The Best Indie Games of All Time, According to Someone Who Actually Plays Them

Every "best indie games" list on the internet includes Hollow Knight, Celeste, Hades, and Stardew Valley. They're great games. You already know about them. You don't need me to tell you Hades is good.

So this list is going to do something slightly different. Yes, the undeniable classics are here — you can't write this list honestly without them. But we're also including games that don't show up on every other list, games that pushed their genres forward in ways that don't always get the recognition they deserve, and games that prove indie development keeps getting more interesting, not less.

The Ones That Changed Everything

Minecraft started as one person's side project and became the best-selling game of all time. That sentence still sounds absurd. Notch built the alpha in a week, charged people for early access before that was a common business model, and accidentally invented a genre and a cultural phenomenon. Everything about modern indie development — early access, community-driven updates, solo developers building empires — traces back to Minecraft proving it was possible.

Undertale proved that a single developer with a clear creative vision could make something that resonates with millions. Toby Fox made a game where the combat system is also the narrative system, where your choices about violence are the story, and where the final boss fight of the pacifist route made the entire internet cry. It's been nearly a decade and nothing has quite replicated what Undertale does.

Hollow Knight set a new standard for what indie games could look like and feel like. Team Cherry made a metroidvania with art direction that rivals anything from a major studio, a world that feels genuinely vast, and combat that's tight enough to support multiple fan-made challenge runs. The fact that they charged $15 for a game with 40+ hours of content was almost insulting to how much work clearly went into it.

Celeste is the best platformer ever made, and I'll defend that take. The controls are perfect — not good, perfect. The difficulty curve teaches you its mechanics through level design rather than tutorials. And the narrative about anxiety and self-doubt is woven into the gameplay so naturally that the story and the mechanics become the same thing. Madeline climbing the mountain IS the metaphor, and it works because the climbing feels incredible.

Stardew Valley was made entirely by one person over four years and outsold most games made by teams of hundreds. ConcernedApe taught himself to program, make pixel art, compose music, and write dialogue because nobody else was making the Harvest Moon successor he wanted to play. That level of stubborn creative ownership is the purest expression of what indie development means.

The Genre Definers

Slay the Spire created the roguelike deckbuilder genre. The games that existed before it had cards and had roguelike elements, but Slay the Spire found the specific combination of card drafting, relic synergies, and escalating difficulty that made the formula click. Everything from Balatro to Inscryption to the wave of indie deckbuilders still coming out owes its existence to this game.

Vampire Survivors did the same thing for bullet heavens. Poncle took a concept from a 2019 mobile game, stripped it to its most addictive core loop, and accidentally launched a genre that now has hundreds of entries and its own Steam festival. The fact that it costs less than a coffee and provides dozens of hours of entertainment is part of why it worked — low price, zero friction, pure dopamine.

Spelunky defined what a modern roguelike could be. Derek Yu proved that procedural generation plus tight platforming mechanics plus permadeath could create something with near-infinite replayability. Every roguelike released since 2012 exists in Spelunky's shadow.

Hades proved that roguelikes could also tell compelling stories. Supergiant figured out that if death is a mechanic, then conversations between deaths can be narrative progress. The writing is sharp, the voice acting is exceptional, and the combat is satisfying enough to sustain dozens of runs even after you've seen the story through.

Balatro proved you don't need combat, characters, or a narrative to make one of the most addictive games in years. It's poker plus deckbuilding plus math, and it consumed the gaming internet for months. LocalThunk made it solo, and watching the game's complexity unfold as you discover new joker combinations is one of the best experiences in recent gaming.

The Hidden Ones

Outer Wilds is the best game most people haven't played. You explore a solar system stuck in a 22-minute time loop, piecing together an alien civilization's story through environmental storytelling and physics-based space flight. There are no upgrades, no unlocks, no progression systems. The only thing that progresses is your understanding. When you finally put the pieces together, it's one of the most profound moments in any game, period.

Return of the Obra Dinn gave you an insurance claim form and turned it into one of the best detective games ever made. Lucas Pope's follow-up to Papers, Please has you identifying 60 crew members on a ghost ship using a pocket watch that lets you see the moment of each person's death. The 1-bit art style is striking, the deduction is genuinely challenging, and the satisfaction of correctly identifying a crew member from a tiny contextual clue is unmatched.

Disco Elysium is the best-written game of all time. That's not hyperbole. ZA/UM created an RPG where your skills are voices in your head arguing with each other, where your character's alcoholism and self-destruction are mechanics, and where the political philosophy is treated with more nuance than most actual political philosophy. It's dense, it's weird, and it's brilliant.

Inscryption starts as a creepy card game in a cabin and then becomes something entirely different three times over. Daniel Mullins made a game that breaks its own genre, breaks the fourth wall, and breaks your expectations repeatedly. Saying anything more specific would ruin it.

A Short Hike is a two-hour game about climbing a mountain as a bird. It's gentle, it's charming, and it's exactly as long as it needs to be. Not every great game has to be a hundred-hour epic. Sometimes the best indie games are the ones that respect your afternoon.

What we make at Choost

We're a small indie studio. Our games: Granny's Rampage — a bullet heaven where grandma grabs a minigun and fights through hell — and Granny's Gambit, a Victorian deckbuilder roguelike starring a card-slinging nan with a chip on her shoulder. Granny's Rampage is $2.99 on itch (Windows) and Google Play (Android), with the Steam launch on June 22 (also $2.99). Granny's Gambit is pay-what-you-want on itch.

The Recent Standouts

Lethal Company proved that horror and comedy can coexist perfectly. Zeekerss made a co-op horror game about working a terrible job for a terrible company in a terrible economy, and the internet fell in love with it. The monsters are scary. The physics-based item hauling is hilarious. The combination creates moments that are simultaneously terrifying and the funniest thing you've seen all week.

Buckshot Roulette turned Russian roulette into a strategy game with a shotgun, and it works way better than it should. Mike Klubnika made a game that costs less than a sandwich and provides one of the tensest gaming experiences available. The AI opponent's tells, the item system, and the sound design create a game that's much deeper than its premise suggests.

Megabonk took the bullet heaven formula into 3D and sold a million copies in two weeks. It's proof that the survivors-like genre has room for innovation beyond "Vampire Survivors but with a different theme."

And then there are games like Granny's Rampage that prove the indie spirit is alive in the smallest studios too. A bullet heaven starring a grandmother with a minigun, built by a solo developer using AI tools — it's exactly the kind of weird, personal, uncompromising game that could only exist in the indie space.

The indie scene has never been more productive or more diverse than it is right now. Solo developers and small teams are shipping games that compete with — and frequently surpass — the output of major studios. The tools are better, the distribution is more accessible, and the audience for weird, personal, uncompromising games keeps growing.

The best indie game of all time is probably one that hasn't been made yet. But the ones on this list set the bar, and the bar is high.