Kingdom Come Deliverance
I love this game. No other game can quite truly capture that “you’re a dirt-poor medieval peasant, cry about it” niche. You start off as an average 1400s Czech peasant, and you end as an average 1400s Czech peasant who’s really good at bashing people in the head with a club. The combat, the theft (I love stealing), the dialogue, the detailed open world, the quests; it’s all so incredible. It’s probably the best open world RPG I’ve ever played, and it’s super historically accurate which is awesome. My favorite experience in this game: got black out drunk, woke up in the middle of the forest hungover, wandered around scared because the night time is really dark, got lost because the map doesn’t show your position, got ambushed by a bandit, spent 5 minutes punching him to a bloody pulp because I forgot my sword, found a house, broke in, and fell asleep next to the sleeping family because I was dying of exhaustion. 10/10 would Goldilocks again. – By JellynJam
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
Shovel Knight is a fantastic game. Well, technically Shovel Knight is 5 games at this point, as “”Treasure Trove”” includes all four of the massive expansions to the base game that play completely differently.. I don’t think I really need to talk about why Shovel Knight is great from a gameplay standpoint; retro style meets modern sensibilities, and there’s a great adventure to be had from it. And, after the original success, the team went above and beyond for the Kickstarter promises of three new playable characters who were just bosses originally; instead of the original plan of three characters who were a bit different than Shovel Knight, they got their own adventures, which were all fantastic. With the battle mode on top of it, which I have had some fun bouts with friends in it. The game(s) have always hit the nostalgia button while being great games in modern times.
But Shovel Knight is close to me also, in part, because the development helped me understand game development as a whole When Shovel Knight had their Kickstarter in 2013, Kickstarter games… well after so many games that raised funds and either bombed completely or misused funds (I’m looking at you, Broken Age), the Shovel Knight team was very open about their money and how they used it to keep our confidence in the project, talking very specifically how the process works. It’s a game that taught me better *how* the indie game industry works, via the talking about the game development itself and the hard reality of how to manage finances, and I will always appreciate how it was the game that really helped me understand how hard making an indie game really is, and helped me appreciate the ones that could be made.
Which is why you should never play Shovel Knight, all that sentimental emotional nonsense that doesn’t even fully apply today. – by Andrew Fields
Vagante
“Just in case you thought Spelunky wasn’t punishing enough. Vagante is a roguelike platformer set in a dark fantasy world. Play as a knight, wizard, rogue, feral human, or even a dog trainer. The amazing pixel art really softens the blow after you end a run through suicide for the tenth time. The game really picks up at about thirty hours in when you finally get past the second area for the first time. – by Will Vella
Minecraft
I’m sure there aren’t many Hard Drive readers who haven’t played Minecraft by now, but a favorite is a favorite. Sure, it hasn’t been an indie game since Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang in 2014, but this game has been keeping me company since I was a sophomore high school sophomore in 2011, and its indie roots are still undoubtedly clear. Hell, just acknowledging that it’s a Microsoft title feels kinda weird because the game lacks the vibe of a big IP, or at least it did for most of its life. The organic sound design, geometric looks, and nearly limitless terrain to explore then ignore in favor of building a mining empire—it’s a solid time killer and consistent as hell. Honestly I’ll probably be playing this game until I die or at least until they release Minecraft 2. – by Ian Guyette
El Paso, Elsewhere
El Paso, Elsewhere is perhaps my favorite game of 2023. It appeals to my own specific sensibilities to such an extreme degree that I am perhaps not to be trusted. Regardless, you should, because it is a goddamn piece of art. The Max Payne esque gameplay is action heavy and very well executed. Mainly, though, the draw for me was the story. Hack, slash, and shoot your way ever-closer to Draculae’s dark ritual. It’s worth noting that she is your ex. Fully voiced, with a full Hip Hop album, and with dialogue so good it feels raw and real, this is neo-noir at its best. For the love of God please play this game. – by Mason Kennedy
The Swapper
Atmospheric sci-fi themed indie puzzle games are practically a genre unto themselves- but The Swapper proves that the best atmospheric sci-fi themed indie puzzle games are the ones where you make clones of yourself, and then sacrifice those clones on the alter of scratching that puzzle-solving itch. The Swapper is what happens when you stretch the cold, metallic aesthetic of Dead Space over the skeleton of Lemmings, as you solve puzzle after puzzle by blasting your consciousness into a cloned version of your avatar with an awesome gun. The player may find themselves asking deep philosophical questions like “does this clone share my memories? do they feel pain? would it be weird if we kissed, or would it be like kissing my own reflection in a mirror?”. Haunting, beautiful, and a deep enough cut that by mentioning it you just might impress that friend of yours who’s always so smug about beating The Witness. The Swapper is sure to satisfy your inner puzzle-lover, but remember: every clone you callously murder in your relentless, single-minded pursuit of victory will weigh heavily on your shoulders. But mostly, it’s pretty fun! – By Cameron Daxon
Limbo
Limbo is a mix of fairy tale, fever dream, and huge spiders. Run and climb your way through nefarious puzzles and risk getting drowned, squished, eaten, poisoned, and electrocuted if your timing is off or you can’t sprint fast enough. Stressful as hell, fun as hell. – by Sean Fallon
ShellShock Live
There used to a game similar to this on coolmathgames.com and my 5th grade math teacher would let us play that when she got tired of teaching a bunch of idiot middle schoolers. When I finally found ShellShock Live, I spent so much time holding up rulers and protractors to my laptop screen to perfectly line up my Pyrotechnics shot. At one point, I even tried messing around with sine, cosine, and tangent BS like I actually paid attention in math class. – by Neel Bhakta
Hotline Miami
Between the release of this game and the Harlem Shake, the internet of late 2012 experienced a rubber animal mask renaissance the likes of which we may never see again. With just a couple hours of polished, brutally addictive gameplay and one of the most iconic artistic languages in gaming history, Hotline Miami burst onto the scene with nothing but muscle, serious fangs, and a bad attitude. I mean, how often is a game’s action so electric that they immortalize it in a John Wick movie? – Dr. Jill Biden
Ultimate Chicken Horse
Indie games often reach for higher levels of artistry and emotional resonance than mainstream games. That of course, is the coward’s path. Ultimate Chicken Horse understands that the two true pillars of gaming are being good at jumping and making your friends angry.
The crew at Clever Endeavor Games have created a competitive 2D platformer, perfect for rage-inducing couch co-op sessions. Everyone places platforms, traps, and contraptions on an increasingly hectic map and then they race to see who can finish first. Add in cute animal characters and inventive maps and you’ve got the perfect indie party game. ” – by Jacob VanGundy
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
Ah, hello there. I see you’ve expressed an interest in “The Stanley Parable.” How delightful! This is a game, or is it? It’s more like a story… but also a game. A narrative experience, let’s say. You play as Stanley, or do you? Stanley is Employee 427, working in an office where he pushes buttons as instructed. One day, the instructions stop. How curious!
“”The Stanley Parable” is less of a game and more of an existential crisis. It’s perfect for those who find joy in questioning the fabric of their reality every few minutes. You thought you understood free will? Cute. This game will have you second-guessing every choice you’ve ever made, including the one to start playing it. Welcome to your new obsession. – by Aisha Josiah
Hell’s High Harmonizers
I know it’s only $5 in Steam. I know it’s a (mostly) 2-bit simulation RPG. I know the English translation isn’t the smoothest. I know it’s not the most visually appealing game… But goddammit, do I love Hell’s High Harmonizers.
It may seem dark at first; a monochrome palette will tend to do that. Within your first couple of days however, you will find a whimsical and soft slice-of-life charm to Hell’s High Harmonizers. Yes, you will fail missions, but there’s always the next day. After all, it’s Hell; you’re immortal, remember?
You get to customize your character in the neatest ways, and recruit a multitude of characters, including the cutest little cabbage dog. Combat and adventure is done through text, and there’s stats needed for different encounters for the missions.
All in all, $5 on Steam (a bit of a steeper price of $12 on the Nintendo eShop, but alas, I’m a sucker for indie games on my Switch) leads to a fun wholesome time. Go on, my computer-headed denizen of Hell. Harmonize some highs. – by Finch Vandal, who would like to remind everyone that Best Friends deserve the AEW Tag Team Championships and that 2024 is the year Chuck Taylor and Trent Baretta get the big one.
Signalis
Signalis answers a question as old as time, what if anime weren’t insufferable? What if almost all the characters in a game could be anime girls and nobody that played it belonged in federal prison? Taking place on the icy world of Sierpinkski-23, Signalis is The Thing meets Silent Hill meets the gay agenda. The two person design team on this game, Yuri Stern and Barbara Whittmann, prove definitively that you don’t need to have 100 game devs in chains to make a great horror game, you just need two. – by Spookiest Nick
Flower
I can already feel you shoving me in a locker as I describe this game. Flower epitomizes the indie game aesthetic by letting you control the wind, guiding a petal through lush landscapes, seeking to connect with other flowers and accumulating petals as you go. So yeah, it’s exactly like Call of Duty.
Despite the boos I can already hear coming from the back, I promise you this pictorial journey is the perfect escape from a hectic world. Nothing will help you forget a stressful work email quite like combining the power of the Moneyball audiobook with the delicate sway of your aging PS4 controller, channeling the whimsical force of nature. – by Matt McInerney
Vampire Survivors
Have you ever thought, “I like twin stick shooters, but they use too many sticks?” Of course you haven’t, I’m the only person the goddamn planet who still talks about twin sticks, but you should check out Vampire Survivors anyway. With just about the simplest control scheme possible, a slew of interesting weapons and upgrades, and incredible pixel art paying loving homage to (mainly) Castlevania, it’s a great way to just chill out and kill 10 000 of something without really feeling stressed about it. Add in a decently complex system of persistent unlocks, and it’s also easy to get way more focused without even meaning to. Overall, it’s a great casual game that I’ve personally spent dozens of hours playing. – by Bex
Outer Wilds
Every time I tell one of my co-workers about Outer Wilds, they say “Sick, I’ll put it on my list” and then they forget about it after 22 minutes. Sure, I get the joy of geeking out about it all over again — but it’s a little weird they remember for so little time. And lonely. – by Aaraf Afzal
TOEM
TOEM is a charming lil’ photography simulator. You explore a set of Scandinavian-inspired biomes populated with quirky questgivers, and take photos for (and of) them. The fun of it is less in the product and more in the process: You get a handful of tools to harass NPCs, look for secrets, and manipulate your photos. You won’t be hanging any pics you snap on your fridge or anything, but if you’re like me and you like the little “Beep” sound the office fridge makes every time you open and close it, you’ll love TOEM. (Sorry, office). – by Aaraf Afzal
Cuphead
It’s a basic answer, but can you blame me? While the run-and-gun gameplay can be tear-your-hair-out difficult, every piece of Cuphead‘s package is lovingly crafted to reflect 1930s “rubber hose” animation. Plus, the boss design is phenomenal, as you can picture each one saying a variety of old-timey racial slurs. How much more authentic to the 30s can you get? Two gloved thumbs up! – by Trayton Miller
Enter the Gungeon
What makes a great indie game? Is it an intriguing art style? Compelling lore? Or a sheer ‘f**k you’ difficulty level? Enter the Gungeon is a bullet hell, rogue-like dungeon crawler that is painstakingly unforgiving. Traverse enemy littered levels, dodging wave after wave of bullets, and collecting whimsical weapons from classic video games. Want a gun that turns enemies into chickens? This game’s got it! Want to kill an Ammocanda with Mega Man’s Mega Buster? The Gungeon has exactly that. I’ve come back to this game time and time again just to be brutally humbled by the difficulty. I’ll dodge roll my way out of the Gungeon one of these days. – by Garrison DeSieno
Loop Hero
Does life ever feel like you’re wandering through a barren, apocalyptic hellscape that was ruined well before you came into being? Has the famous line from True Detective that “”time is a flat circle”” started to hit a little too close to home as you enter middle age? Does seeing 16-bit graphics fill you with a wash of dopamine and serotonin that reminds you life is worth living? Do you love being idle? Have I got a game for you. For when life has crushed you to the point that multiplayer is way too much socializing and, hell, even single-player sounds like a lot of effort, there’s the zero-player masterpiece Loop Hero.
It is the game for all seasons. You can sit, slack-jawed and dissociative, contemplating the world as the game plays itself, watching your hero move in a ceaseless loop, default monsters getting stronger with each lap. The hero will lose badly, of course, and that’s why for some reason they give you a deck, where cards allow you to control beneficial landscape tile placement, enemy placement, and equipment for your autonomous hero, with a number of cards needing to be played to summon the boss.
You’ll give the hero all the help you can and they will die anyway, over and over–and it’s all your fault every time they do, as you placed the monsters which killed them and equipped them to face the hordes. Perhaps the messiest god sim* of all time, Loop Hero asks you to empathize with a faceless hero whom you cannot directly control, root for them and try to make them as powerful as you can, while building a world which will probably kill them over and over again.
*It’s not a god sim, please don’t yell”
Shovel Knight
This is the indie game that got me into indie games. I used to play this on my 3DS on the train while commuting to my unpaid internship downtown, and I think it’s the only thing that kept me sane for a little while there. It’s a tribute to the great platformers of the NES era that simultaneously honors them and improves upon them with the new tech available. And it blurs that line seamlessly. The references don’t feel like shameless pulls as they are masterfully integrated into the gameplay — Castlevania, Super Mario Bros. 3, and even Ducktales get nods in this modern day platformer. Also they continued to release a bunch of free DLC in the form of entirely new campaigns. How awesome is that? Yacht Club games, you are truly goated for that one, or whatever. I’m too old to be talking like this still, ironically or not. – by Kevin Podas
Night In The Woods
Night In The Woods is a video game version of a Weird Al Polka medley combining A Nightmare On Elm Street, Slacker, Halloween (1978), Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, The Wicker Man (1973), Waking Life, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Clerks, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Gremlins, The House of the Devil, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Hot Fuzz, The Goonies, I Know What You Did Last Summer, SubUrbia, and The Blair Witch Project into adventure game with anamorphic animals and a solid story about mental health. -by Dan Bookbinder
Rolled Out!
It’s Super Monkey Ball. That’s all you wanted to know, right? Listen. It’s been in EARLY Early-Access for like two years, it’s never being finished, making it the perfect indie game for you to ignore. Is it really good? Absolutely. Is the announcer as grating on your ears? Of course. Maybe by the time this game is actually finished you’ll want to play it. – by Micah Bain
Barotrauma
Barotrauma is a multiplayer co-op submarine simulator with gameplay consisting of intense missions and underwater combat. Barotrauma night is the best night of the week. I dream of the damp, murky submarine air. It has torn the fibers of my being and stitched me back together. Every successful mission gives me a rush of indescribable ecstasy that I imagine is like holding your newborn son for the first time. And success is one thing, but to die alongside my brothers and sisters of the depths? Oh, bliss all the same. In the morning, my co-workers see me as Woman the Sales Person, but no…in my heart I am Capt. Smeepo Bon Doopu of the S.S. Big Bagungus. – by Rachel Javorsky, a Brooklyn-based comedian, writer, and producer.
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