Evercade owners, check your system update — there’s a free precision platformer hopping onto your handhelds this month.
FleaRun! is October 2026’s Evercade Game of the Month, taking over from September’s Master System RPG ReSeCom. If you’ve got an Evercade VS, EXP, or Alpha, it’s yours in full, for free, the moment you update your system software. It sticks around until the next monthly update swaps in a new title, so you’ve got until early November to play it to death.
For the uninitiated, FleaRun! is the latest entry in LowTek Games’ Flea! series — precision platformers built for the actual NES, the kind of hair-trigger, pixel-perfect hopping that made the original a cult favourite among homebrew fans. Both of the earlier Flea! games have already been released on Evercade (the first one even had its own turn as a Highlight of the Month a little over a year ago), so the whole flea-infested family is slowly colonising the platform. Sorry, that’s the last parasite pun. Probably.
According to Retro News, FleaRun! is this month’s title, and the game itself is shaping up to be the series’ most ambitious outing yet. The official trailer promises a single-player story mode against a series of tricky opponents, plus multiplayer for up to three friends with “Bank” and “Last Man Standing” matches. The endgame? Dethroning Fleasar from the top spot. As someone who has absolutely destroyed friendships over four-player 8-bit party games, this one has my attention.
Nexus owners, I haven’t forgotten you — Evercade says the handheld joins the Game of the Month scheme later this year, so sit tight. And if you miss October’s window entirely, there’s always the physical route: Evercade has confirmed every 2026 Game of the Month title will be compiled onto the Indie Heroes 5 cartridge in early 2027, so FleaRun! will live on long after the free month ends.
It’s a small story, sure — but this is exactly the kind of thing the Game of the Month program was built for: a genuinely good NES homebrew getting discovered by thousands of players who’d never have touched a flash cart. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go update my firmware. Fleasar isn’t going to dethrone himself.
Sources: Retro Game Wire, Retro News, and Evercade’s official announcement video. No generative-AI involvement was reported in any of the sources for this game.