September is the month of events for us at Noisy Pixel. We’re getting ready for PAX West, and Tokyo Game Show isn’t far behind. Event season means flights, hotels, meetings, demos, and more trailers than anyone really has time to process.
Of course, the release schedule doesn’t care about any of that. September 2026 still has plenty of games worth paying attention to, even while everyone’s busy looking ahead to the next wave of announcements. There’s a good mix of major releases, returning series, and smaller games trying something a little stranger, all competing for the same time, money, and backlog space.
So before event season gives us another pile of upcoming games to think about, here are our Top 10 Games to Wishlist for September 2026.
Table of Contents
The Blood of Dawnwalker
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PC
Release Date: September 3, 2026
The Blood of Dawnwalker is an open-world dark fantasy action RPG set in 14th-century Europe, where the Black Death has left enough chaos for vampires to stop hiding and start taking territory. You play as Coen, a young man caught between human and vampire, with the immediate problem of saving his family before time runs out. This lets Coen use swordplay and magic during the day, while night unlocks his more aggressive supernatural abilities.
More interesting is how literally the game seems to treat the month-long timer. Taking on quests advances time, which means chasing one problem can leave another unresolved, while your actions and inaction both shape what happens around you. Combined with different approaches to alliances and exploration, it could make the usual open-world urge to clear every marker considerably less practical. Apparently even vampires have scheduling conflicts.
Roman Sands RE:Build
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Switch, PC
Release Date: September 16, 2026
Roman Sands RE:Build has been long awaited by us, and it’s finally here. From the studio behind Paratopic, it splits its apocalyptic story across two realities: a luxury resort where demanding guests expect you to keep working despite the sun preparing to swallow the world, and a decaying zoological research facility where survival has become considerably less customer-facing. Adventure game, visual novel, puzzle game, survival sim, and atmospheric horror all get dragged into the same strange vacation.
The two scenarios seem designed to weave together for an interesting experience. At the resort, completing tasks and earning equipment pushes you toward whatever is hiding underneath its cheerful service-industry nightmare, while the facility turns maintenance and survival into a much lonelier problem involving a parasite, a familiar voice on the radio, and one notably dead cow. There are safer games to wishlist in September, but probably fewer where the apocalypse still expects you to clock in.
CONTROL Resonant
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PC
Release Date: September 24, 2026
CONTROL Resonant takes Remedy’s paranatural action into a much larger playground, shifting the sequel out of the Oldest House and into a Manhattan being rewritten by forces the FBC can no longer contain. Dylan Faden replaces Jesse as the playable lead, emerging from years of confinement to deal with the Hiss, the Mold, and a new cosmic threat while searching for his sister. The mood is still recognizably Control, but the move toward an action RPG structure and an entire warped city suggests a considerably different kind of sequel.
The bigger change may be how Dylan actually fights. His paranatural abilities are joined by the Aberrant, a shapeshifting melee weapon that can switch between forms such as a heavy two-handed hammer and faster dual blades, while progression choices determine how his powers develop. That should give Resonant a more physical rhythm than Jesse’s gunplay-heavy encounters, even before Manhattan starts rearranging the furniture.
Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic – the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2, PC
Release Date: September 10, 2026
Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic brings the 2002 bullet hell shooter The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil onto modern platforms with rebuilt visuals and a soundtrack completely rearranged by ZUN. The fundamentals remain wonderfully uncompromising: pick Reimu or Marisa, learn how their different shot patterns behave, and thread through screens so saturated with hypnotic danmaku designs that finding the safe route starts to resemble its own form of pattern recognition.
Further, this rerelease doesn’t just repackage the original. New Classic mode adds high-resolution visuals and an unlimited-lives mode for players more interested in learning the stages than tracking the continue count, while a separate Classic version recreates the 2002 game as closely as possible. That makes it both a much easier entry point into one of Touhou’s defining releases and a convenient way for veterans to discover that twenty-four years apparently did nothing to make those bullet curtains less rude.
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave
Platforms: Switch 2
Release Date: September 17, 2026
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave builds its tactical RPG around the Heroic Games, a tournament held in the prosperous Dagdan Empire where the winner is granted a single wish. The story follows four heroes with very different reasons for entering, but five years later the empire is collapsing under the revived demon god Balor. That’s where the stranger part comes in: you can travel back through the heroes’ individual stories, alter their fates, and assemble the forces needed to change a future that’s already gone badly wrong.
Between battles, the calendar appears to matter almost as much as the grid. Training, recruiting allies, pursuing quests, and traveling all compete for limited time, so preparation isn’t just about improving your army. It’s also about deciding which opportunities are worth spending days on before events move forward without you. Say bye to your friends, because the Switch 2 finally has a game worth playing.
Kernel Hearts
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2, PC
Release Date: September 17, 2026
Kernel Hearts takes the action RPG roguelike structure and gives it a particularly direct objective: four android magical girls need to climb the Tower of Babel, kill its angelic inhabitants, and eventually dethrone God before their world disappears beneath the ashes. Runs can be tackled solo or in four-player co-op, with temporary powers modifying attacks, spells, and movement as each floor pushes the group toward another guardian fight.
Death sends your Unit back to a memory backup at humanity’s last holdout, where rewards can be converted into permanent chips for the MAHOU.OS before another attempt up the tower. Those persistent upgrades sit alongside temporary magical-girl transformations and the opportunity to build relationships with characters encountered between expeditions, giving the repetition more to work with than another climb toward bigger numbers. Killing God is apparently easier when everyone remembers to update their firmware.
SILENT HILL: Townfall
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC
Release Date: September 24, 2026
SILENT HILL: Townfall takes the series to 1996 Scotland, where Simon Ordell returns to the isolated island of St. Amelia to confront a past that’s apparently been waiting for him beneath the fog. It’s a full-length, self-contained psychological horror game played entirely in first person, trading the wider perspectives of recent Silent Hill entries for something more immediate as Simon explores an abandoned town where memory, delusion, and whatever actually happened there keep bleeding together.
Survival mixes stealth, limited combat, and narrative puzzles, but the CRTV looks like Townfall’s defining tool. This pocket television can be tuned into unstable signals that reveal nearby threats, clues, and fragments of the town’s history, turning static into something you actively search rather than simply dread hearing. We’re looking forward to visiting Silent Hill once again later this month.
Orbitals
Platforms: Switch 2
Release Date: September 3, 2026
Orbitals is a two-player co-op puzzle adventure wrapped in the look and tone of classic Japanese sci-fi anime. Maki and Omura leave their failing space station in search of help after a supernatural storm cuts it off from the outside, sending them through asteroid fields, abandoned stations, and increasingly strange corners of space. The important part is that the puzzles are built around two players having different tools and responsibilities, so communication is part of the actual design.
This system carries through local split-screen and online play, with GameShare and a Friend’s Pass lowering the usual barrier of convincing someone else to buy the same co-op game. Piloting, environmental puzzles, and character-specific abilities all appear to demand some actual coordination rather than letting one player quietly solve everything while the other follows. Orbitals knows exactly who’s going to cause the problem when somebody says, “I thought you had it.”
Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2, PC
Release Date: September 17, 2026
Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter continues Falcom’s full remake of the original Sky arc, picking up immediately after Joshua disappears and leaving Estelle to cross Liberl in search of him while Ouroboros finally steps out of the shadows. This is very much the second half of an ongoing story rather than a friendly jumping-on point, but that continuity is also the appeal. The political maneuvering, character relationships, and mysteries established in 1st Chapter now have room to actually pay off.
Combat keeps the remake’s ability to shift between faster field encounters and command-based battles, while adding new Crafts, S-Crafts, and Brave Rush attacks to expand how party members work together. Clear data from 1st Chapter also carries bonuses forward, and the larger lineup of playable characters and side activities reinforces that sense of continuing one long journey rather than resetting for a sequel. If you made it through Estelle’s first chapter, September 17 is less a recommendation than an appointment.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2, PC
Release Date: September 4, 2026
Onimusha: Way of the Sword brings Capcom’s supernatural, sometimes static-camera samurai series back with an entirely new entry set in an Edo-period Kyoto consumed by Malice and overrun by Genma. This time, Miyamoto Musashi takes up the Oni Gauntlet, with his likeness modeled after legendary actor Toshiro Mifune, and sets out through a warped version of the historic capital looking for worthy opponents before his reasons for fighting become considerably more complicated.
Swordplay is a significant focus during gameplay, with Musashi cutting through Genma, absorbing their souls through the Oni Gauntlet, and facing human opponents capable of matching him in more deliberate duels. The supernatural powers keep the old Onimusha identity intact, but the heavier focus on close-range clashes makes this feel like a revival that understands the series can’t survive on recognition alone. If Capcom can make those sword fights feel as sharp as they look, Way of the Sword has the clearest shot at being September’s release we’ll still be talking about after event season moves on.
