• Skullgirls - Still the best damn fighting game ever made. I've been grinding for a full decade now, and I'll be entering Combo Breaker 2025 once again this year.

• Slay the Spire - The game that ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about StS is that it never lets you get complacent, never lets you lean on just one good synergy that will carry you the entire run. You always have to keep adapting, and you have to have a well-rounded deck to deal with enemies that are designed to counter players who try to rely on only one thing. And when I eventually got to the point where I'd had my fill of vanilla, there's so much fun stuff from the modding community to play around with. Packmaster is incredible.

• CrossCode - It's been years since I finished this RPG and its colorful cast still lives rent-free in my head. This is a game that is perfect in every way and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fantastic combat, tons of side content, endearing characters, emotionally powerful story, beautiful visuals, amazing soundtrack.

First :

• Outer Wilds
• Disco Elysium

Then :

• Inscryption
• Carto
• Spiritfarer
• Pyre

Hollow Knight

I love it so much that I can't finish it, I always stop when I'm about to fight the final boss. I just don't want it to end.

Maybe when Silksong came out I finish it once and for all.

For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn't been topped. Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.

Stardew

FTL: Faster Than Light

Dwarf Fortress. Not even just my favorite indie game, but favorite game ever.

Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta... Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.

Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.

Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything... and everything in it is immaculate. It's still free for the original version as well.

Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out... also goes on sale really cheap.

Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you're from the PNW, it will hit even more.

Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.

OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.

If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).

If you want a game that's beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af... definitely check out Rain World.

Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It's how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.

Rusty's Retirement... isn't so much a game.. sorta.. but yeah.. check that out.

Balatro

Obra Dinn

Factorio.

Honourable mentions:

• Chants of Sennaar
• Blue Prince
• Animal Well
• Raft
• Citizen Sleeper

Lethal Company. It was developed by one person, yet it outsold Call of Duty. It trended from 2023 to 2024, but I still play it at least weekly. A couple Lethal Company clones have since come out and some say one (R.E.P.O) is better, and graphically I would say yes, but nothing quite matches Lethal Company’s charm.

It’s a scrap-collecting + space horror survival + comedy game. The comedy feels very unintended and that’s why it’s so fucking funny. You encounter very horrifying creatures, then see your friends die the funniest death. Then you hope to collect enough scrap to survive another day.

Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don't find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!

Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.

Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers' solidarity and union struggle type of plot.

Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.

Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.

Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.

Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.

Dwarf Fortress. It's Dwarf Fortress.

WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.

Descenders. Crazy fun downhill bicycling game.

One game I love that hasn't been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.

Valheim. Bought it late January and already got almost 400 hours on it. Play it vanilla first then modded. I played it with friends, beat final boss on Day 997, we took our times, building and all along the way. Then I started over solo with x3 resources, no raid, and move metals through portal. I just wanted to see if I could solo all game and today I just finished basically everything. So right now, I'm just collecting resources for gears and buildings. Going to make few houses across the map.

I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I've since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.

Here are a few, hopefully they aren't mentioned yet:

• walking simulator/light puzzle game - Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, INSIDE, A Juggler's Tale, Abzu, Nuts
• puzzle - Manifold Garden, The Case of the Golden Idol, GNOG, Gorogoa
• misc - Inscryption, Pony Island
• 3d platformer/adventure - Yooka Laylee
• metroidvania/platformer - Blue Fire
• programming - Human Resource Machine, TIS-100
• souls-like/boss rush - Furi, Titan Souls

Some of these might be AA, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. I have plenty more where that came from. :)

Balatro. It's a great Maths game.

Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.

Here are the ones that don't get uninstalled from my potato box:

• Sable

• Ion Fury

• Torchlight

• Ziggurat

• Baba Is You

• Edritch

• Fez

• Plunge

• Valley

• Into The Breach

• Journey

(Disclaimer: some are very old, some may not be indie, eh, I did my best.)

I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:

• Autonauts and Autonauts Vs Piratebots - Cute automation games
• Spelunky - Elegantly simple and well executed platformer
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute - Rhythm FPS. Others have tried. None I have found have been as good.
• Immortal Redneck - FPS roguelite
• Ziggurat - FPS Roguelite
• Receiver II - Unique FPS roguelike. Every part of everything that moves is simulated. The hammer on your gun hits a firing pin which hits the primer on the cartridge. You can get stovepipes, misfires, double feeds, etc. You don't reload by hitting 'reload' but go through the full manual of arms in a shooter where the tolerances for failure are fairly slim.
• Valley - running game. The feeling of letting a hill propel your running to otherwise impossible speeds, bottled. Nice little story too.
• Dredge - Lovecraftian fishing game.
• Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician simulator. Build a network to allow communication between computers in an underground society with unspeakable horrors occasionally destroying your mind/body.
• Opus Magnum - Programming puzzles
• Vagante - roguelike with tight tolerances
• Ruiner - Cyberpunk slash n dash with a soundtrack half by Sidewalks and Skeletons. Very fun.
• Tails Noir - Detective story. Normally find the anthro thing a bit tiresome but this was pretty good. Well written.
• Elderborn - First person brawler
• Webbed - be a peacock spider. Rescue your lady spider. Help insects. Fight a bird. Dance.
• A Story About My Uncle - Movement game. Jump, dash, grapnel. Simple and elegant.
• Tormentor X Punisher - Top down twin stick shooter. Everything dies in one hit. All the enemies, and you.
• Tin Can - Survival game in which you try to keep up an escape pod long enough to be rescued, which is hard when it seems to have been made by the lowest bidder's lowest bidding subcontractor and maintained with all the loving care of a convenience store bathroom.

N++

Undoubtedly the best, most complete 2D platformer I've ever played. Super tight controls and incredible level design, coupled with an episode-long timer mechanic that you can influence makes this one absolutely unmatched. Sure, games like Celeste are flashier, but nothing is a better game than N++. I think I put something like 120 hours into this to get the platinum on PS4. I would happily start over and play the whole thing from scratch again.

Inside

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Eternal Strands

Disco Elysium

All very different and unique. All fantastic!

Slay the Spire

I've not seen many RPG maker games mentioned here, so i'll do my part. These are a lot of my favourites through the years:

• To the moon

• Finding paradise
• Oneshot
• Celeste
• Omori
• End roll

There are also a lot of them that i've not played but i've watched full playtroughs of, like IB, Hello Charlotte, Lisa, ... and most recently The coffin of Andy and Leyley

One game i would also like to add is Rain World, which is a 2d survival platformer, a bit challenging, but i would argue it's also a "metroidbrania" if you know the genre, games that have knowledge as gates rather than keys or power-ups like metroidvanias. Some notable examples are Outer wilds or Return of obra dinn, who others have already mentioned

Cave Story, the original 2004 version.

I played it a long time ago and I still think about that game from time to time.

Vampire Survivors

It might just be because I was actually early aboard the hype train for this one; but this one just scratched that “one more go” itch until 2am like nothing else.

Enter the Gungeon

Randomly came across this via a YouTube short, and the art-style just meshed with me. Absolutely love the messy bullet-hell quick-play genre in general.. Hades being another great example of this.

Kerbal space program (the first one) And The Long Dark

Can’t really decide which I like more, and they are vastly different

Slay The Spire

Fury

Ori And The Blind Forest

Factorio.

Probably Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. All the older Indy games weren’t that great but this new one is really good.

A Hat in Time

UFO 50

Outer Wilds

Hylics

Hylics 2

Pizza Tower

Celeste

It's hard to pick one lol

I can't say it's my favorite, but after checking out all of these games, I'm just gonna post one I think all you guys would love.

NOITA

From the top of my head

• crawl stone soup. Classic traditional rogue like. Less fiddly than net hack, but very good.
• untitled story (an older game by the main person behind Celeste. Looks like Ms paint but is utterly charming)
• everything supergiant did. Hades, bastion, pyre
• binding of Isaac is a classic.

Dyson sphere program is still one of my enduring favorites.

I'll put Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead up there with FTL and Dwarf Fortress.

I am having a lot of fun with Timberborn and Big Ambitions.

Timberborn is a colony builder where you are in control of beavers. You have to survive between times of good water, bad water, and no water.

Big Ambitious is a business sum in new York make by the same person who made Startup Company.

Cult of the Lamb.

Judging by the playtime, Rimworld. It is such an important part of my life at this point, it's not even funny. I've played thousands of hours, and don't regret it

Shadow Empire. Best 4X wargame ever. 400 page rulebook included. Realistic logistics and planet generation 6000 years in the future!

Crumble A speedrunning platforming game, where you play as a blob with a tongue. Pleasant experience to play through while learning, while absolutely balls to the walls insane when actually speedrunning, actually 100% achieved this

Cyberpulse Twin-stick arcade neo style virus slamming game. Great control precision, challenging and colourful. The right thumbstick pressing might take a bit of getting used to.

Pseudoregalia Such a fun old school platformer. Big bunny girl MC for some reason but SUPER FUN and satisfying movement mechanics and the world is built well enough for the mechanics. A few hour long game, unless you look everything up.

Actually going to put some indie demos here I played this weekend, that I really enjoyed: Half-Sword Physics based medieval combat game. Reminds me of Exanima but instead of 2.5D, you can play Half-sword in 3rd or 1st person, which is really fun. Can have full gore or turn the gore completely off.

Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon First person (potentially later also 3rd person) RPG, very much in the vein of Elder Scrolls or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Really enjoyed the demo, it takes place on the tutorial island/dungeon. Going to buy the full version when it releases, because there seems to be a save wipe for 1.0.

Bloodthief Reminds me of Neon White and Ultrakill having an even more indie baby. Seemed to be pretty simple and good speedrunning platforming fun.

Shape of Dreams 2.5D action RPG roguelike. Very pretty and gameplay feels good. Didn't play it quite enough yet, only thing I kinda disliked was the amount of cooldowns on abilities.

9Kings Small town defense game with waves of enemies led by other kings attacking your kingdom. Really enjoyed this one. Demo isn't too difficult, even when I am really bad with these type of games.

RKGK (RAKUGAKI) 3rd person platforming game, where you bring some colour to the world with your graffiti. Very fun movement and popping colours. The dialogue isn't necessarily for me but the gameplay felt really fun.

Unbeatable Colourful rhythm adventure game, style is great and soundtrack slaps.

Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita's world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone's offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.

The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.

Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.

I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)

There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.

A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.