The best indie games of 2024

If you’re looking for restraint, you will not find it in Echo Point Nova. Within the first 30 minutes of the game, you’ll find yourself equipped with a hoverboard capable of climbing any vertical surface, a grappling hook that can latch onto clouds, and a triple jump. This game does not hold back the goods.

Echo Point Nova is an open-world FPS that offers nearly total freedom. Once you’ve got your basic loadout, you’re free to explore the enormous map of hundreds of floating islands and enemy bases. There is a story, delivered via in-world text popups, but you’ll likely miss much of it as you’re soaring over an ice mountain trying to dive-bomb a giant robot. It is an untethered power fantasy.

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One of the most inspiring things about humanity is that no matter where we end up, we can find a way to thrive. Take, for instance, the setting of Threshold, an indie game by a developer who previously worked on Deathloop and Dishonored. Threshold takes place on the peak of a high mountain, where you play as someone embarking on one of the most stressful maintenance gigs available. I watch the trains go by, and make sure that they run on time. The air is so thin, I often struggle and choke my way through a shift. My predecessor is buried nearby, and my co-worker is just relieved that someone is there to share the burden.

There’s a country-based difficulty system, or at least the Steam page advertises one. I chose Canada, and the game begins with an ominous display of my home country and flag. I load into my little worker’s room and spot a shirt that says “I love Ottawa.” As a proud Torontonian, I frown. This game is already insulting me. This is true psychological horror.

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Fields of Mistria’s one big problem is that its day cycle is really quick — time moves fast, and before you know it, it’s 2 a.m. and you’ve passed out in the mines. The big new update released on Nov. 18 doesn’t adjust the cycle at all, but it has one new feature that I’ve found pretty helpful: animal mounts. If you’ve met certain requirements, you’ll be able to unlock a purple horse called Mistmare.

After a windstorm, Hayden will ask for help in finding his weathervane, and while you look for it, you’ll stumble on a new statue. That’s where you’ll unlock Mistmare for 100 essence. There are customization options that’ll come later, but the benefits of Mistmare are immediate. She’s a horse, and horses are faster than humans. You can ride her anywhere outside, which is wildly helpful for getting around Fields of Mistria’s big map more quickly. Again, it doesn’t solve the game’s problem with short days, but I’ve found myself passing out much, much less when I stay too late in the mines; I just jump on Mistmare and rush back to the comforts of my own bed instead of crawling through Mistria at a walking speed that feels like a glacier’s pace when you’re racing the clock.

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This review was published upon Neva’s release in October, but we’re updating it upon its three Game Awards nominations, including Best Indie Game.

I am not a woman with a sword, and I don’t live in a soft, watercolor world that’s quickly being overcome by dark, spindly shadows. But I feel like I do. Most days are a fight as I slash back at the abyss that threatens to overwhelm; I have a lot more in common, right now, with Neva’s striking human character Alba than I expected.

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It’s the 1970s, and The Case of the Golden Idol is ancient history. What was the stuff of legends and myth — Lemurian history — in The Case of the Golden Idol is almost entirely unknowable, told in the shadows by the weirdest of conspiracy theorists and fringe historians. Anything that was known about the golden idol and its powers broke alongside it at the end of The Case of the Golden Idol. The Rise of the Golden Idol kicks off with a scientist face down, dead in the snow; the cycle begins anew. “The world has changed dramatically,” Color Gray Games wrote in its description of the sequel. “The sins of humanity have not.”

At the outset of Rise, there’s no immediate mention of the idol or the role it may play, but several people — mostly unhoused people and one prestigious scientist — have been found dead from various causes, all with glowing red eyes. Like in The Case of the Golden Idol, the first order of business in The Rise of the Golden Idol is to start piecing together clues built into the game’s scenes. While in The Case of the Golden Idol these scenes were static and made with pixel art, Color Gray Games’ team has advanced the art alongside the centuries: Scenes are still largely static, albeit with some looping animation on certain details, but now rendered in a grotesque art style that’s reminiscent of Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó’s Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, or As Told by Ginger instead of classic video games.

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At the risk of being entirely unrelatable: You know that music they play at the spa? That synthy, spaced-out soundscape type of stuff that isn’t exactly music, but isn’t exactly not music? The sort of playlist you can find if you take a wrong turn from your favorite lo-fi playlist? Chord after relaxing chord, interspersed with birdsong, rain sounds, or crackling fire? Well, Europa is that, but in video game form — at least when it comes to its gameplay.

Europa, developed by Helder Pinto and Novadust Entertertainment, is a game mostly about gently floating through cel-shaded environments to soothing piano and electronic music. You play as Zee, a humanoid boy who uses a “Zephyr” backpack to fly through serene landscapes riddled with overgrown ruins and cutesy robots. In its opening hours, Europa feels like it ought to have been titled Beautiful Vista Simulator, as it shuttles you from overlook to stunning overlook, panning the camera out to show off the game’s painterly aesthetic and surprising scope. If you liked the opening of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Europa does that kind of epic zoom-out every 30 minutes or so. (Only a slight exaggeration.)

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The runaway success of Luca Galante’s Vampire Survivors has inspired many imitators: new games like HoloCure – Save the Fans! and Halls of Torment, as well as spinoffs of existing popular titles like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and League of Legends’ temporary Swarm game mode.

A new contender has burst onto the scene, and it’s quite fun — if you’re willing to give it a few hours. Karate Survivor, released by developer and publisher Alawar on Oct. 30 for PC, is a Vampire Survivors-like that takes inspiration from ’80s action movies, and specifically the Hong Kong action movies of that era. The game nails the brief aesthetically — the models for the player characters, enemies, and environments (Supermarket, Bar, Rooftop, Construction Site, and Subway) look straight out of the movies the game is hoping to evoke — you’ve got lots of denim, vests, and a general ’80s vibe to the animation style. Plus, the movement of the action is smooth and fluid, which is a must for any game playing off the legacy of ’80s Hong Kong action cinema.

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Being lost in a dark and unfamiliar location is a common fear, and a great start to a horror game. Filling that place with weird, menacing monsters is even better. One horror game adds another novel twist to the formula: I have no idea what anyone is saying, and I have to piece this strange, foreign language together before I’m viciously murdered. Welcome to Homicipher, a “female-targeted language deciphering and exploration ADV based on the concept of ‘romance with horror men.’” I’ve never played anything like it.

Homicipher starts out with a very simple premise: I’m alone in a new place, I’ve lost my bag, and I’m in a rusted-out old hallway with flickering lights and a hunched, menacing figure called Mr. Crawling. I sprint away, only to be confronted by Mr. Hood, a Grim Reaper-style specter. Luckily, Mr. Hood is much nicer than his colleague, and we take part in a little impromptu language lesson. He teaches me a few basic words like “me” and “you” before I stumble onto the next hallway.

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Keiichirō Toyama is a developer’s developer. He may not be a name you know off the top of your head, like Shigeru Miyamoto or Hideo Kojima, but you’re probably familiar with one of the many games he’s directed, such as Silent Hill, Siren, or Gravity Rush. His latest game, Slitterhead, feels like a culmination of his nearly 30-year career so far: an action-horror stealth thriller about two warring factions of parasitic creatures vying for control over the fate of humanity. Moreover, it’s a game where truth really is just a matter of perspective, as you jump between several different characters in your search for both an understanding of and resolution to the game’s ongoing conflict.

In Slitterhead, players assume the role of a Hyoki, a nameless, disembodied entity with the power to possess unsuspecting living creatures and control their bodies at will. At the game’s outset, you find yourself in the body of a stray dog wandering the back alleys of Kowlong, a fictional neon-bathed metropolis inspired by ’90s Hong Kong, specifically the densely populated enclave known as Kowloon Walled City. You have no memory of who you are, what you are, and how you got here.

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I love driving. I love the physical act of it — controlling this big, sophisticated machine like it’s an extension of me. But I also love the poetry and adventure of long-distance drives — the freedom, the self-reliance, the gradually changing landscape, the sense of limitless possibilities.

Video games are fantastic at capturing the first of these things, in Gran Turismo and countless other racing games. Sometimes, they try to do both things at once. Open-world driving games like Forza Horizon deliver a compressed and heightened dose of the pleasures of the road trip, while the Truck Simulator series offers a more workaday, realistic take on it — and Desert Bus infamously parodied the boredom inherent in the idea of simulating long drives.

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There’ve been a ton of great horror games released recently, between major titles like the Silent Hill 2 remake, the indie survival horror game Hollowbody, and horror-themed DLC like Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred. One title fans of survival horror games should pay attention to among all these big releases is Tenebris Somnia, an upcoming survival horror adventure game that has a new demo on PC this week as part of this year’s Steam Next Fest. Here’s the pitch: It’s a retro-inspired horror game that features Famicom-style graphics interspersed with bone-chilling live-action cutscenes, and the combined result is as novel and entertaining as it is jarring and terrifying.

Developed by Argentinian filmmaker Andrés Borghi in collaboration with Saibot Games and published by New Blood Interactive, Tenebris Somnia centers on Julia, a film student who has recently broken up with her college boyfriend Ivan. Upon returning to Ivan’s apartment to return her copy of his key, Julia quickly realizes that something is not quite right. From there, she’s thrust into a dark supernatural story brimming with alternate dimensions, occult sacrifices, and chthonic entities and horrors that look like they stepped straight out of Clive Barker’s imagination.

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What if we just quit our jobs, moved back home, and started up a frog refuge with our childhood pals? That’s the premise of developer Humble Reeds’ creature collecting game Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge. And it’s a delight. If you’ve played Neko Atsume, you’ll understand the base gameplay of Kamaeru — attract frogs to your wetlands frog sanctuary. You’ll place furniture and toys on the refuge grounds, build builds and plant reeds, attract bugs to feed the frogs, all to lure them into staying. Kamaeru doesn’t have the same pure, simple bliss that Neko Atsume had, but it’s still a sweet, chill time.

Beyond bringing frogs to the yard, Kamaeru builds off creature collecting to add management sim elements: You’ll also harvest reeds and berries to create jam and paper cups to sell, the proceeds of which are important to build up the sanctuary. There’s also a biodiversity meter, which means you need to pay attention to what sorts of nature you put down, and to make sure you’re quickly removing invasive plant species. Lastly, you’re also breeding frogs to create unique, colorful combinations — like a frog with leopard spots. Though it sounds like a lot, it is all pretty simple: You can just take photos of your frogs as they come and go. (However, the way frogs come and go is probably the worst part of the game. They disappear quite quickly, meaning you do somewhat have to rush to feed and photograph them, bringing my heartrate up a little in what’s typically a chill game.)

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Grunn is a game about gardening. It is a very normal game where things are exactly as they appear, or at least that’s the kayfabe developer Tom van den Boogaart likes to spin up around the project. But things immediately seem off as I start my journey in Grunn. The bus driver’s face is wrong, and I can’t make out anything he’s saying. I’ve just arrived at my new job site, and the vibes are absolutely rancid.

It’s hard to say what type of game Grunn is, exactly, because it defies conventional genres. It is a gardening game where I spend chunks of time carefully trimming hedges and clipping away at tall grass. It’s also a game where I found a skeleton and had to soothe its upset ghost with my magical trumpet. That victory was short-lived, as I fell into a trap and drowned shortly after.

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A good horror game scares you in the moment, but a great horror game lingers in the back of your mind well past the end credits. We’ve been blessed in recent years with a plethora of excellent horror games, but with the arrival of October comes even more spooky games to get us nice and scared before Halloween. Mouthwashing immediately gripped me with its jarring, off-putting visuals, and kept me pinned under the weight of mounting dread.

Mouthwashing is a three-hour narrative experience that takes place on the Tulpar, a Pony Express courier ship in the middle of a long-haul trip through space to deliver cargo. It’s your typical sci-fi capitalist dystopia; humanity trekking among the stars has not done anything to ease corporate control over workers’ lives. Despite this, the crew are a tight bunch: There’s the grumpy veteran Swansea, the anxious and avoidant nurse Anya, and the cheerful himbo Daisuke. Rounding out the crew are the co-pilots, Captain Curly and Jimmy. The game begins with a horrific crash, leaving the ship stranded and off course.

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Over on Cheap Digicam TikTok, there’s a lot of talk about recipes these days. Recipes in this context are congregations of specific camera settings that can generate very specific film-like effects in digital photographs. Want a bloomy 1970s sunset or a cityscape with bokeh pearls the size of snowballs? Good news. There are recipes for that.

I spend quite a lot of time on Cheap Digicam TikTok, so it’s probably inevitable that I’ve started to see these kinds of recipes hiding within other facets of life too. Most recently I’ve been thinking of Nova Drift as a source of really great recipes. Nova Drift is an arcade space blaster in which you shoot everything that moves and level up regularly. And when you level up, you get to change some aspect of your ship, of your abilities, of who you’re going to be out there in the universe for the next five hectic minutes.

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I wasn’t able to start enjoying Moonloop Games’ Hauntii until I let go of the idea of playing the game correctly. Chasing a mysterious ghost through Hauntii’s gorgeously stylized afterlife, I kept asking myself: Am I doing this right? Moonloop Games does begin with an exploration of the buttons and their functions, but that’s about it. What you do next is up to you. Thankfully, it did not take long to start messing around with what’s possible and what’s not — and I started to appreciate Hauntii’s few expectations, a similar experience I had with A Short Hike, one of my all-time favorite games.

Everything in Hauntii is light or dark; playing as an inky ghost — new to the afterlife — I’m following an angelic figure throughout the darkened world. I navigate by following the light and creating it where there is none, via Hauntii’s twin-stick mechanic. Using one stick to move and another to shoot, I can fire away at enemy beings or I can inhabit objects to shake their light free, creating a path to wherever I’m heading next. But where am I heading next? Am I going in the right direction? I haven’t yet finished Hauntii, so I really don’t know. And that’s OK.

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If there were ever a video game I’d like to live in, it’d be developer Pounce Light’s Tiny Glade, a scene-building game where you design castles and gardens straight out of a fairytale. Its muted colors and satisfying sounds only add to the near-perfect atmosphere: You can hear the bricks fall into place as you stack a stonework wall around your wizard’s tower or watch the sheep wander your vast fields. Tiny Glade feels like a mixture of Lego building and painting; with no goals or objectives, Tiny Glade is all vibes.

It’s also part of a growing trend of scene-building games that follow a similar structure, allowing players access to a sandbox full of tools — something more akin to a pile of creative toys than anything else. Over the past several years, there’s been an influx of games that are all atmosphere; the developer puts tools into a player’s hands and then steps back to let them play with it all.

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Like limited-time public demos, media hands-on preview builds often feature handy text boxes that flash on the screen to inform the player that only a few minutes remain. During my half-hour with Atomfall at Gamescom, one appeared while I was chatting with the flat-capped landlord of a painstakingly British pub. Alf Buckshaw of the Grendel’s Head had done well to frame the world beyond his grimy windows, waxing about the post-government military quarantines and Droog-like bandit gangs that have cropped up in the wake of Rebellion’s fictionalized exaggeration of a real 20th-century nuclear disaster. But time was of the essence, so I brandished a cricket bat and started lamping the poor bloke in the head. To my surprise, he was up for a scrap, even in his old age.

Playing a choice-driven RPG with a built-in time limit can force you to do some strange and ethically murky things. And I don’t typically do so with an in-person audience, so it was hard not to worry about the judgment being passed over my shoulder by Rebellion’s head of design, Ben Fisher. After I was gunned down by a tipsy soldier for my crimes against the elderly, I stood up for a quick chat about this inimitable Cumbrian STALKER-like.

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You ever lose your engagement ring in a claw machine? No? Me either. But in Cupiclaw, a “roguelike deck-building claw machine game” from French developer Julien Tran, you’ll play as a man named Morris who lost his engagement ring and needs to furiously play a very expensive claw machine to win it back.

Cupiclaw is not out just yet, but Tran has a demo available on Steam, where you’ll be able to play through five levels. Basically, the gist of Cupiclaw is that you’ve got to play the claw machine and win prizes to afford to move on to the next claw machine — then keep doing that until you’re able to find Morris’ ring. Simple, right? Well, Cupiclaw is actually pretty hard: The roguelike, deck-building aspects of the game mean there’s strategy both in what prizes you go after and in the new prizes you can choose in between each round, which are then added to the claw machine. Each prize has its own characteristic that changes how you’ll play. For instance, there’s a gem you can add to the machine that boosts the prize payout for all teddy bears you collect. But if you don’t collect any teddy bears, you’re effectively losing out on tons of coins.

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Nancy Maple had spent mere minutes in the Crimson Lodge before I got her killed in The Crimson Diamond. The amateur mineralogist — on an errand with the Royal Canadian Museum, where she works as a clerk — spent hours on a train heading deep into the Canadian wilderness, in search of diamonds. I figured she’d like a shower. So I click Nancy through the Crimson Lodge, peering into rooms and occasionally saying hi to other guests. I find a bathroom with a tub and shower, maneuver Nancy next to it, and type Take a shower. It doesn’t work, because Nancy is fully clothed. I type Undress, and Nancy won’t do it because the door’s open. Makes sense! I point Nancy to the door. Close the door. Now Undress. Back at the shower, I peck out Turn on water valve on my keyboard. Switch to shower. Now Nancy can get in.

But then, The Crimson Diamond cuts to a different angle, Nancy’s silhouette behind a shower curtain. The music shifts. Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows what’s about to happen next — the door handle jiggles. The door opens. Nancy is stabbed to death. I forgot to lock the door.

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Bridges collapsed, buildings crumbled — the sleepy town of Mistria must rebuild. You can see the earthquake’s devastation in Mistria’s sidewalks and buildings too worn to enter. But you can also see its beauty — something that’s evident not only in its lush spring flowers and berry-laden bushes, but in its people, too. Around the edges of destruction, the people of Mistria continue on with life. A group gathers weekly to play “Dungeons & Drama” (remind you of anything?); Celine, all blond hair and braids, tends to flowers in her garden bed; March, a grumpy young blacksmith, forges swords and shovels at his shop; Reina, a quiet, masterful cook, preps stews at the inn; and the ever-optimistic Adeline acts as the town’s mayor. To put it simply, Mistria is alive — its buzz radiates from its town core, spreads into its wilderness, and seeps down into its mines.

Fields of Mistria, the first game from Chicago-based NPC Studio, begins like many farming simulators do: A wayward adventurer moves to town with little but a hardworking spirit, into a neglected cabin on a patch of land that’s primed for farming. Adeline offers the player character this old farm in exchange for some help rebuilding Mistria after the earthquake. From the first swing of your ax, Fields of Mistria is sending a message — this is a game about community. It’s not necessarily a revelatory idea for games of this genre: In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’re building up an island locale; in Story of Seasons or Harvest Moon, you’re integrating yourself into a world; and in Stardew Valley, you’re restoring a community center. Fields of Mistria’s foundation is built upon the legacy of these games and others, but it’s the community — the non-playable characters who are so grateful for your help — that sets the game alight.

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Tactical Breach Wizards proves there’s no substitute for the dopamine hit you get from simultaneously ejecting three dudes out of a window. Defenestrations aside, Tactical Breach Wizards is a surprisingly deep turn-based strategy game that delivers some of the best writing I’ve seen in a game this year.

The world of Tactical Breach Wizards is very surreal —similar to our own, with similar problems, but distinct in its collection of nations, politics, and traditions. Also, magic is real. You control a squad of warlocks, wizards, witches, clerics, and druids whose talents and abilities make them uniquely qualified for working in various branches of the special forces. Instead of Navy SEALs, you have Navy Seers, and instead of boring normal medics, you have necro-medics that can raise the dead. I would love to pore over an encyclopedia or sourcebook for Tactical Breach Wizards; it’s that good.

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I’m not supposed to speak to the four-person cast of The Crush House, but when they’re asking for favors — late at night, when the cameras are off — it’s hard to say no. One shy cast member of the in-game reality TV show wants to project a persona into the world that’ll surprise people: They want me to film them making friends and enemies. Another cast member doesn’t want her parents to see her smoking, and she wants me to turn my camera off when she’s got a cigarette in hand. Then there’s the person who wants to prove to her mom that she’s hot stuff (??), which means showing her kissing two separate people. As Jae, the cameraperson and producer, I play a big role in how these people are portrayed to our growing audience; I shape their narrative by what I choose to film, and what I don’t. But I’m also still at the whims of my bosses — i.e., advertisers — and the audience, both of whom dictate whether the show will get canned.

Created by developer Nerial and published by Devolver Digital, The Crush House — not the in-game show, but the eponymous game released on Aug. 9 — gamifies the dating reality TV show experience but switches up the perspective. “[Former Nerial creative director Arnaud de Bock and I] were both obsessed with this reality show called Terrace House,” creative director Nicole He told Polygon. “That’s where the spark of the original idea came out.”

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