Indie games are totally dominating 2024. It’s not like mainstream studios aren’t trying. Nintendo remade its worshiped role-playing game Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Square Enix did the same with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Sony ignited a thousand-year boob war with its skin-tight, Korean action-adventure Stellar Blade. But neither Nintendo’s old, mustachioed Italian plumbers nor Sony’s young, bionic K-pop idols have been intriguing enough to counter the recent downpour of fantastic and innovative indie games.
Titles like Animal Well, the first release from YouTuber Videogamedunkey’s new publisher Bigmode, and the highly anticipated roguelike sequel Hades II, which has entered its early access period, are proving a point. Not only can smaller games emanate a comparable, big-budget luster, but they also produce that glow in shockingly original contexts. But, since many of this year’s great indies were released in a late-spring conga line, you might feel lost on where to start. That’s not a problem. This list will help you sift through all of indie gaming’s new, shiny things, and it’ll help pick your next obsession based on what you already like.
If you’re not afraid of the dark … play Animal Well
The Metroidvania platformer dispelled gamers’ hesitations about new indie publisher Bigmode with its striking art style and dreamy details. As a weak glob of pollen, you’ll navigate weeping caves outfitted with all kinds of treacherous puzzles: strange buttons, razor pits, and freakish creatures spewing bubbles or flames. Tiny taper candles provide only small bubbles of refuge, since the entire nonlinear game takes place in pitch black. But they’re broken up by neon flora and fauna — the game has a laser-tag flavor to it — so Animal Well stands as a worthy reason to embrace the dark.
If you ride every roller coaster … play Crow Country
It’s a low-poly survival horror game set in an abandoned theme park. The game is unabashedly inspired by the creaky strangeness of PS1-era horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which famously filled their many empty rooms with puzzling, rusty dread. Crow Country adopts these games’ slow-burn horror into its interconnected map, in which monsters with raw skin occasionally show up and demand you waste bullets on them. But exploration is king in Crow Country, and you’ll find that ransacking the game’s old rides and blacklight arcade rooms for secret corridors is its most thrilling part, like getting engaged on Space Mountain.
If Immaculate left you wanting more … play Indika
Publisher (and FrostPunk creator) 11 Bit brings you the surreal narrative game about a girl and the devil. Kazakhstan-based developer Odd Meter packed Indika with doomed, Dostoevskian introspection, so the game tackles funny issues like the quality of one’s soul through minigames that look like picture-book pages. The nun Indika, who has Alicia Vikander’s same deep, dark stare, is on a third-person journey to find herself through snow, but unrelenting, evil thoughts keep getting in her way. Fans of Sydney Sweeney’s somber nunsploitation movie Immaculate will appreciate how Indika calmly challenges what we think is pure and what we think is horrifying.
If you couldn’t shut up about Percy Jackson … play Hades II
The sequel to breakout 2020 roguelike Hades is currently in its early access period on Steam and does not yet have an official release date, but its unfinished version offers around 20 hours of story and upgrades anyway. Like the original game, Hades II has you guide a child of the Underworld (this time, the witch-princess Melinoë) through a series of palatial dungeons in order to, ultimately, kill a god. The game’s satisfying combat loop feels even more divine through its reliance on Greek mythology, so Hades II will undoubtedly let you fulfill your middle-school wish of being Logan Lerman’s summer-camp girlfriend. Or maybe that’s just what it does for me.
If you can find your friend’s sister’s husband’s crush on Instagram … play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
It’s an eerie puzzle game that encourages delusion. Once you start playing you’ll realize that, no, you’re not being paranoid — everything in Lorelei is either a question or an answer. A mysterious man has called you, a belladonna wearing sunglasses indoors, to a stately European hotel. You’ll quickly discover that it hides supernatural secrets behind logic, math, and environmental puzzles. Since many of these puzzles have little to do with the game’s arcane story, Lorelei will reward you for note-taking and frantic texts to the group chat, two skills you may have already sharpened as an expert cyberstalker.
If you always wished Kill Bill had a Disney adaptation … play Another Crab’s Treasure
I respect your insight, and so does this game, which is kind of like The Little Mermaid with combat. The cartoon hermit crab Kril is on a mission to retrieve his forfeited shell. In the meantime, he has to use loose garbage, like empty soda cans and fissured tennis balls, to protect his body through an endless barrage of diseased sea creatures. As a Soulslike action-adventure game, Another Crab offers difficult boss fights, and it encourages you to be strategic during gameplay. But, much like Tarantino’s over-the-top butchery adds a slick layer of humor to Kill Bill’s revenge plot, Crab’s cartoon graphics and anti-pollution stance make it audacious and entertaining, never too frustrating.
If you think Law & Order would be better if Mariska Hargitay were a duck … play Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
It’s a short mystery game about, well, a duck detective. The adorable 2.5-D game tells the story of an underdog duck-tective with a penchant for white sandwich bread. By closely observing people and places, you’ll help him solve the case of a conspicuous call center by filling in the blanks of his notebook (“[person] is feeling [emotion] because [deduced reason]”). Duck Detective’s clear-cut investigations have the predictability of Law & Order’s procedural episodes, and playing through the game’s approximately two-hour run time will bring you the same satisfaction as seeing Detectives Benson and Stabler be hot near each other.
If you’re so babygirl … play Little Kitty, Big City
It’s a comforting open-world exploration game starring you, a little black kitty. Like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, Little Kitty empowers you to take gaming slow and easy with no real objectives aside from running errands for your friends. Help a squawking duck find its missing babies, for example, or knock over jars of purple jam on behalf of an ancient, whiskery cat. No matter what task you’re working through, Little Kitty is good at making you feel minuscule and mischievous in its pastel-colored city. As you paw at bluebirds in back alleys or buy hats from scavenging crows, you’ll start seeing yourself as babygirl, much like your favorite bearded prestige TV actor.
If your favorite part of Bridgerton is the shrubbery … play Botany Manor
You’re going to love this historical fiction puzzle game. You’re a plant researcher in 1890, and you’ve been charged with taking a leisurely stroll through a sprawling house and garden. As you explore, you’ll discover the poetic and scientific properties of both real and imagined flowers, like a Pixie Tears plant that sucks up sugar from nearby apple trees. Though Botany Manor takes place about 60 years after Bridgerton, it regards the past with the same romantic and fantastical eye. With its perpetually sunny skies and verdant, clandestine gardens, Botany Manor inspires similar yearning for relaxed love and luxury.
If you can’t wait to be a ghost … play Hauntii
The game is an inky, twin-stick adventure through the dense forest of Eternity. You are a thumbprint-size ghost, Hauntii, and you use fiery, turquoise “essence” to either blast things apart, like a pistol, or enter them, like The Exorcist. The game’s winding roads and dusty, orchestral score are made even more atmospheric by Hauntii’s excellent line-art graphics; the game’s opening sequence alone has the production value of a Pixar short, managing to make hundreds of pinprick stars appear lazy but transportive, like the portal that opens in your house when dust gets caught by a sunbeam. Hauntii is, by nature, a little spooky, but it treats ghosts with the gentleness of the best contemporary indie games, like Gris and Journey.
