The Best Indie Games of All Time: 13 Picks That Still Hold Up

Ask ten people for the best indie games of all time and you will get eleven lists, all of them angry. Indie games are personal. They are made by tiny teams, sometimes one person and a cat, and they chase a single weird idea all the way down instead of sanding off the edges for a focus group. The good ones do not feel like products. They feel like obsessions.

So here is our take. Not a popularity scrape, not a list copied off a wiki, but thirteen games we would defend at a dinner table. We picked across genres, from 2008 trailblazers to recent breakouts, and every entry earned its spot for a reason we will explain.

What Counts as “Indie” Anyway

The word “indie” used to mean something simple: no big publisher, small budget, made by people who answered to nobody. That definition has gotten blurry. Some games below were funded after launch, some sold millions. What still ties them together is authorship. One vision, executed without committee.

The reason these titles hold up while a thousand AAA releases age into forgotten patch notes is the same reason a good short story outlives a bloated novel: they know exactly what they are. The digital storefront era made this boom possible, and our explainer on how digital delivery actually works covers the plumbing.

The 13 Best Indie Games of All Time

1. Hollow Knight (2017)

Team Cherry, three people in Australia, built the metroidvania that every other metroidvania now apologizes to. Hollow Knight is a hand-drawn descent into a dead insect kingdom, enormous, melancholy, and brutally precise. It sold over 15 million copies and turned a genre into a gold rush. It earns the top spot not because it invented anything, but because it perfected everything.

2. Disco Elysium (2019)

Studio ZA/UM made a role-playing game with no combat, where your worst enemy is your own brain. You play a wrecked detective whose 24 skills argue with him constantly, and the writing embarrasses most published fiction. The Final Cut sits at 97 on Metacritic and swept Best Narrative at The Game Awards. One of the best things the medium has produced.

3. Celeste (2018)

A pixel-art platformer about climbing a mountain and, less literally, climbing out of an anxiety spiral. Celeste is razor-sharp to control, generous with checkpoints, and one of the kindest games ever made. It is also a speedrunning favorite, which we get into in our piece on how speedrunning categories and glitches work. Hard game, soft heart.

4. Hades (2020)

Supergiant Games solved a problem nobody thought was solvable: a roguelike that rewards you with story every time you die. Hades wraps Greek mythology, sharp combat, and warm character writing into a loop you cannot put down. The rare game where losing feels like progress.

5. Stardew Valley (2016)

Eric Barone, working alone as ConcernedApe, spent four years building a farming game that out-farmed the franchise that inspired it. Stardew Valley is the comfort blanket of modern gaming: plant crops, befriend townsfolk, lose entire weekends. It made the cozy genre a commercial category.

6. Undertale (2015)

Toby Fox wrote, composed, and coded a role-playing game where you can finish the whole thing without hurting anyone. Undertale is funny, strange, and structurally clever in ways that spoil if you say too much. One person with a clear voice, out-charming a studio of hundreds.

7. Outer Wilds (2019)

Mobius Digital built a 22-minute time loop around a tiny solar system, then hid a galaxy’s worth of mystery inside it. Outer Wilds gives you no upgrades and no map markers. The only thing that progresses is your understanding. The whole game is one long spoiler, so we will say no more. The best argument for curiosity as a game mechanic.

8. Braid (2008)

Jonathan Blow’s time-bending puzzle-platformer is on this list as much for what it started as for what it is. Braid was the flagship of the Xbox Live Arcade era, the title that proved an indie game could be a critical and commercial event. Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Limbo all walked through the door it opened.

9. Spelunky (2008, HD 2012)

Derek Yu’s procedurally generated cave-diver is the quiet ancestor of half the games on this list. Spelunky took permadeath, random levels, and systems that interact in chaos, then polished them until the genre clicked for a mass audience. Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, and even Hades owe it a debt. A foundation, plain and simple.

10. Inside (2016)

Playdead followed up Limbo with a wordless, dread-soaked puzzle-platformer that says more with silence than most games manage in hours of dialogue. Inside is short, grim, and impossible to shake. If you want to see how mood and restraint can carry a whole game, this is the textbook.

11. Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)

Lucas Pope, the one-man studio behind Papers, Please, made a detective game rendered in stark 1-bit dithering. You board a ghost ship and reconstruct the fate of sixty crew members from frozen moments of death. A logic puzzle dressed as a maritime nightmare, and nothing else plays like it.

12. Balatro (2024)

Our recent pick that already feels timeless. A solo developer working as LocalThunk built a roguelike that weaponizes poker, and it ate 2024 alive. Balatro swept Best Independent Game, Best Mobile Game, and Best Debut Indie Game at The Game Awards. A “one more run” loop that quietly deletes your sleep schedule.

13. Animal Well (2024)

Our least obvious pick, and the one we will defend hardest. Billy Basso spent roughly seven years building Animal Well alone. It looks like a retro metroidvania, then reveals itself as a cryptic puzzle box where the community is still uncovering secrets. One person, one fixation, no compromise.

Honorable Mentions Worth Your Time

Thirteen slots is cruel, so a few that nearly made it. Cuphead, for art like a 1930s cartoon escaped its reel. Cave Story, the grandfather of indie games and still free to play. Hotline Miami, the most stylish bad decision in your library. And The Binding of Isaac, one of the most replayed roguelikes ever built.

Where to Start If You Are New

Thirteen games is a lot to face at once, so do not. Pick by mood. Want a cozy place to live? Start with Stardew Valley. Want to be moved? Celeste or Outer Wilds. Want a challenge that respects you? Hollow Knight or Hades. Want to feel like the smartest person in the room? Return of the Obra Dinn or Balatro. And if you have the patience, Disco Elysium will reward you with writing you will quote for years.

What these games share is that they were made to last, not to chase a launch window. That is also why old hardware keeps them alive so well, a topic we dug into when we explained how video game cartridge saves actually work. Great indie games age like good books. They wait on the shelf until you are ready.