The Best Games of PAX East 2026

Another year in the books for my annual tradition of flying up to Boston for a week and previewing what the games industry has to offer in the coming future. After playing dozens of game demos and seeing dozens of friends, I’d like to discuss my highlights of 2026’s annual PAX East conference. 

Quality Time

Though I am technically a video game journalist in the sense that I write articles and record podcasts about video games, the anchor that keeps me returning to PAX each spring is the chance to see my friends from around the world. Whether that’s my Canadian crew primarily consisting of my Left Behind Game Club co-hosts or the cluster of peripheral podcast crews, friends from Crossplay Conversations, Tales From the Backlog, and the Fun and Games podcast, just to name a few, I always find that there’s never enough time to see everyone and spend the amount of time I want with them. Balancing game demos, live panels, and so forth is far more difficult the larger our groups have grown, but we still try our hardest every year to spend quality time with each other and that means the world to me. 

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t gush about the fact that Epilogue had our first official Boston meetup around PAX this year! While I was booked up at the conference and didn’t have a ton of free time to venture out from the convention center with everyone else, I was lucky enough to be invited to the EG bowling night early on in the week. And while I didn’t necessarily prove my bowling skills on the lane itself, I was happy to see friends I’ve been speaking with for years, meet new ones, and overall celebrate the fact that we have such a robust and lively community. I’m incredibly envious of my friends who were able to participate in more events from the meetup, like visiting Salem and playing pool at the AirBNB. My hope is that our community will make this a tradition; I’ll keep my schedule clear next year, if so. 

Peripheral-Based Games

Now onto the games. I’ll be honest, when I entered the show floor this year, PAX East felt sort of empty – and not in terms of attendance. Since I was planning to spend three full days on the show floor, which translates to about 25 hours with hands-on impressions for game demos, my approach this year was to wander the show floor while I made notes of games I was interested in, passing out my business card to schedule appointments if I hadn’t already. 

I left the show floor after day one feeling a little deflated. There are usually a few video games that stand out on the show floor, whether Elden Ring: Nightreign’s massive dome last year or otherwise. But in 2026, I struggled to pick more than ten games to play during my time on the show floor that first day. I tried out DoubleFine’s Kiln with friends during the media hour, and dabbled with a few indies like Replaced, Heart Links, and Fractured Blooms, all of which I enjoyed. But the proper highlight of my day involved video games that are developed with peripheral equipment in mind. That is, games like Guitar Hero where you have an object other than a traditional controller to interact with the game.

At this year’s PAX, I noticed a number of games that were peripheral-first in their design. Games like Alpine Trainer caught my attention immediately, as I watched people try their best to navigate holding a controller while physically moving a connected snowboard beneath their feet. I tried my hand at Alpine Trainer, thinking of my time on the slopes, or at least on SSX Tricky’s, and I was aghast at how terribly I performed. I kept crashing out, going out of bounds, to the point where one of the developers of the snowboard controller got impatient with me and put his foot on the snowboard to help me along. Alpine Trainer is not a game that’s geared towards mainstream release, it was more of a tech demo for the snowboard controller itself, according to the developer I spoke with. But even though I performed abysmally on it, I could see the appeal if I had a few hundred extra square feet of living room space to keep a giant snowboard set up.

There was also a booth set up on the show floor demonstrating Infinakore’s new customizable guitar controller, inspired by classic games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Infinakore’s controller is the first fully customizable guitar controller that actually harbors all of its electronic components in the neck. And though it is in an official collaboration with Fender, offering a Telecaster-inspired model, the intent of the developers behind this hardware is for people to go wild with 3D printers and build replicas of existing models on the “real” guitar market. Compellingly, this controller features some neat innovations for accessibility, and will fully release 3D printing designs to exchange, for instance, the guitar pick – adding a physical pick, rounding out the picking device, and so forth. Quite literally, this guitar exists to give people with disabilities additional options to give modern miracles like Clone Hero a chance for the first time. 

I played a few songs on Infinakore’s controller, and while my strumming partner wanted to play one-star songs like Paramore (yuck), I convinced them to give a 5-star devil-emoji’d song a go before I passed the guitar to the next person in line. With Guitar Hero main frets and Rock Band tapping frets, there is the availability to swap switches as you would on a keyboard, and they’ve even added four buttons to simplify tapping in the middle of those two sets of frets. For enthusiasts like myself, Infinakore is truly onto something.

Though there were several other peripheral-heavy games, the other one I must mention is Nex Playground’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I initially mistook as the forthcoming fighting game title. Nex Playground is marketing a webcam device of sorts, which tracks your body movements in unique, precise ways. I’m not sure that the Avatar game is even going to be fleshed out into a full game for the market, but in the demo, I had to perform full-body gestures to fight Toph in an earthbending arena. While I was the only person to lose against her, at least amidst the two others in line before me, I still received a pity poster. Nex Playground’s tech is truly impressive, it’s simply a question of what software is going to be released and supported on that device. If there’s truly a library of motion-based games like the Avatar demo, then I think this could be really cool. As of now, however, it sort of feels like a glorified step backwards to the PlayStation Eye Toy. 

Honorable Mentions

There were, of course, some games I played that were interesting to me but didn’t quite cross the threshold into instant-wishlist territory. And in regards to that, I’m thinking of games like The Secret of Crystal Mountain, a PAX-Rising indie that felt incredibly akin to a Zelda title with some Tunic vibes thrown in for good measure. It was a brilliant demo, polished, with smooth mechanics, and audiovisual excellence, but there have been so many Zelda-likes at this point, it’s hard to say that Crystal Mountain stood out in the way that my other favorites did.

There was also Project Lexa, a translate-em-up that evokes titles like Heaven’s Vault and Chants of Senaar, but curiously the developer resisted these comparisons. Rather, they wanted to convey comparisons to Outer Wilds, which, to paraphrase my friend Dave when evoking this comparison, “Let’s not get crazy here.” The game was…fine? The developer himself was quite sweet, so it’s hard to say anything critical without feeling rude, but I left my roughly 25 minute demo feeling uninspired. There’s some cool art here, some interesting puzzle design, and the demo ends in just the right place to pique your interest, but did I wishlist it? No comment.

Aniimo had one of the bigger booths at PAX this year, taking up a sizable chunk of the show floor and flooding their merch to people who played it. I was lucky enough to be shepherded into a private room for press where I was given a hands-on demo with this creature-catching game. For me, Aniimo feels like a mashup of Honkai Starrail, the Pokemon series, and Breath of the Wild. And though my impressions with Aniimo were largely positive, when I brought it up to any one of my friends at the event, their immediate response was, “Isn’t that the AI game?” And I hope not, for obvious reasons. Notoriously, I have a bad filter detection for AI, but after spending five minutes of my demo customizing my protagonist’s appearance, it felt real enough to me – but who knows. Either way, the game is gorgeous, and I’ll still be keeping an eye on it as it approaches release, because there is an unfulfilled child inside of me who still desires a graphically realistic Pokemon-like.

The Best Games of PAX

Alright, the reason why we’re here: my favorite games of the show. While some runner-up contenders include the fantastic Ghost Eater and Heart Links: A Puzzle Called Love – which you can hear me speak about more on my podcast – my real game of the show comes down to two equally compelling titles: Canvas City and Crystalmancers. 

Canvas City is a tactics game that, according to XCOM fans, is very inspired by that series. But the aesthetic of Canvas City is very anime-inspired, evoking a fashion sense and grungy aesthetic of Jet Set Radio. This combination of turn-based tactical combat, mixed with streetpunks on roller blades, simply works for me – all the way down. It pulled out memories of playing Lord of the Rings: Tactics on the GameBoy as a kid, while also feeling fresh and new with the countercultural energy the game leans into.

I chatted up the exhibitors at the panel while playing, both before and after my demo, and they were incredibly enthusiastic and generous with their time. What ought to have been a 30-minute demo, with a tutorial, main level, and boss battle, took me the better part of an hour, as I was so immediately invested in the mechanics and strategy involved. I might have spent a half hour on the boss battle alone, just methodically working my healing character throughout groups of my allied characters as I tried to fend off the inevitable. Though I almost never do this, I’m almost certainly going to replay the demo when it drops on Steam soon. I want to get that final encounter right, because it all went downhill at once and I need revenge. 

Crystalmancers was a game that I must have walked past several times, not catching my attention. But at dinner one evening, a few of my friends mentioned it was one of their favorite games of the show this year, so with that strong of word-of-mouth recommendation, I had to give it a go. The lead developer, Jack, offered me a spot at the booth to try it out, and coached me through quite a bit of the gameplay. There’s a tendency some people who run booths have to either be nonchalant and leave you completely alone or, on the other hand, be completely overbearing and basically backseat-game you while talking your ear off. Jack’s commentary was the rare perfect medium where he let me figure out the game while pointing out key mechanics that I wouldn’t have really known how to apply or take full advantage of. 

In terms of design, Crystalmancers is sort of a hybrid of Tetris and Balatro, if you can imagine it. You’re dealing with a Tetris-inspired grid of blocks that you have to place. But instead of a time limit, you’re engaging with an enemy in combat. By clearing rows of blocks, you inflict damage on the enemy. It sounds simple, but Crystalmancers promises the depth of roguelikes in the way it arranges dungeons and enemy encounters, not to mention block customization and different characters which all have their own ultimate attacks. Unlike Canvas City, I did manage to overthrow the dragon final boss of the demo, and I’m now desperate for more. I spoke with Jack for a solid half-hour after my demo, and I learned that this game will feature about 30 bosses, seven characters, and will be ported to all possible touchscreens (Steam Deck, Switch, mobile, etc.) once it hits Early Access around this time next year.

Final Thoughts

And that’s basically a wrap on my PAX for 2026. I spent far too much money on food, drinks, and video game merchandise – if anyone knows a way to get a meal for less than $20 in Boston, let a girl know – but at the end of the day, it’s worth it. And hey, I luckily avoided the hellish TSA lines plaguing America right now, so my verdict on this year’s PAX is a solid thumbs-up. I did the thing I always do, which is play interesting games, make new friends, visit with old ones, and cherish the opportunity I have as a writer about video games to spend time with people in this same field who, through their own work, inspire me to be better. 

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