Nordic Game Jam 2026 | Industry Showcase

It's 2026 and it's time for another Nordic Game Jam! I am an Organiser this year like I was for 2025 and this year we repeated the success of the industry showcase where games being made in Denmark are brought to Aalborg University in Copenhagen and the jammers get to both play and network with the developers, while the developer gets tons of feedback!

If you wanna see what it was like in 2025 check out my blog post from that year here. I was so busy this year and sadly didn't get to even half of the games in the showcase but I did get to some and I have written about them below.

Animal Game

This first game caught my attention immediately because of the colourful and very juicy UX. It was hard to look away from something so enticing. I sit down to play and two of the developers join in because this is a multiplayer game. I get to pick an animal character and then we are put in a house level to fight each other to the death! If you like games like the Super Smash Bros. franchise mixed with a likeness of the Happy Tree Friends cutesy yet violent deaths, then this game is likely to be for you. To sweeten the deal, after every round each player gets to pick upgrades to evolve their animal character with traits and mutations and the first to get the most kills win. Here the developers were very clever and decided that, the better you do the less powerful your upgrades are and the worse you do the better the upgrades you can choose are! So there are some great catch-up mechanics there and if you are an experienced played I could imagine trying to lose on purpose to get stronger evolutions earlier to win big later. Playing it felt really cool as every interaction had lots of feedback and the controls were really responsive.

I had a chat with the developers after getting 2nd place and they told me that they were inspired by Rounds made by Landfall but wanted to expand on the concept, as well as fighting games in general as one of the developers on the team used to be a professional fighting game player. They aim to get the game out on Steam and possibly other platforms later, if they can. Not all of the team was present today, but I did manage to get a picture of the two people I spoke to.

9UP Games

• Creators: Anton Meineche Falk and Adam Nellemann Hansen
• Platforms: Steam
• Wishlist on Steam

Infernal Logistics

Taking a look at this game I saw some fairly old-school inspired 3D graphics for the gameplay in that it was more simplistic than detailed and then 2D still images for cutscenes to explain the premise of the story. They are aiming for the feel of the "cozy horror" genre of games with inspirations from games like Oxenfree. You are a minimum wage courier who has to do logistics on an island but there is a problem; this otherwise seemingly quiet and nice little island is holding a lot of mysteries as well as a paranormal posession which gets you stuck on the island until you've done all the work that needs to be done. Talking to the two developers that were present today they told me that they wish to invoke feelings of being stuck in a job you can't leave, being made to do low wage work until you need to retire and how to deal with that kind of dread of the situations. A feeling of "I was just about to retire, but I was dragged back in and now I can't leave!".

The team behind this game won an award at Spilprisen earlier this year so it's definitely a team worth keeping an eye out for as they aim to release on Steam soon.

Ghost Frequency Games

• Creators: Enrico Aiello and Kristine Klok
• Platforms: Soon on Steam
• Get the Demo on Itch.io

Snooze Control

I spotted a leaderboard on an ipad stand between two laptops and decided to sit down and play whatever game was in front of me. No introduction, just play. I was put in the drivers seat of a truck but apparently I was a very sleep truck driver because I saw a little sleep meter that kept going down rapidly! The only thing I could do was seemingly drive the truck forward, steering it and take a nap...while driving! You basically have to make it as far as you can in the truck, which has wobbly and slow controls, while also managing to get a bit of shuteye in-between and avoid driving off road or hitting other cars. The game was made originally at Nordic Game Jam 2025 where the theme was "Eat vs Sleep". The game is very simple and likely something you might play a couple of short bursts of, although it does have that element of "needing to master" it. I didn't get very far before crashing, however looking at the leaderboard some people got really far so the potential is there!

The developers let me know that this was a learning experience for them. They wanted to see what it was like taking a game from first idea to finished game and all of the processes that come in-between like bug-testing, UX, asset creations, polish, etc. I think this is an excellent approach and I hope more people who are starting out will let themselves be inspired by this example! This is the way! Believe in the process! I wish them the best of luck.

Sleep Nerds

• Creators: Basia Motylinska, Zuzanna Gronowicz, Stefan Mir-Mackiewicz and Aiting Lee
• Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, no plans for consoles, but maybe mobile
• Find them on Linktree

Bird Breakout

Walking past this booth I saw two laptops setup with what looked like a 2D flappy little bird. But not like the game that took the world by storm years ago, no, this flappy bird was...in a dungeon?? That's right. This game is a mix between the flappy bird game and the metroidvania genre. You flap the wings using one button and if you want to turn around you gotta bump into the environment as otherwise you'll keep going in your current direction. How does someone come up with something so unheard of?

I had a chat with the creator who goes by the handle Rki3000 and they told me that they had attended a rather niche type of game jam called flappy jam. It's about what you expect; You have to make a game that's like flappy bird in some way. They tried to do the game in time but failed actually however the idea stuck around in their head and after a couple of years they had worked out the idea into the game that exists today. The creator let me know that they had been very inspired by a game called Dadish made by Thomas K. Young. The game is currently not out on Steam but it will be soon.

Rki3000

• Find them on Linktree

Escape the Baby Alarm

My last stop was at the booth for this game. The person who made the game did a talk on the journey they went on to make that game earlier in the day and had lots of people come by to play it. The game has a super captivating art style and aesthetic because everything is flat coloured without any shadows whatsoever. So depth becomes harder to convey, but Julie manages to do this very well and once you've played her game for a bit you barely notice it. The artstyle also feel very simple with thick black lines and bright single colours for each shape but it still manages to convey complex and beautiful imagery. The game itself is very reminiscent of a visual novel with a couple of context appropriate minigames spewn about. You are a first time mother who is caring for her child but you can't seem to escape the baby alarm that keeps going off even when the baby is asleep. You find yourself in a weird almost psycadhelic fever dream that glides in and out of reality as you question what's real and what's a waking dream, you get to think about your identity as a parent and as an individual and all of the moments big and small that crop up as you experience this thing that nothing can quite prepare you for.

Talking with the developer she told me that the game is a very personal thing for. It kind of illustrates some of her own thoughts and experiences as she became a mother and how she had to kind of find herself again after that experience. Because once you have a child you can never really go back to how things were before you had a child. You have to reinvent yourself, learn to live with this new life you brought into the world and all of the chores, experiences, questions and so on that entails. Definitely worth checking out.

Julie Nordmann Bjørnskov

• Platforms: Steam, PlayDate
• Get the game on Steam

Many more....

This was just a small sample of all the games I could make it to this year. There was at least another 10 I didn't get to and I wish that I could have! Some of the games have been featured before in my Dev, Test, Repeat blog posts and I'd recommend you check those out too to see more.

Otherwise...come to the jam maybe? It's much better in person, I promise ;-)