A Combat-Free Afterlife From a Love, Death + Robots Veteran: Abelina, Brushland, and Cresata Steal the MIX Fall Showcase 2026
The MIX Fall Game Showcase 2026 on October 17 delivered a standout lineup of inventive independent projects, right alongside Coral Island's official Nintendo Switch 2 and Update 1.4 reveal. Three distinct titles stood out during the presentation for their visual identity and mechanical ambition: Abelina, Brushland, and Cresata.
From exploring a bioluminescent afterlife without a single weapon to painting a living fairytale kingdom with a brush and swinging through rotating 2.5D arenas, these three games highlight the creative variety heading to PC and consoles through 2027. Here is a closer look at the trailers, gameplay systems, and demo windows confirmed by their developers.
Abelina: A Surreal Combat-Free Afterlife Crafted by a Love, Death + Robots Veteran
Developed solo by Gabe Askew, a veteran CG animation director formerly with Blur Studio and Hornet (Netflix's Love, Death + Robots), and published by Indieformer, Abelina on Steam deliberately abandons traditional action tropes. Players step into the shoes of Vasily, who passed away some time ago and now tries to find peace in a quiet afterlife settlement where souls from overlapping generations tend gardens and carve bird masks to avoid thinking about where they truly are.
When a sudden tragedy shatters that fragile calm, Vasily ventures out into the untamed frontier for reasons he keeps hidden, while the companions he left behind follow his trail and catch up to his campfire each night. The entire journey is built around one defining design rule: there is zero combat in Abelina.
Nothing you encounter in the wilderness can be fought, placing the entire focus on climbing, jumping, and route-finding across hand-crafted biomes. Fluorescent flora lights the darkness through hanging lantern-plants and glowing coral pools inhabited by pale apes known as komin, airplane-sized moths with star-covered wings, phosphorescent goats, and giant beetles you can ride up steep hills.
Backed by an original score from Webby Award-winning film composer Ryan Holladay (Weapons), the project joins a strong wave of autumn PC trials following the upcoming Steam demo for action RPG Second Stone. Abelina will launch its free public Steam demo in November 2026, ahead of a full PC release scheduled for Q1 2027.
Brushland: Painting Living Kingdoms From the Creator of Soldat and King Arthur's Gold
Shifting to a brighter palette, Brushland is the newest sandbox creation from Michał Marcinkowski and his studio Transhuman Design, the developer behind cult indie hits Soldat and King Arthur's Gold. Drawing inspiration from Neuschwanstein Castle as well as Oskar Stålberg's Townscaper and Anastasia Opara's Tiny Glade, this fairytale kingdom-builder removes traditional building menus and prefab catalogs altogether.
Instead, players paint directly onto the terrain with a brush: laying down rock raises snow-capped mountains that feed rivers and waterfalls, while every tile checks its neighbors to decide what it should become. Ringing a lonely cottage with a road automatically transforms it into a church with a belfry, surrounding a house with fields turns it into a spinning windmill, and expanding a prosperous village eventually causes a castle with pointed towers to rise on its own.
Designed without timers, resource penalties, or fail states, the simulation brings villagers ashore by boat with their suitcases to stroll the roads, ask for bridges, or open mines. Even if you accidentally paint a lake directly underneath a crowd of townsfolk, they simply cartwheel into the water and swim off to find a new home.
Once a kingdom is complete, players can test 42 distinct color palettes and fold the entire map into a compact text code that can be shared with friends like a digital postcard. Built for PC (Windows, Mac, Linux) and Steam Deck, Brushland is slated for a playable demo in Q1 2027 followed by a full release in Q2 2027.
Cresata: Crescent Claw Grappling, 2.5D Rotating Stages, and Voice Work by Ben Starr
For players craving high-speed precision and dark fantasy vengeance, developer Shatter Flask Games and publisher Rocket Panda Games showcased Cresata, a 2.5D side-scrolling action platformer with retro roots. You control Phaedon of Arsica, a warrior betrayed and left for dead during a rebellion, who rises as a revenant to stop Prime Reclaimer Leo Vennghast from seizing an otherworldly power on the island of New Arsica.
Every boss in the campaign is a former ally Phaedon once trusted, and combat revolves around the Crescent Claw, a versatile chain weapon and traversal grappler. Players use it to deflect attacks, chain together Cresata Arts combos, and tether or Slingstrike across levels that blend 2D pixel-art sprites with dynamically rotating 3D environments.
Alongside online Ghost Races that let speedrunners compete against leaderboard phantoms, Cresata boasts a star-studded English voice cast featuring Ben Starr and Aleks Le (Solo Leveling). The game is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
My Perspective: When 3D Animation and Procedural Rules Reinvent Exploration
What resonates most with me in this autumn batch from The MIX Showcase is how seasoned creators are using their technical craft to strip away conventional UI clutter. Watching a cinematic director like Gabe Askew remove combat entirely in Abelina draws your eyes to Vasily's posture, the sway of glowing lantern-plants, and the quiet storytelling that emerges simply from climbing through the dark alongside fellow travelers.
In the same spirit, Michał Marcinkowski's neighborhood-aware tile logic in Brushland proves that procedural adaptation does not need complex spreadsheets to feel alive, especially when an entire kingdom can be compressed into a shareable text string. We will be able to step into Abelina's fluorescent afterlife firsthand when its Steam demo goes live in November 2026.
Based on the outskirts of New York City, Chaya 'Chayane' spent five years studying software engineering in Montreal before returning to her home state. A Full-Stack developer and Deep Learning AI architecture researcher, she explores neural networks and algorithmic optimization while engineering data pipelines for Retrocharting and Gamescharting alongside Grimtag. A gamer for over 20 years and an avid collector of Nintendo history and The Legend of Zelda, she explored World of Warcraft's Azeroth before bringing her deep technical background to video game analysis.
