Two guys. One enormous dieselpunk spider-turret. A 1920s Castillian monarchy held together with hydraulic grease and bad decisions. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator just became the number-one most wishlisted game of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest, and its demo is sitting at 99% Overwhelmingly Positive. That is not a rounding error. That is the universe telling you to pay attention. The Formula recognizes this game immediately: take a colossal interwar war machine, lock a lone operator inside it with teleprinters, ballistic calculators, hydraulic levers, and enough moral ambiguity to last a decade, and you have DieselPunk distilled into a first-person box of clanking, groaning, morally compromised steel.

Here is the thing nobody tells you: you will spend approximately zero percent of your time actually firing the cannon. You will spend the other hundred percent reading coordinates, charting ranges on a map the size of a kitchen table, calculating powder charges, manually rotating a turret that weighs more than a battleship, and then questioning whether High Command actually has any idea what they are pointing you at. (They do not. High Command never does.) It is part math test, part immersive sim, part ethics seminar nobody signed up for. The full release drops August 6, 2026. The free demo is still up right now. Go. The Doctor will not be held responsible for the hospital.

Via: Steam

The Clockpunk genre has a problem, and that problem is that most Clockpunk games look like someone put a gear decal on a generic fantasy RPG and called it a day. Duskfade, however, is not that. Indie studio Weird Beluga (yes, that is their actual name, and the Doctor approves) has built a full clockpunk world out of suspended architecture, intricate mechanisms, and painterly landscapes that shift from ethereal forests to underwater ruins to cloud-piercing heights. The whole land has been plunged into eternal night by a mysterious Clock Tower and its enigmatic Master Clockmakers, which is exactly the kind of villain backstory that makes sense when you think about it for two seconds and then makes you furious that you didn’t invent it first.

You play Zirian, a workshop apprentice accompanied by his mechanical bird sidekick Cuckoo, who must shatter the shackles of time (their words, and they earned them) to rescue his sister and restore the world. The traversal looks genuinely fluid: jumps, dashes, grapples, glides, swinging from floating chains, running suspended rails. GameSpot called it “the spiritual successor to Jak and Daxter that we’ve been waiting years for,” which is either massive hype or the truest thing anyone has said about a game in a decade. The demo is live right now on Steam and PS5, so you have zero excuse not to find out which one it is. Launches August 13 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockpunk kid with a mechanical bird and a vendetta against the concept of time might come close. High-5, Weird Beluga. Wishlist it. Play the demo. You’re welcome.

Via: Chalgyr’s Game Room