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Steam's indie week is wonderfully strange: armed fishing, resurrected Touhou and a wooden frog
Steam's most interesting September games are not all competing for the same audience. One asks players to shoot fish after catching them. Another resurrects a 2002 bullet hell. The next few days add eight-player pixel-art adventuring, narrative tidying, wooden dioramas, actual dressmaking and, eventually, a graveyard powered by zombies. Some of these games already have numbers behind them. The rest are about to find out whether their hooks work.
By Kader 
How to Fish is already the breakout
How to Fish launched on August 20 with a premise that sounds almost deliberately engineered for chaotic multiplayer clips.
Catch fish, sell them, upgrade your gear, clear bosses and move to another island. Then add guns, physical objects and trick shots to everything that happens between those steps.
The result has become a substantial Steam success.
The store currently shows more than 50,000 user reviews with roughly 94% positive feedback. Dazed Games also expanded multiplayer from four to eight-player lobbies in patch 1.0.4, released only one day after launch.
Recent patches have focused on stability, private sessions, Steam Cloud support and other post-launch work. The developer has now indicated that its attention is beginning to move toward additional content.
That is a useful problem for a small studio to have: the joke landed, and now a very large audience wants more of it.
Touhou's 2002 classic has returned to a 98% positive reception
Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic represents the opposite kind of indie story.
The original game did not need to become a modern hit to prove its influence. The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil dates back to 2002 and helped establish the Windows era of Touhou Project.
The new edition launched on September 9 and currently holds a 98% positive rating among its English-language Steam reviews.
Its modernization is deliberately conservative. Artwork has been rebuilt for contemporary displays and ZUN has rearranged the complete soundtrack, while the fundamental vertical bullet-hell design remains recognizable.
A separate Classic edition is bundled alongside it for players who want something closer to the original release.
Unlike most of the games further down this list, Touhou does not require speculation about its initial reception. Players have already answered that part.
Dimraeth has an intimidating number of moving parts
Dimraeth is scheduled to enter Early Access on September 14, and Mudtek appears to have responded to every design meeting by adding another system.
There are eight races and six classes, an open pixel-art world, Souls-lite combat, crafting, settlement development, NPC relationships and online drop-in/drop-out co-op supporting up to eight players.
Personal character progression can travel between hosted worlds while story progress and constructed settlements remain attached to the host.
The feature list is impressive. Early Access will determine whether the systems actually strengthen one another rather than merely occupying the same game.
Neat! turns clutter into character writing
Also scheduled for September 14, Neat! is considerably quieter.
Korova Games gives Molly eight spaces to organize, but each room belongs to a different client and uses ordinary possessions to reveal something about the person living there.
A family kitchen, a VTuber's room, a neighborhood library and a Japanese konbini are among the environments.
There is no need to race through them. The organizing mechanics function as a way of reading the space rather than beating a timer.
Woodo is a coloring book built out of wooden models
Woodo follows on September 16.
Tiny Monks Tales describes it as something close to a tactile 3D coloring book. Players rotate handcrafted wooden dioramas, identify missing pieces and place them back into each scene.
As the model comes together, color returns and small animations bring it to life. The connected scenes follow Foxy and Ben the frog through a nostalgic summer story.
It is the smallest-feeling idea in this group, and that is very much the point.
Dressmaker has already built a substantial wishlist audience
Dressmaker is due September 21 and may be the strongest upcoming niche bet.
Cozy Lives is making the physical process of dressmaking the game itself. Players select fabric, arrange patterns, cut pieces, sew them together and decorate the finished clothing.
The developer announced more than 200,000 wishlists in late July.
Wishlists do not guarantee successful conversion, but that is a notable audience for a simulation game focused this tightly on garment construction.
Happy Wheels finally arrives on Steam
September 21 also brings a game that hardly needs an introduction to anyone who spent enough time on browser games.
Happy Wheels is finally receiving an official Steam release from Jim Bonacci and Fancy Force.
The store page promises its full level editor and access to more than five million community-created levels, now in an ad-free package.
It feels less like a brand-new launch than a piece of browser-game history finally acquiring a permanent Steam address.
Graveyard Keeper 2 closes out the run on September 22
Then comes the largest established indie name in this particular group.
Graveyard Keeper 2 launches September 22 from Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild. The sequel expands its macabre management loop beyond cemetery maintenance into town restoration, larger production chains, automation and battles involving an undead army.
The original already gives this sequel a recognizable audience, which changes the question surrounding launch.
Graveyard Keeper 2 does not need to explain why anyone should care about a medieval cemetery simulator anymore. It needs to prove that making the whole machine larger also makes it better.
Not every game on this list has proved itself yet
The important distinction is timing.
- How to Fish and Touhou already have substantial Steam review data - Dimraeth and Neat! are scheduled around September 14 and are only beginning their launch cycle - Woodo, Dressmaker, Happy Wheels and Graveyard Keeper 2 remain upcoming as of September 14
That makes this less of a definitive ranking than a snapshot of an unusually varied few weeks.
One breakout has already happened. One 24-year-old game has returned to excellent reviews.
The next surprises may involve sewing patterns, an eight-player RPG, meticulously organized shelves or a small wooden frog.
Steam has worse problems than having too many strange games worth watching.