It’s often said in, well, pretty much every indie games thing, that the indies are where you go when AAA gaming disappoints you. It’s kinda an overdone point at this, uh, point, but it is true that indie games try things that mainstream games would be too scared to. Here are a bunch of really cool indie games that you should try out the next time the £90 advanced access or whatever game lets you down.
CRUEL
CRUEL lets you loose in a weird hotel that makes Premier Inn look like the Hilton. You discover a body in an elevator, pick up a gun, and plunge into ten procedurally shifting levels featuring plenty of kicking and shooting. It’s like Hotline Miami with a concussion and also little pig dudes. .
Combat’s fast and very challenging. Run, shoot, dodge, survive, all while a spreading fire lights up your backside. Cans act as currency and health, and the pace barely lets up. It chucks you in at the deep end and hopes you don’t drown. Well, not drown, I guess. Burn to death or get shot by a pig with an uzi?
If you’re in for something mean and eccentric in the indie shooter space, CRUEL delivers ten hours of FPS fun. It’s not super high budget, but if you like indie devs working on weird stuff and askew atmospheres, this one hits. Just maybe don’t expect warm and fuzzy. Even from the dog.
Dead Cells
Dead Cells might be the best game ever made where you play as a sentient smoke worm piloting a corpse in a tasteful suit.
Developed by Motion Twin, it’s a “roguevania” that takes the punishing nature of Rogue and Castlevania to beat you up in brand new ways. Every run is a dance between confidence and humiliation, and the game takes immense joy in reminding you that you’re just a silly silly little boy.
The weapon variety borders on absurd — one minute you’re freezing mobs, the next you’re panicking with a frying pan. Its pixel art glows in this neat kinda sickly style, and its got some pretty great animations for an indie game of its time.
What keeps Dead Cells so fun after all these years is how much you get to play around with every single time. It never wastes your time, even as you die for the 400th time. Ask politely and Motion Twin might even send out their 401st update.
Deck of Haunts
Deck of Haunts reimagines deck-building through a spooky ooky lens. You see, you play the house. Build rooms, lure intruders, spook them silly, then siphon their essence to grow stronger. It’s an isometric deckbuilder where your cards place scares, hazards, and tricks while you expand a rambling mansion.. Developer Mantis and publisher DANGEN pitch it as becoming a “malevolent Haunted House,” which is exactly how it plays.
The feels lands close to Dungeon Keeper meets Deception. Both bangers. Plan the layout, bait the greedy and the curious, then spring the nastiness in turn-based phases. Progress unlocks new starters and synergies, including a trap-focused deck that leans into ambushes and misdirection. It’s roguelike enough to push you into fresh builds while still letting you tinker with room combos that funnel victims exactly where you want them.
It’s a neat spin on the genre. If you enjoy being the villain engineer — herding meat into machinery — this has the right tools to haunt your free time.
Eastward
Eastward is like if Studio Ghibli made a post-apocalyptic RPG after a particularly bad week. Developed by Pixpil, it’s a lush, hand-animated adventure about a man, a mysterious girl, and the dying world they keep stumbling through. The characters feel like they’ve lived entire lives before you showed up, and the soundtrack could make a grocery list sound emotional.
Avocados? In this economy? I don’t think so.
The gameplay swings between puzzle-solving, light combat, and emotional gut punches. You swap between the two protagonists, one with a frying pan, the other with mysterious powers, which sounds absurd but somehow works beautifully. It’s got that The Last of Us dynamic that we all know and love, or the Amy dynamic for all us purists.
It might stretch a bit long, but Eastward’s heart and world-building are unmatched. It’s like a hug you don’t quite trust.
Easy Delivery Co
Easy Delivery Co. takes the grind of courier work and turns it into something really quite brilliant, also you don’t have to wee in plastic bottles. You’re a tiny cat delivery driver hurtling through a crumbling town where nobody seems to actually live. Every parcel has somewhere to be, but the routes are a mess of architectural crimes. It’s a simple setup, like a puzzle game with a little truck.
There’s an odd rhythm to it: pick up, crash, lose half of your delivery, recover, repeat. As you buy more upgrades and explore more, eliveries get stranger, the city and its people more surreal, and somewhere along the line, you start caring about these absurd errands.
If you loved Death Stranding and Paperboy, Easy Delivery Co. is the kind of indie oddity that immediately makes you sit up and take notice, even if you’re just a little cat guy who everyone thinks is a different little cat guy.
El Paso, Elsewhere
El Paso, Elsewhere takes the skeleton of Max Payne, stuffs it with heartbreak and monsters, and makes it as cool as that sounds. You play as James Savage, a man diving through a haunted motel to stop his vampire ex from ending the world. Sold yet?
Developed by Strange Scaffold, it’s a love letter to PS2-era shooters: slow-motion dives, gunfights in tight corridors, and enough melodrama to drown in.
The aesthetic’s gloriously chunky, with hefty models, grainy textures, and lighting that feels like it’s been designed by a mole. But underneath the pulp, there’s real emotional heft. James narrates like a man trying to sound tough through heartbreak, as he continues to descend in more ways than one.
It’s stylish, sincere, and also just really really fun. El Paso, Elsewhere doesn’t wink at its inspirations; it stares at them with bloodshot eyes. Then does a little slow motion dive, as a treat.
Empty Shell
Empty Shell drops you onto a derelict military facility and tells you almost nothing, except that you must kill. It’s a top-down survival horror shooter set in a world of flickering lights, half-finished experiments, and something absolutely horrific running at you. Every run begins with a new “volunteer,” because of course the government would rather throw bodies at a problem than solve it.
The pixel art is gritty like an evil Vib Ribbon, and it may not be for everyone. The lighting system makes every corridor feel like it’s going to be your last, and the gunplay hits that sweet spot between smooth and clumsy when you get desperate. Enemies move like they’re made of bad memories, and ammo always runs out two rooms too soon.
There’s real tension in its simplicity as you skulk around corridors and flinch at every sound. Empty Shell doesn’t bother with lore dumps or cinematic intros. It just drops you in, locks the door, and lets you sweat your way toward understanding maybe a little bit more than you did before.
Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami feels like being trapped in a peyote nightmare. Developed by Dennaton Games, who made the sequel and then evaporated, it turns pixel art into a blood-slick ballet where every mistake explodes in colour. You kick down doors, swing pipes, throw guns, and restart thirty times in the same room, all while that filthy synth soundtrack pulses until you hear it in your sleep.
There’s a story buried under the carnage. Something about hitmen, masks, and brainwashing. It matters less than how it makes you feel: jittery, uneasy, and like you really like hurting people. Every level ends with a walk of shame back through your own mess, which is still one of gaming’s best little gut punches.
It’s stylish, brutal, and still really bloody brilliant, despite so many imitators. Hotline Miami makes total sensory overload feel like design genius, and it’s one of the most influential indie games ever made too.
Into the Breach
Into the Breach takes turn-based tactics and compresses it into turn-based terror. And a healthy dose of guilt. Made by Subset Games, it’s about commanding mechs against massive insect monsters on tight, eight-by-eight battlefields. You see every attack before it happens, which sounds easy until you realise it just gives you extra time to hate yourself for not preventing it. One wrong move, and an entire city block is rubble.
The visuals are clean and deliberate, with a colour palette you really don’t see that often. Each turn is less about power and more about control — shoving an enemy into water, blocking a spawn hole, sacrificing a mech to keep civilians alive. There’s never enough time, space, or luck to fix everything, and that’s what makes it brilliant.
Itnto the Breach is strategy boiled down to a series of mini anxiety attacks. Simple to play, deeply punishing, and endlessly replayable because your ego refuses to stop trying.
Look Outside
Look Outside feels like waking up from a nightmare where your mates have all been turned into teeth, except it’s real. It throws you into a decaying apartment complex where simply looking out the window will destroy you, as if you’re a Discord mod. Anyone who dares to glimpse the outside world mutates into something grotesque, leaving the survivors to turn inward — literally and psychologically.
You play as Sam, scraping by on rationed food, scavenged parts, and the uneasy company of neighbours who might not stay sane for long. Developed in a crazy short amount of time, Look Outside blends survival horror and management sim in a way that’s both fascinating and miserable.
Every decision chips away at your stability. You can keep on top of hygiene to keep your mental health in check, craft weapons, or recruit other residents, but every new face adds another potential disaster.
Look Outside takes your typical horror and RPG formulas and builds something that you simply have to see for yourself.
Papers, Please
Passports are boring. There are no passports in Call of Duty for a reason. But Papers, Please turns the drudgery of passport stamping into something pretty dang tense. You’re a border agent in the fictional communist state of Arstotzk a, checking documents, catching liars, and trying not to starve your family while the government dangles rations over your head. It’s a puzzle game with crazy stakes.
Each day brings new rules, new scams, and new reasons to doubt your own sense of decency. The writing’s superb, the pixel art is bleak as hell, and the sound of a rubber stamp hitting paper becomes oddly satisfying. Right up until you approve the wrong person and you get a knock on your door at night,
Developer Lucas Pope built a bureaucracy simulator that’s somehow more stressful than most horror games. Papers, Please is about finding out how easy it is to lose your humanity, one stamp at a time.
Pizza Tower
Pizza Tower is a loud, sweaty, sugar rush of a platformer that makes Wario Land 4 look like a ham sandwich. You play as Peppino Spaghetti, a panicked, overweight chef whose anxiety could probably power several hundred Tumblr blogs. He’ll be sprinting, body-slamming, and screaming his way through a labyrinth of pizza-themed madness, and you’ll be cackling the whole time. Developed by Tour De Pizza, it’s all about momentum, and the game never stops reminding you that you’re probably doing it wrong but should keep going anyway.
The art style is pure 90s cartoon silliness laced with a bit of LSD. Jittery animation, distorted faces, and a soundtrack that sounds like a pizza party in Hell. It’s a sensory overload in a very fun way.
You’re rewarded for speed, improvisation, and sheer audacity. Pizza Tower doesn’t want you to be careful — it wants you to become Forrest Gump basically all the time, except without the unrequited love.
Rain World
Rain World doesn’t care about you having a good time — and that’s the point. You play as a fragile little slugcat trying to survive in a post-industrial ecosystem where everything bigger than you wants you dead. Developed by Videocult, it’s a brutal survival platformer wrapped in hauntingly beautiful art and weather that kills with the same enthusiasm as the predators.
Every creature has its own AI routines, hunting and hiding on their own schedule, so no two runs unfold the same. Ultimately, uou’re just lunch that got lucky. It’s punishing, obtuse, and sometimes unfair, but there is a feel and vibe to the game that makes it super arresting if you have the patience.
It really will not be for everyone, but Rain World rewards your stubbornness. It’s miserable and gorgeous in the way only a game about starving to death in the rain can be.
RimWorld
RimWorld is a colony sim about watching everything you build catch fire. Sometimes literally, sometimes emotionally. You start with a few crash-landed survivors and a dream of civilisation, then slowly realise that dream involves endless micromanagement, social drama, and the occasional psychic cat attack. Developed by Ludeon Studios, it’s The Sims if The Sims also included the plague. Let’s try not to give EA DLC ideas.
Every colonist is a walking disaster waiting to happen. They fall in love, insult each other, get addicted to drugs, and accidentally burn down the kitchen because their mood dropped two points. The emergent storytelling is where the game shines. Beneath the basic visuals, you curate a rolling tragedy that happens to involve farming.
There’s a reason why people get so utterly obsessed with this game. See, you’re not really managing people — you’re just delaying the moment when everything inevitably collapses and you have to resort to eating space pirates. Beautiful stuff.
Sea of Stars
Sea of Stars is a turn-based RPG that feels like someone time-travelled back to the SNES era, stole all the charm, and gave it modern polish. Developed by Sabotage Studio, it’s a sorta prequel to The Messenger but swaps brutal platforming for old-school adventuring. The world is gorgeous, the combat has rhythm-based timing like Mario RPG, and the soundtrack from Chrono Trigger’s Yasunori Mitsuda gets you right in the member berries
Sea of Stars is familiar RPG fun with plenty of modern trimmings to keep things engaging. You juggle combos, time your hits, and solve light puzzles between conversations that are just the right amount of corny. They joke, bicker, and actually feel like friends rather than exposition machines.
Sea of Stars doesn’t try to fix the genre — it celebrates the past, with the confidence of a studio that knows exactly why people fell in love with turn-based RPGs in the first place.
Signalis
Cor. Check out those polygons. Signalis knows its audience, but it’s also great for modern horror fans too.
Developed by rose-engine, it follows Elster, a synthetic woman searching for her lost partner across a collapsing facility full of corpses and echoes. It feels like Silent Hill and Resident Evil with a heavy dose of Blade Runner.
The fixed camera angles, scarce ammo, and puzzle-box rooms all feel lovingly PS1, but the presentation pushes it far beyond homage. The art direction is amazing and the sound design hums with unease. Beneath it all is a story about memory, identity, and loss, told in fragments that refuse to explain themselves. I couldn’t tell you what happened in my playthrough, but it was pretty cool!
And yes — it’s genuinely scary in some moments. The enemies move wrong, like broken marionettes twitching toward you in slow motion. And it doesn’t help that they screech like your average Discord mod. Play this, play this now.
The Midnight Walk
This one’s a stop-motion dark fantasy made from real clay, which already gives it a kinda “Aardman gone wrong” vibe. You’re “The Burnt One,” wandering a forested night with a nervous little lantern buddy called Potboy. You hide, distract, and outsmart things with too many teeth while trying not to snuff your only light source. It’s from MoonHood, published by Fast Travel Games, and it works in flat-screen or VR if you fancy being stared at up close.
Keep Potboy glowing, keep moving, don’t get eaten. Levels play like fables gone wrong, stitched together with handmade sets that look brilliant even when they’re wet and horrible. You’re sneaking, luring, and legging it, with small puzzles and moments to catch your breath before the mayhem descends again.
It’s moody, yet weirdly cosy for a game about things that want to devour your light. If you like claymation with teeth, this is a very easy recommendation.
Tunic
Sick of the open world direction of modern Zelda? Here, be a tiny fox.
You play in a pastel world that clearly worships old-school Zelda — except here, everything’s written in a made-up language and half the rules are hidden in a fake instruction manual you have to piece together like an archaeologist. Developed by Andrew Shouldice, it’s clever without showing off and mysterious without being pretentious.
You’ll stumble into entire mechanics hours after starting, and you have to kinda laugh at how much you’ve missed. Combat’s simple but still plenty fun. You got dodges, stamina, and the occasional panic roll into oblivion. It’s not Dark Souls, but it’s not super duper easy either.
Tunic feels like finding a lost isometric Zelda prototype, except Rito is substituted with the Duolingo bird. That’s way more fun and less judgmental than it sounds.
Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors looks like something you’d find on a random Flash site in 2006, yet it’s one of the most dangerously addictive games ever made. You move with one stick, the attacks fire automatically, and within minutes the screen’s buried under enemies, gold, and biblical amounts of particle effects. Developed by poncle, it’s proof that raw feedback and clever design can outshine a billion-dollar budget.
You start pathetic, end unstoppable, and then do it all over again because your brain’s now hardwired to chase another upgrade. Ooh, try the bloke with the whip. The soundtrack slaps, the chaos builds beautifully, and the sheer number of hidden characters and evolutions gives it ridiculous replay value.
It’s a dopamine factory disguised as a iPhone 4 game, and it knows exactly what it’s doing. You’ll tell yourself “just one more run” then realise you’re actually running away from your life in order to play this more. Worth it.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a loud, messy throwback to late-90s 3D platformers — the kind that don’t care if you fall off the map as long as you’re having a nice time. You’re a sentient taxi with no care for road safety, bouncing off walls, ramps, and furniture across bright, ridiculous levels that feel like they were designed by someone who just discovered caffeine. Developed by Panik Arcade, it’s fast, yellow, silly, and very vroom.
There’s no jump button, but instead a weird system where you like flip on your back, bounce up and then dash? It’s goofy, but once it clicks, you’re chaining leaps, bouncing into secret areas, and crashing through collectibles with proper old-school glee. The soundtrack keeps the energy high, and the humour will crack you up a lot of the time.
If you ever like Banjo Kazooie but wish it was a bit more Crazy Taxi, you just gotta go play this one.
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