The best Nintendo Switch 2 games of 2026

Developer Lovely Hellplace’s debut project, Dread Delusion, is one of my favorite indie games of the past few years. This open-world action RPG may have been first released in 2024, but it’s a spiritual successor to ancient fantasy adventures, borrowing heavily from the alien world and narrative freedom of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.

If in-depth combat is what you’re looking for, this may not be the game for you. But if you want to explore questlines with multiple solutions (and there’s no right answer), Dread Delusion might solve that problem. In classic RPG style, some quest outcomes may only be possible if your character specializes in brute force, peaceful settlement, or cunning subterfuge. Each character archetype is fun to play to its full potential, making Dread Delusion highly replayable.

Where Dread Delusion really shines is the world building – this is a game where you’ll be searching for every NPC to exhaust their dialogue options, reading every book and exploring every secret just to discover more about the Oneiric Islands. We’re living in a renaissance of dark fantasy games, and Dread Delusion’s depiction of a Crusader church forcing an inquisition on the floating island homeland of the indigenous people is a fascinating blend of dark fantasy and real-world history.

There are no hands in this game, so it’s up to you where you go first, what you discover and who you ally with in the conflict between the Crusaders and the ancient god-worshippers. Dread Delusion is as good as some of Bethesda’s or Obsidian’s best work, and is highly praised by fans of open-world RPGs. And with PlayStation-inspired graphics, this is a perfect fit for the Switch 2 hybrid console.

release date: May 14, 2024

Type: An open-world Morrowind-inspired RPG

Developer: Beautiful hell place