Five Free & Open Source Games to Try in 2026
There's plenty of high quality games that can be had for absolutely free!
In a time where (for better or worse) there's talk of increasing the "standard" price of triple-A games from the traditional $60 USD price point to reflect the increased amount of work and expenses that go into their development, there's still a lot of open source games with extensive amounts of content available and large modding communities to keep players tided over until their next big purchase.
Many free games start as a reverse engineering or clone of a popular, sometimes retro game. But there's plenty of completely original projects out there as well.
Endless Sky
Inspired by space exploration games like the early Elite titles, Endless Sky gives players a wide open, galactic sandbox to explore. There's plenty of things to do, from running cargo, transporting passengers or becoming a mercenary in league with multiple parties who may be interested in using your skills for bounty hunting and the like.
The graphics might be simple in Endless Sky, but the mechanics are pretty decent - there's a nice economy in play, an expansive list of star systems, jobs to take the players to each of them, as well as a decent sized list of ships to purchase and equipment and weapon upgrades for each of them.
The game also has a pretty rapid release cycle - with releases still popping out every 2-3 months, each bringing new features.
Luanti
Luanti started life as Minetest, a fairly obvious clone of Minecraft, but over the 15 years of its development, it's developed into more of a framework for developing voxel-based experiences than a mere game.
Players can download mods and games from Luanti's ContentDB. Classic Minetest itself remains a game players can download and continue to play around with, with a few other Minecraft-inspired experiences such as VoxeLibre and Mineclonia. There's also some more unique and interesting game modes available - with Subway Miner, a clone of the popular Subway Surfer mobile game, and The Library, a short adventure RPG experience with NPCs implemented as well.
There's also a large variety of texture available, ranging from very simple 8px to realism-labeled 512px ones.
Mindustry
Mindustry is actually a really unique take on the automation/tower defence/RTS genre. Players need to construct defences and capture enemy bases, but they also need to build and automate the gathering of resources, feed ammunition to their defences and output units to fight their enemies with.
There's a detailed campaign with a large tech-tree to work through, and there's also full multiplayer support including dedicated servers for both co-op and PvP action.
Mindustry has an interesting commercial model - the entire game is available for free and is fully open source - with players able to download from itch.io or build from source themselves. They can also purchase it for a reasonably nominal cost on Steam to support the developer. They don't get any additional in-game functionality, but do get automated updates and access to the Steam Workshop for managing their mods.
OpenTTD
In my opinion, OpenTTD is simply the best free, open source game out there. In its early years I had a significant amount of involvement in the OpenTTD (as well as that of its predecessor TTDPatch). It's been a long time since then, and the community has kicked on, with major release 15.0 landing on New Year's Day this year.
Originally a complete re-implementation of the Chris Sawyer classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, with players creating transport companies, building and managing their infrastructure, vehicle fleets and helping to develop the cities and towns they service.
The game is now so much more than its inspiration - with a choice of 8-bit (classic) and 32-bit modernised graphics available. And where it truly excels is the sheer scale of the customisation and modding available, with everything from the UI, terrain, vehicles and even the AI company personalities being fully customisable, with hundreds (or thousands?) of different mods available via the BaNaNaS content hosting service.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a pretty gorgeous pixel art, dungeon crawling roguelike. Based on the source code of 2012's Pixel Dungeon, it expands the content available for that game while staying reasonably faithful to the original.
Some of its detractors might say that it doesn't add anything meaningful to the original, and that the difficult of the game is more based on the procedural generation lottery than clever game mechanics or the like, but I still really enjoy my time playing this game.
Similar to Mindustry, Shattered Pixel Dungeon is available both completely free for download and also for a fee via Steam to support its creator and ongoing development.
What free and open source games are you playing? Join the conversation over on Mastodon and let us know!