People have been debating the meaning of the term “indie game” for years. What is an indie game? On paper, Hades 2 and Hollow Knight Silksong are both indie games, as they are games self-published by developers not affiliated with a larger publisher.
But they’re also both big sequels to big games – guaranteed success, to a certain extent, unless something goes spectacularly wrong. (They didn’t.) Compare that to something like Blue Prince, an original puzzle game that almost no one had heard of before it hit stores this spring.
There are other games that seem to fit the indie designation better, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But that game was developed by over thirty people, along with a number of contractors – that’s even more than Hades 2, which had a team of about 25 people.
So when we look at indie games to include in this list, we try to think about the spirit of an indie game and larger games that may meet the paper definition are excluded. What we want here is a small team working on something unique or weird, without the backing of a big publisher like Epic, Microsoft or Electronic Arts. With all that in mind, let’s dive in.
Editor’s note: All games on this list are traditional ‘Web2’ games with no crypto or blockchain integrations. But you might enjoy it anyway!
Ball x Pit
The title of this game, styled as “BALL x PIT” and pronounced simply as “ball pit”, can make for a confusing time when trying to search for it or discuss it with friends. But this one is worth seeking out. You manage a city that sits on the edge of a huge pit, and in order for the city to survive, you must go into the pit for money and resources.
Ball x Pit takes a page from games like Vampire Survivors, offering a variety of unlockable characters – each with their own quirk – that you’ll have to put through a time-bound gauntlet. However, instead of wandering around an infinite castle, you march forward into the pit as enemies resist you.
You defeat these enemies by launching balls at them, Arkanoid/Breakout style, trying to hit as many enemies as possible with each launch. As you level up, you’ll pick up new modifiers for these balls, like electricity or fire. Balls and skills can be combined or developed, completely changing the flow of a run and giving each attempt a different feel and flow.
If Vampire Survivors appeals to you at all, then Ball x Pit almost certainly will as well.
Blue Prince
We’ve listed it at the top, so we might as well put it first. Blue Prince is a first-person puzzle game that received critical acclaim this year. You are the heir to a mansion whose layout is reset every day and is created as the residents and staff open doors.
As the heir, your goal is to reach the secret 46th room and decipher the house’s secrets. This game is based on the drawing mechanic of tabletop card games, where you choose the card (also called a room) that you think best suits the situation, based on what you know and the strategies you have developed.
Developed by one person, Blue Prince weaves a web of creative puzzles and nearly indecipherable mysteries. If you are determined, you can find it all on the walls and shelves. But it’s never that simple, right? You may want to have a notebook and pen handy, as the game suggests, because you’ll be taking pages of notes.
Look outside
The original PlayStation release brought us the first true survival horror game in Resident Evil, but what would a game in the same genre look like on a Super Nintendo? Look Outside is the answer: this survival horror game offers a top-down perspective, turn-based combat, and pixel graphics that look like they belong in the ’90s.
In Look Outside you are trapped in your apartment building, with something outside that turns people into grotesque monsters if they even look out their windows. It’s hard to resist the temptation to look out the window, and even more so when you know you shouldn’t.
Your apartment building is full of people who either knew no better or gave in to temptation, and you will encounter these twisted shapes as you search through the building for food and resources, along with the few people whose minds and bodies are still intact.
Luto
This psychological horror title is inspired by Hideo Kojima’s PT, which finds you trapped in a loop through a realistically rendered, nondescript house that gets scarier the longer you spend in it. But Luto goes further and does his own thing.
As you explore, your once safe home shifts around you, making less and less sense as you move on, stepping out of the shape of a house and into new, stranger spaces. If anyone were to ever make a House of Leaves game, this would be as close as we can get – in the best way possible.
No, I’m not human
The world ends. You are safe in your home as long as you keep the doors and blinds closed. However, people know you are there and come to your door to ask for help. They could be people, but they could also be people Visitors– people who pretend to be people and do it very well. If you let the wrong person in, you could die.
No, I’m Not a Human uses a mechanism similar to Papers, Please; you need to gather as much information as possible about the person at your door and make a judgment based on that, deciding whether to let them in and provide them with protection. Unfortunately, insulation is not an option.
The story of apocalyptic paranoia is aided by some truly terrifying art. When you meet people you will notice that none of them look real That human, making every encounter exciting and charged.
Schedule I
If you’re a very old kid, you might remember having a graphing calculator in high school—and you might also remember using it to play games that your friend sent to you over a connecting cable, more than you did any actual graphing or science with it. And one of those games that impressed many young minds was called Drug War.
Scheme I basically involves the following: You are a drug dealer in a new city, aiming to start your own drug empire. You produce and distribute drugs through handcrafted facilities, while dealing with NPC rivals and the law, and sometimes getting involved in shootouts over territory and price. There’s also a co-op mode where you can run an empire with a friend.
The wanderer
From Powerhoof, the team behind the cosmic horror multiplayer game Crawl, comes The Drifter, an adventure game set in the studio’s homeland of Australia. Mick Carter, the titular drifter, has returned to his hometown for a funeral. This game is a gritty thriller that you experience through the mechanics of a point-and-click adventure game, plus a time-loop mechanic that allows for creative approaches to problem solving.
Hiking stop
A great warrior has experienced her first loss in battle. In the aftermath, she finds a quiet tea shop in the woods and discovers she cannot leave, or even wield her sword.
Created by the minds behind The Stanley Parable, Wanderstop is a fun game about burnout and about parsing what it means to be a fun game. Many players will find the lack of progression mechanics frustrating, while others will find it liberating. This game isn’t as self-aware as The Stanley Parable, but it has as much to say about the genre it’s in as that game does about first-person games. It’s definitely worth checking out.
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