Xbox Indie Selects February 2026, Week 2: Six Offbeat Adventures Worth Your Time
From hand-drawn British comedy to horror fishing and anti-capitalist fairy tales, Xbox's February curation delivers six indie games you should not ignore.
The ID@Xbox team just dropped its February Indie Selects, and this month’s lineup is one of the strangest and best in the program’s history. Six games, zero overlap in genre or tone, all worth downloading right now.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
A hand-drawn comedy adventure set in the fictional Northern English town of Barnsworth. The animation feels like Terry Gilliam directed a Monty Python episode about corner shops and council estates. Matt Berry provides voice acting, and the humor lands with a physical, slapstick energy that most games never even attempt.
You play as a tiny salesman knocking on doors and solving problems for the town’s eccentric residents. Every interaction is a visual gag waiting to happen. It is short, absurd, and genuinely funny.
Pathologic 3
Twelve days. One plague. No easy answers. Ice-Pick Lodge’s latest is a psychological survival game where you manage a dying town through resource scarcity, trust, and consequence. Combat takes a back seat to moral ambiguity. Every decision costs something, and the game makes sure you feel it.
The Xbox Series X|S version runs with enhanced lighting and faster load times. If you liked the oppressive atmosphere of the first two games, this is the most refined version of that formula yet.
Escape from Ever After
A Paper Mario inspired RPG where a fairy tale hero storms his rival dragon’s castle only to find it has been converted into corporate offices. Ever After Inc. has infiltrated storybooks to farm resources and exploit labor. So Flynt and his dragon enemy Tinder team up, get jobs, and climb the corporate ladder to burn the whole thing down from inside.
Turn-based combat uses timing-based action commands. The writing is sharp, the jazzy big-band soundtrack is fantastic, and the whole thing runs about 21 hours. It sits at 98% positive on Steam. If you miss the old Paper Mario games, this is the closest anything has come in years. For another turn-based RPG making waves this season, see how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept indie awards.
Wylde Flowers
A farming sim with a twist: your grandmother is a witch. You tend crops by day and cast spells by night, learning to fly broomsticks, brew potions, and control the weather. The game is fully voice acted and lets seasons advance only when you choose, so there is no pressure to rush.
Wylde Flowers nails the cozy formula while adding real narrative stakes. Romance options, a full coven to bond with, and enough witchcraft to keep things interesting beyond the usual harvest cycle.
Loan Shark
The darkest pick on this list. You play as a fisherman drowning in debt, casting lines into murky water while a deadline ticks down. Then you catch a one-eyed talking fish named Cagliuso who offers to help. His help is not free.
Built in Godot 4 with intentionally rough PS2-era visuals (one of the free engines we recommend for game jams), Loan Shark is a 45-minute horror experience with multiple endings. The deal-with-the-devil setup is effective, the atmosphere is suffocating, and the Italian dev team at Studio Carota knows exactly how much dread you can fit into half an hour of fishing.
Hero Seekers
A classic JRPG in the late-90s mold. History has been rewritten, and you recover forgotten heroes to restore the truth. Parties of up to five characters, turn-based battles, dungeon exploration, and skill optimization. It does not reinvent the genre. It just executes the formula with care.
Published by KEMCO and available on all platforms, Hero Seekers is comfort food for anyone who grew up on Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Sometimes that is exactly what you want.
The Takeaway
Xbox’s Indie Selects program continues to be one of the best discovery tools on the platform, sitting alongside Steam Next Fest as a way to surface games that might otherwise go unnoticed. This month’s batch covers hand-drawn comedy, survival horror, anti-capitalist RPGs, witchy farming, fishing nightmares, and retro JRPGs. If you can’t find something to play in that spread, you’re not trying.
Browse the full collection on Xbox.com/IndieSelects.
Written by
Florian HuetiOS dev by day, indie game dev by night. Trying to give life to GameDō Studio.
Building games and talking about the ones I can't stop playing.
