Quick Reviews: Summer 2026 Steam Games

Most of my Steam gaming, and so most of my reviews from there, have been me trying to battle an ever-growing backlog, but this time the summer Steam sale had some momentum behind it for me as one of these games I've been waiting for quite some time for, so in a much more current set of reviews, this time these are all games that were released in the Summer of 2026, and generally featured in the Summer sale as well. So this time I'm talking about The Mermaid Mask, The Message from Deep Space, Meccha Chameleon, and Fugaz.

The Mermaid Mask

Way back in Spring 2024, I had talked about Tangle Tower in both one of the earliest review blogs I did and in one of our Lite Switch episodes. That was the second full game in the Detective Grimoire franchise from SFB Games, and the comedic point-and-click mystery-solving games have been satisfying to me every time. So when I played Tangle Tower back then, it had already been announced that another game was coming and I knew that I was going to be eagerly awaiting its release. I also deviated from my usual Steam plans of waiting for a pretty big sale because I knew I wanted to support this game from the get-go given how much I'd enjoyed the previous ones.

The premise itself is quite simple, Detective Grimoire and his friend and partner Sally are brought in to solve one of those classic murder-mystery situations - someone is found dead in a locked room, and with no apparent weapon the question becomes figuring out how they died, why, and who was responsible. For added flair, this is also all set on a most peculiar submarine.

Just as a general sort of whodunit, this could be enjoyable enough on its own, but every facet of this makes this game so compelling for me. The art style is great, and with the fairly full backgrounds, this has also been written so that there's comments from Grimoire and Sally on a whole lot of what's present, even the stuff that isn't plot-relevant, and it's consistently funny. The whole thing is also voice-acted, and I really like the performances as well. So everything around the core gameplay enriches it so much. There's also a series of puzzles along the way, and to the credit of the game... with perhaps one exception, I think the puzzles were generally challenging but doable - there's one that felt like it wasn't set up well enough to get moving in the right direction but the rest were enjoyable and satisfying.

Any good mystery depends not just on how interesting the detective is, but how interesting the suspects are, and they're all really interesting in their own ways (and, again, great performances). I also really appreciate a quality-of-life thing which is that it's very easy to tell what you have and haven't discussed with each of them so that it's really easy to go back and ask about suspects and clues and just ask about the stuff you've found recently - somewhat in the same vein, you can also go back and ask about things again if you want to review it, perhaps looking for information you might've overlooked the first time.

It's made pretty clear, at several points during this, that SFB Games were feeling a bit of pressure to make a good game as a follow-up to Tangle Tower, but I think they succeeded incredibly. My greatest hope is that didn't turn into overthinking that would put them off of making another Detective Grimoire game, because I devoured this game, and I really hope that when they're ready they make another game in this franchise because they've all been great. The Mermaid Mask is such an enjoyable and compelling mystery-solving experience that does a great job at filling up with characters that are interesting and memorable. For me, it's a must play and definitely met and exceeded any expectations I had for it.

The Message from Deep Space

This seems to be the first game, and at least is the first game on Steam, from Applesinmypants, the indie developer behind The Message from Deep Space. Set in the 1970s and with gameplay largely constrained to an interface just consisting of two monitors, you are one of a team trying to decode messages coming from a meteor that has crashed to earth and is emitting radio waves. Teamed up with a computer scientist, astronomer, and linguist, the goal is to figure out how to establish some sort of information exchange. I will concede I'm a tad bothered by how the astronomer gets maligned as a character here, just as I feel like it's not doing any favors for astronomers as a whole.

The core of the gameplay loop is getting a transmission and needing to determine the correct message to respond back, which is a combination of decoding the signals and determining what is being asked and then also determining what the proper response is after identifying the correct question. It plays around with things like the underlying assumptions of syntax and the like as well, but certainly has the ability to be quite satisfying.

However, for me this struggles most when it tries to get abstract; things feel a bit too much like there's a certain interpretation that is the 'right' one among the characters, there's some bits in how to respond that don't always feel consistent, and while the nudges from the team can be helpful, they drop off at some point and it feels like this mostly becomes a question of how long to try before looking it up rather than feeling like there's a breakthrough the way the first handful of hours felt to rely more on breakthroughs. With this feeling more abstract... it's also started feeling more arbitrary. I liked what I got out of the first few hours so it definitely felt worth trying, but I'm now struggling to really find the drive to keep it at it.

Meccha Chameleon

The one game that I didn't really expect to check out until The Midhunting discord got into this (check out a bit of what we talked about with Nate in our Blast Corps episode about that community), and it is one of those games that took the internet by storm because of how clips were getting shared. The basic premise is hide-and-seek, but where part of it is trying to paint yourself to hide better. I did find this glitchy in some frustrating ways (including crashing a few times for me), and that's the sort of thing I hope is getting fixed over time.

For the main gameplay mode, starting with one or two hunters and where people that get spotted also become hunters, the points come from being in someone's field of view.... so the more often people look at you but don't spot you, then the more points you get. And playing with friends, this can be really fun - there's an in-game whistle function that's present to either taunt or to help hunters find where people are and playing this while on voice chat gave ample opportunity for taunting and further mind games.

A lot of this depends on some combination of creativity and artistic skill, and there were ways to be creative without necessarily being skillful. Indeed, my only success came from creative uses that didn't rely on me being good at the painting, as the left hand of the above image showed (as I think I got away with that one). Thanks to Dr. Ilium for the screenshots here, and you can see how much better he was at this than I am. This ends up being a lot of fun to play, at least with people that are fun to play games with and using this as just the gameplay in question.

Fugaz

Fugaz is another game that looks to be from a first-time Steam developer, Spheanix. Describing itself as a "dark immersive horror puzzle game", the core of this is using a flute to unlock things... I'd think of it as in much the same way that Ocarina of Time uses the ocarina and relies upon learning songs to solve the puzzles.

The concept seems somewhat interesting, and starting in on this and the initial exploration did fit into that loop of finding a new bit of music that does something then applying that knowledge. It didn't often feel like it delivered no that, though, and it felt also like it was trying a bit too hard to come off as dark.

What soured me on this, though, was that there's a timer involved. After a certain amount of time passes, the screen goes black, and you start over. And it's hard to explain just how much that drained my interest in this. I've played plenty of rogue likes where restarting is a factor, but those have generally felt like that had some extent of a point. Here it comes off more as arbitrary and frustrating to me. Instead of feeling like I immediately wanted to go again and see if I could go further or do something differently, I just felt like there wasn't as much of a reason to bother.

Recap

The Mermaid Mask is a wonderful sequel to Tangle Tower, I absolutely think its worth playing, and hope that it gets the positive, successful reception that it deserves. And that when they're ready for it, the devs are willing to make another story in the franchise because I enjoy everything about it. The Mermaid Mask is available on Steam, the Nintendo Switch, and Playstation.

The Message from Deep Space is, at least in principle, a really interesting concept for a game. I do think that it struggles to maintain that long enough to complete the game (it's a lot longer than one might expect for this gameplay loop), but having played several hours of it, it's definitely soomething I'd recommend to someone likely to be in to this sort of thing. The Message from Deep Space is available on Steam.

Meccha Chameleon isn't the sort of game I'd get and play on my own, but it's a really fun game to play with friends. And in that context, and given the wide range of maps that have been created for it, it may well be worth checking out - especially if you've got a creative group to play it with. Meccha Chameleon is available on Steam.

Fugaz just doesn't click for me. It had enough to its pitch to entice me into checking it out, but just didn't have enough for me to be motivated to stick with it. Fugaz is available on Steam.