The Next Shelf: 10 New Indie Games on Steam, November 9 to 15, 2026

Casualties: Unknown drops you, one of thousands of test subjects, into the caves of an alien planet to bring back lost cargo for your captors. The planet has 11 layers, each with its own dangers, and nobody expects you to make it back.

The hook is the body simulation. Limbs and blood circulation are simulated, so you bandage wounds, fight infections and stop the bleeding before you pass out, and a gloomy mood makes everything harder. There are three characters, about 300 items, and loot and danger settings on the main menu. Steam's content note mentions depression, violence, dismemberment, drug use and self-harm.

Worst Class Ever is an asymmetric party game set in a classroom. One player is the teacher. The others are students hiding among dozens of computer-controlled classmates, trying to eat snacks, pass notes and play on their phones without getting caught.

The teacher gets a detection mode and items of their own, and the students get smoke bombs, tranquilizer guns and drones to cause trouble. Maps rotate between daytime classrooms, late-night study halls and computer labs. The Steam page still describes one teacher and five students, but the developer says the full release raises the limit to 8 players per match and adds LAN play.

Go Next! is a third-person horde survival game where your weapons fire on their own and your job is to keep moving. You wall-run, dash, slide and bunny-hop across 11 worlds, from fortress ramparts to city rooftops, while hundreds of monsters close in from every side.

Each level-up offers three cards, and a run that starts with one weapon ends with planets orbiting you and black holes on screen. There are 71 weapons, 131 items and 22 characters, plus ranked seasons and leaderboards. You can play solo or in online co-op for up to 4 players.

TANUKI: Pon's Summer follows Pon, a slightly lazy tanuki with a part-time job at the post office, during the month before the big Tanuki Festival. You deliver letters and awkwardly shaped packages around a sunny island on a BMX, and the money goes into rebuilding and decorating the run-down shrine.

The locals keep inviting you to things, from making sushi to a baseball game and the sumo ring, and each activity earns rewards for the shrine. The BMX also does tricks, with over 100 challenges to land. It's published by CRITICAL REFLEX, the label behind Buckshot Roulette.

Hillthorn is a detective game about a missing child in a closed mountain community, told entirely through cards and without a single spoken word. Each Clue card can be investigated, explored or, now and then, talked to, and the locals don't like sharing with outsiders.

Every action moves the clock forward, so you can't follow every thread. It's a short, atmospheric mystery with several endings, and progress comes from what you learn rather than from upgrades. Raw Fury publishes it, and the store page notes that no generative AI was used to make it.

Hope in the City is a narrative mystery about Hope Song, a 17-year-old who comes home from school to a ransacked apartment and two missing parents. She isn't a detective, but she draws, and her artist's eye catches details other people miss.

You investigate by sketching what doesn't add up in Hope's notebook, then combining sketches into insights and, eventually, breakthroughs. The city is drawn in a bold, stylized look and is there to wander. It comes from the team behind Eternal Spring and Sky of Tides.

Main Sequence is a first-person factory builder in space. You start with one mining ship in an asteroid belt, scan for the best spots, refine what you mine, then build a space station and fill it with machines and conveyor belts. Every ship and station is yours to design, module by module.

Your industry wakes up an ancient alien defense network, so the fleet you build also has to fight. In co-op each player captains their own ship, so one friend can run logistics while another goes exploring. It launches in Early Access.

One More Lawn puts you on a beat-up riding mower as a grumpy old man who smokes, drinks cheap beer and still leaves perfect stripes. You start with your own front yard, then take jobs around the area: a picky client who wants every blade at five centimeters, an abandoned golf course and an island wedding.

Where the mower can't reach, you get off and use a string trimmer, and afterwards you can watch the whole job again as a timelapse. Up to 6 players can mow the same lawn online, each on their own mower, with proximity voice chat. There's a map editor with Steam Workshop support, and the free demo's save carries over.

DERELIKT is a first-person sci-fi horror shooter made to look like a PlayStation 1 game, with hand-painted textures, the warping of that era and retro CGI cutscenes, and you can switch some of those effects off. You play an outside contractor sent to an outpost on an asteroid in Saturn's orbit to find out what happened to a missing excavation team.

The halls are dark, systems are failing and the survivors tell conflicting stories, so you can't trust anyone. Next to fast gunplay there's resource management, dialogue with over a dozen characters and old-school puzzles. It's made by one developer and comes out on PS5 the same day, according to the PlayStation Blog.

Sloppy Forgeries gives you three minutes, a mouse, a handful of colors and no undo, and asks you to copy the Mona Lisa. It scores every pixel in real time, so you watch a bar rise and fall as you paint over one of 50 simplified masterpieces from art history.

With friends it becomes a race: up to 8 players online with a join code, or two people head to head on one PC with two mice. Variants like Tiny Brush and Upside Down mix things up, and you can share replays of your strokes as GIFs. There's a free demo on Steam.