<Co-project: Inven X Gyeonggi Content Agency>
The 21st Gyeonggi Game Audition in 2026 will hold its final audition on October 15. In this audition, 10 games in the General Division and 3 games in the Student Division across various genres will compete as finalists, with the final rankings determined through a comprehensive evaluation including an on-site assessment. The final audition will take place on October 15 from 10:00 to 14:00 at the International Conference Hall of the Pangyo Gyeonggi Center for Creative Economy & Innovation.
The 13 games participating in the final audition showcase gameplay across a wide range of genres, including simulation, RPG, puzzle, shooter, adventure, and visual novel. While the majority of games are for PC, players can also check out select console and mobile titles.
Now in its 21st iteration, the Gyeonggi Game Audition serves as a major gateway for the indie game industry, having birthed numerous acclaimed indie games such as SANABI, Shape of Dreams, and Ratopia. Notably, this year's audition introduced a new Student Division, expanding participation to high school and college students. As outstanding games participate in every event, it will be exciting to see which games will take first place in the General and Student Divisions among this year's finalists.
General Division 10 New Titles Notable for High Polish
Soulers is a top-down twin-stick bullet-hell shooter where players slow down time to break through bullet hells. Utilizing 'Time Acceleration' to slow down surrounding time, players navigate combat by finding gaps to dodge incoming bullet waves or counter-attacking incoming onslaughts.
Freely combining weapons, companions, and traits to build a customized party is another key pillar of the game. Players swap configurations depending on the mission and earn completion rewards such as new weapons, companions, traits, and resources needed for growth. Collected resources are used to power up companions.
The game progresses sequentially through various missions alongside its main story. A powerful boss awaits at the end of each mission, and clearing it unlocks Arena Mode, where players can challenge even tougher boss fights. In the Arena, players can enjoy higher-difficulty battles against bosses that employ new attack patterns.
True to its title, Where's My Red Ball? is a cozy puzzle game about finding a red ball for a crying cat. The objective is to observe the surroundings, interact with various objects to uncover clues, and hand over the exact red ball the cat desires.
The puzzles avoid repeating a single gimmick, offering different solutions for every stage. Players will encounter a wide variety of approaches—such as finding a ball hidden behind objects, turning a white ball red, or opening locked areas to retrieve a ball—spanning actions like searching, crafting, retrieving, and trading. Physics-based interactions, including moving, throwing, and dropping objects, are also utilized.
Diary fragments earned by solving puzzles reveal the story surrounding the cat and the red ball. As players progress, the mystery of 'why it had to be a red ball' gradually unfolds. Collecting diary entries is entirely optional, allowing players to enjoy the game at their own pace—whether following the narrative or focusing purely on the puzzles.
Mystical Demon Farm is a vibrant farming game that blends farming simulation, monster collection, and dungeon crawling. Featuring cute and charming graphics, players hatch and collect Demons while exploring dungeons and fields to gather Essences and materials to expand their farm.
Demons can be hatched by acquiring 'Essence' through dungeon runs and farming to craft and activate Cores. Inside dungeons, utility magic transforms into powerful attack magic, allowing players to destroy enemies and obstacles more easily as they upgrade their skills. Summoned Demons also join the player in attacking nearby enemies and objects.
Materials obtained from dungeons and fields are used to expand the farm. Increasing the farm's level through item deliveries, Demon collecting, and farm expansions unlocks new recipes, Demons, and regions in sequence. Meeting NPCs and gathering ancient records also allows players to uncover the truth behind mana anomalies, the Great War, and the three archmages of the past.
Set in Elysia, a city where dungeons have become a part of everyday life, Rule the Dungeon is an urban fantasy adventure RPG featuring a story filled with both wit and tension. Players become a rookie investigator at the Dungeon Management Bureau, receiving civil complaints and hiring Hunters from agencies to investigate dungeons. How problems are resolved rests entirely on the investigator's choices.
Defeated otherworldly creatures with powerful skills is not always the answer. Players can find entirely different solutions by talking to targets or investigating nearby objects. Dialogue and plot developments shift based on who players talk to first and what actions they take, while detective-style deduction puzzles also feature, allowing players to organize collected clues on an investigation board to reconstruct events.
Combat combines a front-view perspective with a grid system. Positional tactics are crucial, such as pushing enemies to different tiles or baiting them into pre-set traps, while enemy Special Skills must be countered via Quick Time Events (QTEs). The game also features a 'Logos' system that allows players to combine words discovered during investigations to grant new skills to Hunters.
Animal Frontiers is a line battle RPG combining familiar animal characters with a dark fantasy setting. At its core is head-to-head frontline combat where friendly and enemy forces clash and push back and forth. Players construct units by combining six classes—Knight, Warrior, Rogue, Archer, Mage, and Priest—and can alter formations and target priorities mid-battle.
In hexa-grid exploration, players must expand their territory within a set number of turns to defeat the final boss. Various events take place on the grid, including combat, gathering, healing, resurrection, treasure acquisition, and PvP, with capturing cells providing roguelike-style team buffs. Conversely, enemy 'Hatred Buffs' also stack over time, escalating difficulty as exploration continues.
Characters grow through six development elements: level, star rank, grade, skills, equipment, and relics. The town offers features such as hero recruitment, training, cooking, and equipment crafting, alongside dedicated PvP and raid content. Relic Conquests, where players compete on a single grid map, and large-scale Guild Battles are also available.
Cold Cases is a mystery visual novel where players become an investigator in the Archival Department managing historical criminal case records to restore eight cases burnt in a fire. Case files found at the scene of the fire are charred black in both text and photo content, requiring players to utilize archival equipment and digital forensics to resurrect lost records.
After deducing keywords needed from the case records, typing them directly restores text fragments containing those terms. As documents are brought back, burnt photos are partially revealed, allowing players to zoom in and examine details for closer evidence. Players must deduce the truth behind each case based on these restored materials to solve the mystery.
The game's standout feature is conveying a genuine feeling of deduction through manual typing. Players can organize essential information using in-game notepad and drawing tools, linking scattered clues together as they type. Rather than simply picking preset options, the focus is placed on players conjuring up words themselves to revive case files.
In the Van is a survival simulation game about surviving alongside a mobile base—a van—in a world hit by a sudden apocalypse. Players search abandoned locations to secure food, fuel, and crafting materials, creating necessary equipment while exploring the dangerous outside world.
The van acts as both transportation and a sanctuary for survival. Players can store supplies, decorate the interior, and apply upgrades to build a personalized living space. Establishing a tailored survival routine through repeated exploration, crafting, cooking, and harvesting is a core aspect of gameplay.
Digital devices abandoned throughout the world serve as clues to uncover the truth of the apocalypse. Investigating traces left behind by the deceased and discovering hidden locations slowly reveals what happened to the world. The gameplay structure bridges high-risk outdoor survival with cozy moments back inside the van.
NAMMO is a 2D Soulslike boss rush game set in a dark fantasy realm inspired by the ancient Korean kingdom of Silla. It features visually striking bosses, including a wise ruler turned monster, a warrior consumed by madness, and spirits that linger even after death. Players assume the role of Nammo, who lost his eyes to the trusted Junjeong and awakened the 'Spiritual Eye'—an ability to perceive the realm of souls—to pursue the truth.
Precision parrying and counter-attacking are key to combat. Activating the Spiritual Eye exposes hidden boss weak points and secret passages that are otherwise invisible. Destroying weak points can disable dangerous attack patterns tied to specific parts of a boss's body.
The story and combat shift according to characters' true forms revealed by the Spiritual Eye. Trusted allies may turn into enemies, while suspected foes might become companions. Defeated formidable enemies allows players to absorb their souls to gain new powers, which can be combined to customize individual combat styles.
The Irony is a horror action platformer where players play as an inspector from a private military company investigating Underdog Corporation, a research facility ruined by illegal human experimentation. While battling test subjects equipped with powerful prosthetic limbs, the protagonist loses parts of their body. To survive, players attach enemy cybernetics to themselves, growing stronger while gradually resembling the test subjects.
Combat revolves around impactful sensory feedback. Players utilize a weapon that transforms between a precision firearm and a heavy melee baton, with melee combat featuring parries to deflect enemy attacks for counter-strikes. The premise—that adopting prosthetics grants power at the cost of losing humanity—weaves directly into combat, character progression, and the overarching story.
The game is presented in 2.5D visuals combining 3D elements and pixel art. Gritty graphics paired with lighting and background direction craft a grotesque sci-fi horror atmosphere as players explore the research facility laterally to unravel the events that transpired within.
Project Revenant is a side-scrolling shooter inspired by the John Wick films. Attacks connect only when enemies are precisely targeted with the cursor, and because the player has only 1 HP, a single hit is fatal—making it essential to analyze enemy placement and attack patterns to prioritize targets.
Beyond direct aiming, players can interact with environmental objects to manage encounters. Combat offers tactical freedom: throwing flashbangs to stun enemies, dropping chandeliers onto foes overhead, or detonating gas canisters to wipe out multiple targets at once. Each stage introduces fresh mechanics, and players can equip skills suited to their preferred playstyle.
Boss stages showcase RPG-inspired bosses with unique mechanics, such as cyborg ninjas, giant robots, and bounty hunters. Beyond combat, cinematic cutscenes and immersive spatial audio further heighten immersion.
Student Division 3 New Titles Overflowing with Brilliant Ideas
IGNOTUS is an action RPG blending roguelike, deckbuilding, and real-time action mechanics. It incorporates turn-based elements into real-time combat via a tile-based grid system. Inspired by Jujutsu Kaisen, the game's core feature requires players to expand a tile-based 'Domain' before executing skills.
When a Domain is expanded, time freezes, allowing players to place skills on the tile area in a turn-based manner before activating them. Once skills are executed, real-time action resumes. Players alternate between real-time action and turn-based planning, repeatedly opening Domains to deploy skills during battle.
Skills used inside a Domain are selected through custom deck construction. Players can upgrade duplicate skills or purchase new ones. Monsters can also expand Domains, which similarly pauses time, and boss battles feature unique mechanics.
UpBRELLA is a knowledge-based puzzle platformer adventure following a witch who sets out to save the world armed with only an umbrella. The game centers on using a single tool in versatile ways—such as opening the umbrella to glide or placing it on the ground as a stepping platform. Interacting with the environment by riding updrafts or reflecting lasers forms part of the puzzle design, which avoids repetitive mechanics in favor of clear, intuitive layouts.
Instead of obtaining separate items or skills, progression comes from acquiring new mechanics to unlock fresh areas of exploration. Grasping new principles through puzzle-solving opens up previously impassable routes and changes how players perceive familiar terrain and mechanisms. In this way, player knowledge directly translates into character progression.
The story touches on universal, relatable themes: the friendship between Sera and Tani, and saving the world. Visually, charming pixel art creates a warm backdrop that makes the game easily accessible to everyone.
War In The Dark is a 1-bit turn-based wiretapping simulation game set in a 1950s battlefield. Players command friendly forces by intercepting enemy Morse code signals. Intercepted transmissions are converted into text and decoded to uncover the movements of unseen enemy forces.
When wiretapping begins, a decoder translates transmitted Morse code into text character by character for players to transcribe. Once interpreted, the gathered intelligence is used to issue movement or attack commands to units via Morse code orders. Decoded information also feeds into preparations for subsequent wiretapping.
Friendly units consist of Scouts, Infantry, Snipers, and Medics, each featuring unique movement ranges and combat styles that demand tactical deployment based on the situation. Campaigns cover the Western Front and the Northern Front. The narrative unfolds as a series of flashbacks, with Remarque, a retired commander hospitalized in a medical facility, recounting his military service to his grandson Anderson.
