Wednesdays: The French Game About Abuse That Players Voted the IGF's Best
A theme-park builder that slowly turns into a story about childhood sexual abuse sounds impossible. The Pixel Hunt and Pierre Corbinais made it work, and the IGF audience gave it their award. What it is, and how to approach it.
The theme park in Wednesdays looks like something from a 1990s PC game: bright pixel rides, cheerful paths, litter to sweep up. A man named Tim used to play a game like this with his cousin when they were children. Now, as an adult, he goes back to it, and every ride he builds unlocks a memory he has spent years avoiding.
Wednesdays is a narrative game by Pierre Corbinais and the French studio The Pixel Hunt, published by ARTE France. It launched on Steam and itch.io for Windows and Mac in March 2025, and in March 2026 it won the Audience Award at the Independent Games Festival, the one prize chosen by public vote rather than a jury.
A park built from memories
The game has two halves that feed each other. One is a light theme-park builder: you place rides, decorate, and clean up shells and rubbish to keep visitors happy. The other is a series of visual-novel-style vignettes, drawn like a comic, that reconstruct what happened to Tim. Placing new rides unlocks new scenes.
Across 17 vignettes, you step into the roles of Tim's family and friends as well as Tim himself, seeing how a child's silence ripples outward. The subject is sexual abuse within a family, and the game's stated aim is to encourage victims to speak and to be heard. Its tagline puts it plainly: the hardest part is not speaking up, it is being heard.
The design choices are gentle on purpose. Happiness in the park does not affect your progress, there are no time limits, and scenes can be skipped. One reviewer put the running time at about two hours.
The people behind it
Corbinais is a former journalist who worked as narrative designer on the indie game Haven and translated Road 96 into French. The Pixel Hunt describes itself as a studio making reality-inspired games at the crossroads of journalism, documentary and video games, and Wednesdays fits that description exactly.
ARTE, the European public cultural broadcaster, has quietly become one of the continent's most interesting game publishers. Over more than a decade it has co-produced and released titles such as Type:Rider, Homo Machina, Vectronom, Inua, Bury Me, My Love and Looking for Fael.
Why the audience award matters
Juries pick games that push boundaries; audiences pick the ones that stay with them. That Wednesdays won the fan vote, ahead of louder, bigger games, says a lot about how it lands with the people who play it. It never sensationalises its subject, and it treats the player as a witness rather than a detective. The theme-park half matters here too: it gives you somewhere calm to return to between the hardest scenes.
It is not for everyone, and it does not pretend to be. The publisher advises that it is not recommended for players under 18, and some scenes will be hard for survivors. But as an example of games doing something no other medium does in quite the same way, letting you rebuild a place and a memory with your own hands, it is remarkable.
Where to play
Wednesdays is on Steam and itch.io for Windows and Mac, and a mobile edition, Wednesdays Mobile, is on the App Store. A free demo is available on PC. For more of the 2026 IGF winners, read our Titanium Court story.