Fury

The name made me suspicious, because Deep Dish Dungeon sounds like a bit, and then I found the demo sitting at 82% Very Positive on Steam and stopped being suspicious.

Behold Studios, behind Knights of Pen & Paper and Chroma Squad, built a hand-crafted dungeon for three players where cooking is genuinely how you progress. Raw Fury is publishing it, which is its own vote of confidence.

Lofsong

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• Release date: TBA 2026
• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
• Genres: Exploration, Puzzle, Art Game
• Developer: Unrelated Studio
• Publisher: Unrelated Studio

I want to be careful not to oversell a trailer, but this one made me feel genuinely small in a way I haven’t experienced since Journey.

Turin debut studio, Unrelated Studio, drops you onto a long-dead Earth where brutalist monuments rise out of a nuclear winter, each built to be read through geometry and sound rather than words. Your origami companion shapeshifts to carry you across the Dust Sea. No map, no dialogue. Whether this lands as profound or beautifully hollow, I’ve already decided I’m playing it alone with the volume all the way up.

Screenbound

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• Release date: TBA 2026
• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
• Genres: Puzzle Platformer, Action-Adventure
• Developer: Crescent Moon Games, Radical Forge, Those Dang Games
• Publisher: Digital Pajamas, Crescent Moon Games

There are some games that make you think, and there are games that make you feel like your brain has quietly slipped on a banana peel, and Screenbound is emphatically the second kind.

You navigate a 3D world while a retro 2D platformer version of the same level plays on a handheld at the bottom of your screen, both under your control simultaneously, with your movements mirroring across dimensions, but the rules emphatically not. GDC journalists say it becomes second nature within thirty minutes. I find that either reassuring or alarming, depending on the day.

Tears of Metal

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• Release date: Spring 2026 (Early Access)
• Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X/S
• Genres: Hack-and-Slash, Co-op Roguelite, Action
• Developer: Paper Cult
• Publisher: Paper Cult

I have thought about Bloodroots, Paper Cult’s top-down brawler where a betrayed man weaponizes everything around him, including carrots, more than is probably healthy.

Tears of Metal scales that energy from one furious man to an entire Scottish battalion reclaiming a meteor-cursed island, with up to four players co-opping through 45 hand-crafted environments between roguelite runs. The demo sits at 96% Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 900 Steam reviews, which is the kind of number that physically stops me mid-scroll.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

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• Release date: TBA 2026
• Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, PC
• Genres: Action-Adventure, Renovation Sim, Horror, Musical
• Developer: Friday Sundae
• Publisher: Friday Sundae

I’ve read a great many game pitches, and “a musical, Lovecraftian, hotel renovation game” is the first one that made me set everything down and pay full attention.

Bristol debut studio, Friday Sundae, hands you a crumbling seaside hotel, talking power tools, including a sardonic Scottish paintbrush named Robert C MacBrushy, and 30 days to restore it before things crawl out of the walls at night. Every character has their own song. You can rewrite the lyrics. Game director Anil Glendinning describes the soundtrack as “a cool, dusty album you find in your dad’s record collection,” and I would very much like to find that album.

Beastro

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• Release date: May 21, 2026
• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
• Genres: Cooking RPG, Deckbuilder, Roguelite
• Developer: Timberline Studio
• Publisher: Timberline Studio / Kepler Interactive

I am not immune to a cozy game with a crunchy combat system underneath, and Beastro has one of the better premises I’ve encountered: the meals you cook for your warriors literally build the deck of cards they fight with.

The world divides into five flavor biomes: bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami, each with its own culture and creatures, which is the kind of worldbuilding detail that makes me want to move in. After each battle, warriors recount their adventure in a puppet theatre, sometimes dragging back monstrous ingredients.

Aphelion

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• Release date: April 28, 2026
• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
• Genres: Action-Adventure, Stealth, Sci-Fi
• Developer: Don’t Nod
• Publisher: Don’t Nod

I have a weakness for games where Earth is already lost, and we’ve made it someone else’s problem, and Don’t Nod, the French studio behind Life is Strange and Vampyr, has built exactly that game.

Two astronauts crash onto Persephone, a frozen ninth planet humanity has pinned its last hope on, and something immediately starts hunting them. You alternate between Ariane, who rappels across ice fields, and Thomas, injured and investigating from where he’s stranded. Developed with the actual European Space Agency.