My new indie darling is this crafting game stuffed with hand-sculpted creatures made by a husband and wife dev team

Every cozy gamer's got one: that one little indie game that you fall in love with at first sight and immediately decide to not shut up about because you believe not nearly enough people have discovered it yet. I found my new darling in this week's Steam Next Fest: an adorable sandbox crafting game full of hand-sculpted creatures called OddFauna: Secret of the Terrabeast.

In OddFauna, I am a little critter called an Astor who lives on top of a giant goofy whale with legs thing called a Terrabeast. I chop trees to craft building pieces so I can snap together a tiny little cottage on my Terrabeast's back, plant a tiny vegetable garden on his rump, and befriend little Fauna critters for my community so I can expand my silly big beastie guy.

The demo for OddFauna that you can play right now during Next Fest is pretty short. It's five in-game days that took me about 90 minutes to complete. I was locked to staying in a single one of the biomes and had just a bit of time to try snapping together my first obligatory crafting game wood box house.

I did get to plant a little crop of parsnip-looking "sweetroot" and befriend three wild Fauna by offering them flowers and foods I had foraged. Some Fauna have abilities like digging, others I can ride as a mount. The rest of the time I spent harvesting leaves and wood to craft new tools and experimenting with using my shovel to terraform the ground.

I'm always a sucker for a crafting game with a building system but what drew me to OddFauna initially were its hand-crafted characters. All of the creatures, building pieces, tools, and plants are sculpted with clay and then painted by one half (Emma SanCartier) of its husband and wife development team and then 3D-scanned to be animated by the other (Cliff Mitchell).

Every little guy in the game is hand-sculpted✨#indiegame #oddfaunagame #cutecreature #polymerclay

— @oddfauna.bsky.social (@oddfauna.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-02-25T18:02:11.293Z

I have a real fondness for games that hand-create assets in traditional art mediums before digitizing them and OddFauna nails that trick of importing sculpted characters and having them still feel great to control within a game.

OddFauna's demo is pretty short and it does lack a bit in the way of actually explaining some of its systems like building, crafting, and planting. It could do a bit more to give me direction on what my overarching progress through the game will be—presumably upgrading my Terrabeast. Once I figured those bits out though, the fundamentals of exploring the world and cultivating my beast felt great.

What I'm most interested in seeing from OddFauna next are some of the neat reactive environmental features talked about in its store page and original Kickstarter. "Your choices have an impact on the other OddFauna," the developers say. "Be thoughtful of the diverse flora you plant on your TerraBeast, different environments will attract different beasts." I'm quite curious to see just how impactful my choices to terraform new water features or plant new groves of trees are on the Fauna around me.

OddFauna is aiming for a spring 2026 early access release so it's not too far off now. You can try the OddFauna demo in Steam Next Fest running until March 2.

What I really want to know though: why is this guy wearing clothes made out of my friend?