[UPDATE - January 20, 2026] We have now posted the final results of the staff and community polls. You can find out which adventure game from this list came out on top in our full Wccftech Awards '25 Winners recap.
[ORIGINAL STORY] 2025 was a great year for adventure games, but this year is perhaps even more promising when looking at the schedule. Some of the most talented developers in the genre are returning with innovative games that will offer a staggering amount of variety in gameplay experiences for those who prefer not to engage in action-focused games.
Unsurprisingly, all of them come from independent developers who correctly identified the genre as a niche that most triple-A developers are content to leave alone. There's also a strong presence of French-made titles. Without further ado, here's our shortlist for the most anticipated adventure games scheduled in 2026.
Other Wccftech's Most Anticipated 2026 Games per genre: Role-Playing Games, Indie Games, Platformers, DLC/Expansion, Action, Shooter Games, Horror, Sports/Racing, Fighting
Cairn (January 29, 2026 - PC, PlayStation 5)
French independent developer The Game Bakers returns after 2016's bossfight action game Furi and 2020's love-themed RPG Haven. Both of those were quite unique and garnered acclaim, although they did not achieve the same level of popularity as other indie titles. The upcoming Cairn might just pull that off, though, especially on the heels of Peak being one of the most successful games of 2025 with over 10 million units sold to date.
Suddenly, climbing games look a lot more appealing to many gamers. In this one, professional climber Aava stands at the base of Mount Kami and must reach its peak. The gameplay prioritizes realistic climbing simulation over cinematic spectacle. Piton placement, rope management, oxygen depletion, and falling mechanics create genuine survival stakes. There's even a riskier, optional Free Solo mode that cuts safety systems for particularly daring players.
The 15-hour campaign features approximately an hour of cinematic storytelling, voiced by a cast of 10 climbers, each representing psychological archetypes drawn to vertical terrain. Mathieu Bablet, the celebrated comic artist, directs visual language, while the sound design comes from the team behind Limbo, Inside, and Control.
The Cairn Steam demo received extremely positive feedback, and with over 700K wishlists already secured, the game is not only the first title on this adventure games list to launch, it's also among the most likely to be successful.
Tides of Tomorrow (February 24, 2026 - PC, PS5, XSS, XSX)
Tides of Tomorrow is another adventure game that comes from an indie studio based in France, more specifically in Montpellier: DigixArt. Founded by the creator of Valiant Hearts: The Great War, the studio has since released a rhythm game, Lost in Harmony, and three adventure games, 11-11: Memories Retold, Road 96, and Road 96: Mile 0. This new game is quite different, to say the least, and incredibly ambitious.
Firstly, it operates in a permanent asynchronous multiplayer narrative-focused mode. Where most online games pursue real-time synchronization, Tides of Tomorrow focuses on the inverse: a cascade of choices where your decisions reshape another player's story, and theirs reshape yours. The asynchronous vision system works like this: you select another player to follow—a friend, a streamer, or even a stranger, and begin your journey in locations they previously visited. NPCs retain memories of their actions; they speak about decisions made by the prior player. Ghost echoes of their movements appear as visual guides helping you anticipate environmental hazards. But here's the crux: when you steal from an NPC the previous player befriended, that NPC's attitude shifts permanently for all future players who follow you.
This ties into the environmental narrative, where Plastemia's spread (the conversion of life into plastic) mirrors the ripple effects of player decisions propagating through asynchronous time. Each player inherits a wounded world shaped by predecessors; each player wounds it further for successors.
The developers promise that the game's branching storylines will respond to the cumulative moral weight. Story sections can even drastically change based on the prior player's set of choices. Multiple endings, therefore, emerge from whether you preserved or sacrificed NPCs, resources, or your own sanity. Needless to say, Tides of Tomorrow sounds like a game that will either reinvent the genre or be a total flop. Of course, we're crossing our fingers for the former outcome.
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss (April 16, 2026 - PC, PS5, XSS, XSX)
The third entry in our adventure games list for 2026 is also the third project that originates from a French developer. They certainly like this genre, don't they? This time, it's Big Bad Wolf, the studio behind 2018's episodic mystery adventure game The Council and 2022's roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong.
After VtM, they're moving to an even creepier setting: Lovecraft. In Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, however, they're bringing Lovecraft's cosmic horror forward to the year 2053, when Earth's surface has been nearly strip-mined and desperate corporations tunnel beneath the Pacific in search of rare minerals. When one mining station goes silent, Noah, an Ancile investigator (an occult division of Interpol), descends into R'lyeh, the sunken city that the miners unwittingly awakened.
As in classic Lovecraft, the city's architecture violates Euclidean geometry, with angles that shouldn't work and paths that loop back on themselves. Corridors will feel simultaneously monumental and claustrophobic, ancient yet pulsating with malevolent consciousness. The city isn't just alien; it's aware and deeply hostile to Noah's presence.
There's a perfectly fitting sanity mechanic, although in this game, sanity degrades constantly merely by witnessing cosmic wrongness, such as impossible geometry, terrifying audio cues, and distortions that suggest reality itself is warped at R'lyeh's depths. Unlike other horror games where sanity can be restored, this will be a one-way descent, and the only choice presented to players is whether to ignore the mysteries to preserve sanity or sacrifice mental stability to uncover the truth. The player's final sanity state at the narrative climax determines which of multiple endings they're going to receive.
NPCs embody the golden Lovecraftian principle: true horror resists definition. The player rarely sees the Shoggoth directly. Instead, they'll catch glimpses: shadows, distortions, echoes of something passing nearby, thus increasing the tension already heightened by the first-person view.
Order of the Sinking Star (TBA 2026 - PC)
Jonathan Blow, the acclaimed game designer behind indie gems like Braid and The Witness, returns ten years after his latest project with Order of the Sinking Star. Announced less than a month ago during The Game Awards 2025, this innovative puzzle adventure game is set in a realm filled with magic, monsters, and curious traps.
During this adventure, players will explore four different worlds, each with its own rules, characters, secrets, and dangers. Some of the playable characters include a queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard, a bard, a druid, and a priestess, each with their own abilities and skills. For example, the warrior can push blocks forward without restrictions, whereas the thief cannot push anything; objects act as walls to her. On the other hand, pulling is compulsive and automatic for this character. If she moves backwards while adjacent to an object, she must grab it. The wizard's core ability, teleportation, is also involuntary: if a swappable object exists within range in his direction of movement, he must swap positions with it. The Wizard can also generate multiple clones by entering different mirrors, creating simultaneous multi-position puzzle solutions.
It is through the combination of the characters' skills that the player can solve the puzzles featured in this game. And there's going to be a ton of them: Blow revealed there will be over a thousand handcrafted puzzles, for an estimated 250-500 hours of gameplay, depending on your puzzle-solving expertise. If you're into this kind of challenge, Order of the Sinking Star looks like a must-have.
Into the Fire (TBA 2026 - PC)
The last pick in our 2026 adventure games shortlist is Into the Fire, the next project by Polish developer Starward Industries, which made 2023's sci-fi game The Invincible, based on a novel by Stanisław Lem.
Into the Fire was actually announced in late 2024 as an 'anti-combat' game called Dante's Ring. Although the title has changed, the setting remains the same. You're a desperate explorer fighting a volcanic apocalypse on Dante's Archipelago and must rescue as many lives as possible, including yourself, before extracting from the danger zone. The game does incorporate some elements from extraction games, although it is single player-only. Whereas in traditional extraction games, you fight off other players and try to extract with new loot, here the main dilemma is: do you save one more survivor, knowing it risks your extraction?
You'll be able to discover the stories of those you saved and help locals by completing their quests. In the hub, which you'll return to between extraction, you'll get to craft and upgrade gear, thus customizing the playstyle, and even tend to rescued plants and animals.
Fire will be both a threat and a tool in this adventure. Expect to have to survive pyroclastic flows (superheated gas), volcanic bombs (ejecta projectiles), structural collapses, ash storms, and more. Just like in The Invincible, Starward Industries maintains a retro-aesthetic design. Here, it's a 1950s-inspired "golden age of scientific ambition" that collides with an apocalyptic reality.
Into the Fire will debut on early access first, though the developer reckons the full game will still launch in 2026, making it eligible for this list.
Honorable Mentions
Beyond those five adventure games, there's plenty more that should rightfully catch your attention, including the following:
- Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror—Reforged
- Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf
- Mixtape
- Hela
- D-Topia
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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