Here’s Our 5 Favorite Games from the Six One Indie Showcase

The Six One Indie Showcase landed on May 21st with 61 games in 93 minutes, and yes, we watched every second of it.

The full showcase is right here, and it is worth your time. Grave Seasons was already on our wishlist before the broadcast started — Perfect Garbage’s farming sim with a serial-killer neighbor locked in its August 14 date, and we will absolutely be there. But these five are the ones we haven’t stopped thinking about since.

Sonnet

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• Release date: Late 2026 (episodic; Part I: The Gardener of Smoke)
• Platforms: Steam
• Genres: Adventure, Exploration, Atmospheric
• Developer: Antique Song
• Publisher: Antique Song

I am a sucker for a journey game, and Sonnet understood the assignment the second that key art appeared on screen. Antique Song is telling this story in episodes, and the first one is called The Gardener of Smoke, which is already doing more work as a title than most games manage with an entire trailer.

The premise is deceptively simple: transport a magical flower across a medieval kingdom full of secrets and strange travelers. What sold me is how atmospheric it looks, medieval in the way old fairy tales are medieval, rather than the way triple-A games are medieval, and episodic in a way that suggests Antique Song knows exactly how much story they want to tell.

Isle of Reveries

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• Release date: September 2026
• Platforms: Steam, Switch, PS5, Xbox
• Genres: Action-Adventure, Puzzle, Exploration
• Developer: desertcucco
• Publisher: desertcucco

The demo for Isle of Reveries has been sitting at 96% positive on Steam since it launched in late 2024, which, for a game that isn’t even out yet, is a number worth taking seriously. Developer desertcucco is a solo dev building a love letter to the Game Boy Color era of Zelda, with an owl named Lief who joins a caravan of misfits on a pilgrimage to an island where wishes are supposedly granted, though notably nobody ever comes back.

The Six One showcase confirmed Isle of Reveries is also heading to Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox alongside PC, which tells you something about the confidence behind it. September is close enough to start getting nervous about it in a good way.

Forklift Flowerpot

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• Release date: To be announced
• Platforms: Steam
• Genres: Exploration, Investigation, Mystery
• Developer: Michael Mato
• Publisher: Too Much Tomato

I don’t know what I expected from a game called Forklift Flowerpot, but I did not expect it to be described by its own developer as an Outer Wilds-like mystery, and yet here we are, and somehow it makes complete sense.

Michael Mato, who previously released the tennis roguelike Torso Tennis through his Too Much Tomato label, is building something that lets you pilot a forklift-flowerpot hybrid around a claymation-inspired archipelago, change between three seasons at will, and pull on the threads of a conspiracy buried inside a shipping company.

The demo is live, and the seasonal mechanic, where each season physically reshapes what you can access, is the kind of design idea that sounds like a gimmick right up until you play it and realize it’s structural. This one has been developing quietly for a while, and the Six One showcase pushed it straight to the top of the list.

Painted Kingdoms

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• Release date: To be announced
• Platforms: Steam
• Genres: Strategy, Tower Defense, City Builder
• Developer: Hectiq
• Publisher: Hectiq

I want to be honest about what Painted Kingdoms is: it’s a tower defense game. I know how that sounds. But Hectiq, a studio out of Bordeaux founded in 2023, built something that makes fire feel like a genuinely unpredictable antagonist rather than a damage number you learn to route around. Your kingdom is made of paper; you paint it to define terrain properties, and the fire spreads dynamically at the cell level with no interest in your plans.

Their previous game was Los Pingheros, which came out on Steam and Switch in 2025. Painted Kingdoms is the more ambitious follow-up, and the demo already exists for anyone who wants to watch their carefully painted forest ignite and spiral accordingly. It has a specific kind of chaos that feels earned rather than random, which is rare enough to notice.

lunr.rdio.taxi

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• Release date: To be announced
• Platforms: Steam
• Genres: Racing, Rhythm, Arcade
• Developer: Soín
• Publisher: Soín

I appreciate a game that commits so fully to a premise that it names itself like a broken URL and dares you to look it up. Brazilian studio Soín built lunr.rdio.taxi in partnership with electronic music label Speedtest Rave, and the concept is exactly what it sounds like: you are an interplanetary taxi pilot drowning in debt in a hypercapitalist future, sliding and boosting across the solar system to the beat of Brazil’s best DJs while trying to pay an infinite bill.

Each planet runs a different genre of Brazilian electronic music, which is one of the better world-building decisions I’ve encountered in a racing game. The demo already has online ghost racing, Soín is actively playtesting it, and the game showed up at Six One and immediately carved out a lane no other title in the showcase was occupying.

About the Author

Cande Maldonado

Editor

Cande’s calling in life is to annoy NPCS, smash virtual pottery, and complete every side quest available in RPGs. Her passion for games dates to 2006, when she mounted a Chocobo for the first time, but she has been writing professionally for the past four years. Under Nintendo and Square Enix’s chokehold, she willingly pours hours upon hours into reaching 100% completion in the longest roleplaying games ever made. But hey, who needs fresh air and sunlight when you can just live in Ivalice?

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