Scavland Could Be My Top Indie Game of 2026, If Early Access Delivers

I’ll expand on that title immediately, as I know how passionate the team behind Scavland is. I have full faith that this post-apocalyptic pixel-art shooter will evolve and improve, so that title isn’t a negative reflection, but rather a constructive one. It’s an early-access game, after all, so you can almost guarantee it’s going to get better.

It was a good few months ago that Scavland arrived on my Steam wishlist, and on September 4, it launched into early access. It’s a top-down survival RPG that echoes games like STALKER, Metro, and Tibia, a fantasy MMO from the nineties, and with a bit of tweaking, it could be my top breakout indie title of 2026.

Scavland Needs Polishing, But It Will Come

I’m absolutely confident that NoShadow, the team behind Scavland, will listen to the community and finesse this game, getting it to where it could be, rather than where it is.

What I will say is that I am very happy with what Scavland presents to the player right now. You’ve got a unique, charming shooter with incredible, retro-inspired visuals that leans heavily into universes that already feel familiar to millions of gamers. There’s meat on the bones, plenty of quests, lots of exploration opportunities, and customization mechanics to boot.

It’s a hardcore title that will please the more skilled gamers out there, but it’s not so suffocating that you can’t get into it as a casual gamer. That is, unless you opt to play the permadeath mode. If that’s the case, then I wish you very good luck.

The ambience is stellar, the diversity of enemies is decent, the learning curve is shallow, and you can tell without a doubt where the game’s chief influences come from. It’s a game that slots perfectly into my wheelhouse, and I’m especially happy that it’s super well optimized to run on handheld devices, which means it’ll become my travelling companion for the foreseeable future.

I’m also a huge fan of the soundscape, of the noises of mutants grumbling in the distance, the grunting of NPCs (it’s not voiced), and the soft guitar music that pops up here and there.

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But what’s wrong with Scavland?

Most of the gripes I have with Scavland are surface-level at best, or things that could be addressed by some quality-of-life patches.

For instance, I understand the hardcore, minimal HUD vibe, but it’s a little tricky to track active quests. You can only highlight one at a time, and navigating to them consists of disrupting your flow to flip open a map every few seconds to reorient yourself.

Another note in the HUD stakes is that you can’t accurately tell friend from foe easily. When you hover your crosshair over a friendly NPC, you’ll see a tiny green dot, but often, you don’t have that much time to identify them before a firefight erupts. Also, scoping out which faction an NPC belongs to often comes down to recognizing their clothing.

Rolling on from the UI, I’ll address the menu and the many items you can scoop up across Zalesye. It’s not entirely clear what the usability is of some things you pick up. For instance, you can pick up a screwdriver, and it says it could be a weapon as a last resort, and you’ll get similar comments for knives and other tools. But there’s no indication if that’s the intended purpose of that thing.

Spoiler: It’s not.

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It’s another UI consideration, but proximity looting would be good. You’ll regularly find yourself ambushed by mutants or other creatures, and more often than not, they’ll crowd you, which means you’ll end up with multiple bodies lumped atop one another. It can be hard to loot them all because you need to directly hover over and click on them, which just slows down the pacing as you fiddle around.

Inventory space is pretty tight, too. There’s actually an achievement for filling your backpack, and I think I unlocked that achievement after around 30 minutes of play. And at one point, I stumbled upon a massive scrap and found a good dozen bodies and weapons lying around, forcing me to leave it behind or make multiple trips to and from the vendor.

And I think some kind of balancing needs to happen in the combat space. I’ve been decimated by rats, but then took down hulking, glowing mutated freaks without a care in the world. Fighting human enemies is the ultimate challenge, from what I’ve seen, as they can often see you in ways that wouldn’t reflect your ability to see them.

I hope that the developers see this and the comments in the reviews on Steam, and they put together a nice to-do list for post-launch patches. I should stress that the game has already been tweaked since it went live on Steam, and I think it would be foolish to assume they’re not already aware of (and potentially working on) these very things.

Again, I want to reiterate that I’m not disappointed with Scavland. I fully appreciate its status as an early-access indie game, and it’s super impressive what NoShadow has done over the last six years with a very small team. I’ll happily keep playing, because I mean it when I say this could be my top indie game of 2026.

I’m already intrigued by the story and the setting, the art has me hooked, and I’m enjoying the tougher-than-average gameplay loop, even if I’m save-scumming a bit to get across the open world. If I had to score Scavland, I’d probably give it a seven out of ten, but honestly, with some work, it could be a solid eight, or perhaps even a nine, with the right updates.

I really have such high hopes for this game.

Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord server if you’re interested in giving Scavland a shot.

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