Loya makes your base a walking fortress you have to crew

You gather resources and build a moving house. You bolt cannons to it and then you fire those cannons yourself. You take it out into an open world, park it when the map narrows, and go into dungeons and caves on foot. Some of the giant bosses can only be beaten with the base standing in the fight with you. You can do all of it alone or bring friends.

The unusual part is not that the base moves — it is that the defences are not automatic. Placing a turret is normally a promise that you can stop thinking about that direction; the whole appeal of tower defence is buying your attention back. Loya sells you the turret and keeps the job. A cannon you control is a station, and a station is only covered while someone is standing at it, which quietly turns a building into a crew requirement.

Moving the base breaks the other survival-game contract, the one where home is a fixed coordinate. A static base is a promise about geography: whatever is out there, this square is safe and this square is where the chests are. Once the base walks, safety stops being a place and becomes a decision you keep making — how far in, facing which way, and whether the thing you are running from is faster than your house.

Keeping the dungeons on foot is what stops that from flattening into one long vehicle game. The fortress is the scale you fight monsters at; a person with a lamp is the scale you explore a cave at. Two scales means the game can ask two different questions, and it means the walk back to your own front door is a real distance rather than a menu.

What to build first in an open world argues that the first thing worth building is not the map but a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else gets attached to that. Loya has an unusual version of the problem, because the hundred metres is crossed inside a structure the player designed. The feel of moving through the world and the feel of the thing you built are the same tuning job, and if the fortress is a chore to steer, no amount of world will rescue it.

How Cuphead’s bosses (try to) kill you breaks a boss fight down to its working parts: every attack exists to make you move, each one carries a rule and a tell, and learning is surviving one more layer than last time. A boss built to be fought by a base has to do that at a completely different reaction speed. A fortress cannot sidestep, so the tells need a much longer lead, and the answer to an attack is usually repositioning, repairing or getting to the right gun rather than a dodge. Bosses that "can only be defeated with a base" is a strong pitch, and it only lands if those fights are legible from inside a slow object.

How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate makes the point that the best co-op does not manufacture teamwork by giving people different powers — it gives everyone the same tools and lets the shared room do the work. That is exactly the shape Loya already has. Everyone on the fortress has the same options, the walls are the room, and the interesting sentences come out of the space itself: someone is on the north cannon, someone is patching a hole, and the whole argument is about which way the house should be pointing.

Loya is made and published by Joyen, and it is not out yet — the store lists it as coming soon with the release date still to be announced, on Windows. Its genres are Action, Adventure, Indie and RPG, with Early Access among them, which usually means it plans to open its doors before it is finished.

The multiplayer is broader than most games this size attempt: single-player, online and LAN co-op, and online and LAN PvP all appear on the page. LAN in 2026 is a small tell about who is building it, and PvP alongside a base you can lose is a much sharper proposition than co-op alone.

If the idea of a home that never stays put is the hook, Railborn is the other one on this list — a base that is a train, where laying the next stretch of track is the decision the whole game hangs on. Same trade in both: you give up the safety of a fixed address and get a game where every fight happens somewhere you chose to be.