A guided tour of real, acclaimed indie games from the last few years, and why this stretch has been such a good one to be a player.
why this run of indie games has been so good
Here’s a thing I keep noticing. When friends ask me what to play, I almost never reach for the big-budget release everyone’s already talking about. I reach for something a three-person studio shipped that they probably haven’t heard of. That’s not me being a contrarian. It’s just where the most interesting work has been lately, and the gap has gotten wide enough that it feels worth writing down. The last couple of years have handed us an unusually deep bench of small games that are genuinely worth your evenings.
So this isn’t a hype list. I’m not going to tell you I played all of these at 4 AM or that any of them changed my life. Some I’ve put dozens of hours into. A couple I bounced off and want to be honest about that too. What I can do is point you at real games that exist, made by real people I can name, and tell you what each one actually is so you can decide if it’s your thing. Everything below ships now (or is in a state you can play today). No vaporware.
One bit of context first, because the touchstones matter. When people argue about the great modern indies, three names come up over and over: Hollow Knight, Celeste, Hades. Worth saying why. Team Cherry, an Adelaide studio that was tiny when they made it, built a hand-drawn world in Hollow Knight deep enough to swallow a hundred hours. Celeste, from the studio then called Maddy Makes Games, wrapped a brutally precise platformer around a story about anxiety and a panic attack on a chairlift, and it shipped with an Assist Mode that let anyone finish it. And Hades, from Supergiant, did the thing nobody had quite cracked: it made a roguelike where dying advanced the story instead of resetting it. It later became the first video game to win a Hugo. Those three set a bar. Most of what follows is, in one way or another, a reply to them.
the ones I’d hand to almost anybody
Balatro
If you only try one game off this whole page, maybe make it this one, and I say that as someone who was sure I wouldn’t care. It’s a poker roguelike. You build a hand, you play it, you score, you climb. Sounds dry. It is the opposite of dry. The hook is the Jokers, little modifier cards that warp scoring in ways that compound into absurdity, until a single hand is racking up numbers your brain can’t parse anymore and you’re grinning like an idiot at a spreadsheet.
What gets me is who made it. A single developer, going by LocalThunk, published through Playstack. One person built the most quietly addictive game I played in 2024. It cleaned up at The Game Awards that year, taking Best Independent Game, Best Debut, and Best Mobile, plus the distinction of being the first solo project ever nominated for the big Game of the Year prize. Five million copies sold, last I checked. I’ve reinstalled it three separate times after telling myself I was done. I was not done.
Vampire Survivors
Cheap, ugly in a charming way, and impossible to put down. You walk your little character around a field and the weapons just… fire on their own. No aiming. Barely any moving. And somehow it turns into the most compulsive loop I’ve fed an evening to in years, the horde thickening while your build snowballs into a wall of bouncing projectiles. Luca Galante made the bones of it largely solo (the studio is poncle now), and it basically kicked off a whole subgenre people started calling “bullet heaven.” It swept Best Game and Game Design at the 2023 BAFTAs, which for a game that started life looking like a flash project is kind of hilarious and entirely deserved.
Dave the Diver
This one shouldn’t work and works completely. By day you’re scuba diving in a gorgeous reef, spearing and netting fish. Then night falls and you’re running a sushi restaurant, serving the things you caught. Two games stapled together, and the seam is the fun part, because the loop of “catch better fish, serve better menu, afford better gear, dive deeper” is wildly more-ish than it has any right to be. Mintrocket made it, and it kept piling on side activities and story beats long after I expected it to run out of ideas. It picked up the Game Design award at the 2024 BAFTAs. If you want something generous and a little goofy, start here.
the swing-for-the-fences picks
Animal Well
Okay, this is the one I get evangelical about. Animal Well is a Metroidvania, but calling it that undersells how strange and quiet it is. You’re a small blob exploring a dark, eerie underground, and your tools aren’t swords, they’re things like a slinky, a flute, a bubble wand. The whole game runs on light and reflection and noticing. Secrets sit behind secrets. There’s an entire layer of community-puzzle stuff that took thousands of players working together weeks to crack, and I am not going to spoil a second of it.
Billy Basso built it. One person, in C++, over roughly seven years, and the entire thing fits in under 40 megabytes, which in 2024 is faintly unbelievable. At the D.I.C.E. Awards it took the prize for game direction. The part I love is hard to convey in a paragraph: the game trusts you completely. There are almost no explanations. You just get handed a dark room and a faint sound and the assumption that you’re curious enough to work out the rest. Most of the time I was. A couple of the deeper puzzles flat-out beat me without a wiki, and honestly that’s a feature, not a complaint.
Outer Wilds
I’m cheating a little including this, since it came out back in 2019, but enough people still haven’t played it that I’ll take the hit. You’re an astronaut in a tiny solar system stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends, every time, with the sun going supernova. No combat anywhere. Forget skill trees and upgrades, too. The only thing that carries between loops is what you, the actual human at the keyboard, have figured out. It’s a game made entirely of knowledge, and the ending floored me in a way very few games have.
Mobius Digital made it, and the BAFTAs handed it Best Game in 2020. I’ll add the standard warning everyone adds: do not look anything up, do not watch a video, go in knowing nothing at all. The whole game is the discovery. Spoiling it is like being told the twist of a film you haven’t seen, except worse, because here the twist is the gameplay itself.
Tunic
A little fox with a sword, in a world that looks like a cozy throwback to old top-down adventures. That’s the bait. The real game is the manual. You find pages of an in-game instruction booklet scattered around, and it’s written almost entirely in an invented language you can’t read, with hand-drawn diagrams hinting at secrets and moves the game never tells you about directly. Piecing together what those pages mean is the actual puzzle, and it’s brilliant. Andrew Shouldice spent years on it as the lead designer, with Finji publishing, and it took home BAFTAs for Artistic Achievement and Debut Game. Combat’s fine. Figuring it out is the whole point.
Cocoon
Short and clean, and one of the smartest puzzle games I’ve touched. You carry glowing orbs. Each orb contains a world. Step into one of those worlds and you can pick it back up as an orb to carry inside yet another world. Worlds nested in worlds, and the puzzles fold in on themselves in ways that made me sit back from the desk more than once. Jeppe Carlsen designed it, and his pedigree shows: he was the lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside over at Playdead. His new studio, Geometric Interactive, made Cocoon, which took Best Debut Indie at the 2023 Game Awards. Doesn’t outstay its welcome either, which I respect enormously.
the weird, the scary, and the experimental
Pizza Tower
Pure cartoon adrenaline. A 2D platformer that runs on speed and chaos, with hand-drawn animation that looks like a fever-dream Saturday morning cartoon and a clear love letter to the old Wario Land games buried in its DNA. No health bar. Forget difficulty sliders, too. Just a chef sprinting through levels and a “Pizza Time” escape sequence that sends you tearing back the way you came against a timer. Tour De Pizza made it. Loud and frantic, and I had to take breaks because my hands got tired, which is the right kind of problem.
Mouthwashing
Short horror, and the kind that lingers. You’re on a doomed cargo spaceship, and the story jumps around in time, before the crash and after, so you’re slowly assembling what went wrong from out-of-order pieces. The look is deliberately crude, that blocky PS1-era polygon style, and it uses the ugliness on purpose to make everything feel a little off. Wrong Organ made it. Don’t expect a jump-scare machine. What you get instead is a slow, sick dread that builds as you understand the people involved, and I’d rather not say more than that. Not for everyone, but if it’s your register, it’s excellent.
Pacific Drive
Here’s a pitch I didn’t believe until I played it: a survival game where your only companion is a station wagon. You drive into a fenced-off, supernatural stretch of the Pacific Northwest, scavenge parts on each run, and limp back to your garage to repair and upgrade the car between trips. The car becomes weirdly precious. Over time you learn its quirks, its dents, the door that won’t shut right, while the zone outside throws strange physics at you that mess with your sense of where anything is. Ironwood Studios made it. I’ll be honest that the repair-loop got a touch repetitive for me after a while, but the atmosphere on those night drives, headlights cutting through fog while something out there pings your sensors, that part really stuck.
Lethal Company
This is a “play it with friends or don’t bother” game, and with friends it’s one of the funniest things going. Four of you scavenge scrap from abandoned industrial moons to hit a quota for a faceless Company, while monsters lurk in the dark. The genius is the proximity voice chat. You can hear teammates only when they’re near, so the game keeps splitting you up and then leaving you to scream into a radio while something eats your friend two rooms over. Zeekerss, one developer, made it, and it had sold past ten million copies barely two months into early access. Total chaos. Genuinely great. Solo, though? I’d skip it.
the deeper cuts worth the effort
Sea of Stars
A throwback turn-based RPG, and a loving one. It wears its 16-bit roots on its sleeve, all glowing pixel art and a day-night system that genuinely changes how a fight plays out. Sabotage Studio built the combat around timed button presses, so you’re tapping in rhythm with your attacks and blocks instead of just picking a menu option and waiting around for the animation. Best Independent Game at both the Golden Joystick and Game Awards in 2023. Do the words “I miss old Chrono Trigger-style RPGs” do anything to you? Then this is aimed straight at your heart.
Pentiment
The odd one out on this list, and one of my favorites. No combat at all. Instead, a narrative game set in 16th-century Bavaria, where you play a journeyman artist caught up in a series of murders that unfold across a few decades. Every screen is drawn to look like an illuminated medieval manuscript, text scratching itself out as characters change their minds, and it’s gorgeous in a way nothing else looks. Obsidian made it, which surprised people who knew them for big RPGs. A Peabody Award followed, which games basically never get. Slow, talky, historically curious. If that sounds boring to you, it probably will be. For me it was unforgettable.
UFO 50
Fifty games. Not minigames, actual games, framed as the back catalog of a made-up 1980s studio, each with its own fake release year and house style. Some are throwaways. A handful are full, deep experiences I’d have happily paid for on their own. Mossmouth pulled it off, and the conceit, browsing a fictional studio’s lifetime of output, is half the charm. It’s the kind of thing you graze for months. I keep finding ones I’d somehow skipped.
Stray
You’re a cat. That’s most of the sell, and it’s enough. You wander a moody, neon, rain-slick city full of robots, a little drone companion translating the world for you, and yes, you can knock things off ledges and curl up for a nap. BlueTwelve Studio made it. Short, easy, no real challenge to speak of, but it nails a very specific cozy-melancholy mood, and the 2022 Game Awards named it Best Independent Game. Sometimes you just want to be a cat for an evening.
the new one I’m watching
Blue Prince
The most recent thing here, and the one I’m least done thinking about. Blue Prince came out in April 2025, made by a developer working as Dogubomb across something like eight years, published by Raw Fury. Each day you draft your way through a shifting manor, picking which room appears next as you go, hunting for a rumored hidden Room 46. It’s part roguelike, part architecture puzzle, part something I don’t have a clean word for. It reviewed extremely well out of the gate. I’m a couple dozen runs in and still uncovering systems I didn’t know were there, which is exactly where I want to be with a game like this. Too early for me to call it a classic. But it has that feeling.
a quick word on Hades II
Supergiant put Hades II into early access in May 2024, and I want to be careful here, because it’s still being built. You play Melinoë, sister of the first game’s hero. Even unfinished, it reviewed in the mid-90s on PC. In a lot of ways it already feels like more than the first game: more weapons, more systems, a bigger map to claw your way out of. I’m holding off on a real verdict until it’s properly done. But if you loved Hades, you can dip in right now and watch the thing grow under you, patch by patch. Strange, lovely way to experience a sequel, honestly.
so why is the small stuff this good right now?
A few things lined up. The tools got dramatically better and cheaper. An engine like Godot, which is free, can now carry a project that would’ve needed a real studio ten years ago. Storefronts got a bit better at surfacing odd little games instead of burying them under the same ten franchises. And there’s an audience now, people who grew up on Hollow Knight and Celeste and went looking for the next thing, who actively want the weird, personal, single-vision stuff that no marketing committee would ever greenlight.
That last part is the heart of it for me. When one person spends seven years on a game, like Billy Basso did, or eight, like the Blue Prince developer, what you’re playing isn’t a product that got optimized in focus groups. It’s somebody’s actual taste, their obsessions, the thing they couldn’t stop making. You can feel that. It shows up in the rough edges as much as the polish. Big studios make some wonderful games, and I play plenty of them. But they almost can’t make something this specific, this stubborn, this clearly the work of a particular brain.
Which brings me to the only ask in this whole piece. These games run on word of mouth more than anything else. A small developer can pour years into something brilliant and have it sink without a trace if nobody talks about it. So if one of these clicks for you, say so somewhere. Leave a review. Send it to a friend who’d get it. I’ve watched a single recommendation pull a game out of total obscurity, and the math on a small team is brutal enough that it really does move the needle. You don’t need to play all of these. Play one. Pick the one that sounded the most unlike anything you’d normally touch, and just see. That’s usually where the good stuff hides anyway.
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