As I said writing up our Best Games of 2019 (So Far) list, it’s been a busy year. We’ve only hit June and already there have been so many quality games we ran out of room on our top ten list. Consider this the spillover list then, the best of the rest, great games that perhaps fell through the cracks. Some of them, I haven’t finished. Some I’ve barely gotten around to playing—but I like what I’ve seen.
However, while there are some great indie horror video games, there are plenty that aren’t that great. That’s why we here at Honey’s Anime have done some homework to bring you the top 10 indie horror video games. For an indie horror video game to be considered great they have to prove a few things first. Discover the largest community for indie games and the people who make and play them. Entertainment group Kinda Funny put on the first-ever Kinda Funny Games Showcase today, and there were a large number of indie games represented there. Here’s a selection of release date.
There are a bunch of indie games newly coming to the Switch, including the Microsoft-published Ori and the Blind Forest, which will be coming to the platform on September 27, Nintendo announced in. Looking for the best recent indie games? Check out our article on the best indie games of 2018! Here at The Indie Game Website we are the absolute authority on deciding what is and isn’t good. We don’t care about your shouts of “subjectivity” and “taste” – we’re right you’re wrong, and that’s all that matters. 11 new indie games are confirmed for the Xbox Game Pass subscription service. During yesterday’s email protected Game Pass showcase, Microsoft announced a slew of new indie titles heading to its increasingly impressive subscription service. Coming to both Xbox One and PC is Plausible Concept’s real-time tactics game, Bad North. Jupiter Hadley: Contributor & Co-Founder- Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist, writing for Rock Paper Shotgun, Metro UK, AlphaBetaGamer, Big Boss Battle, and many more, all with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight.
As for you, hopefully there are a few games on the list you haven’t even heard of yet. That’s always a fun surprise, yeah?
Sunless Skies
Sunless Skies is in large part just more Sunless Sea, but given how impressive Failbetter’s first outing was it’s hard to complain about a second helping. Trade out Sunless Sea’s ships for a flying train and gloomy seas for the stars, and much of the rest stays the same. You’re still plodding from settlement to settlement, uncovering bizarre side-stories and attempting to unravel the larger plotlines in scraps and snatches of conversation.
If it feels less magical, well, the trick’s more familiar now. Sunless Skies doesn’t do much to push its predecessor’s ideas forward aside from streamlining some of the more cumbersome systems. That said, it’s still a beautifully written adventure packed with plenty of odd (and sometimes uncomfortable) rumors to chase.
Textorcist
The Textorcist is one of the more creative genre mashups I’ve played: Part bullet hell, part typing edutainment. You play a priest, Ray Bibbia, who fights demons by typing out phrases, while dodging enemy attacks at the same time.
It’s a real pat-your-head-rub-your-stomach nightmare, trying to frantically eke out each letter of phrases like “In Nomine Dei Patris Omnipotentis” with your left hand while the right works the arrow keys. Maybe not the most useful typing tool, but I had a lot of fun with it.
Islanders
Islanders is the best city builder I’ve played this year, and it’s not at all what you’d expect from that description. This isn’t another SimCity clone, or even a Tropico spin-off. Instead, Islanders borrows the core tenets of a city builder to create a puzzle game.
You draw cards to determine what you can build, and subsequently earn points based on how you plot your buildings. Houses like being near city centers for instance, and churches like being near houses. Chain enough structures together and you’ll earn enough to move onto the next island, starting from scratch again but with a better idea how to maximize points—and more space to do it in. It’s simple and relaxing, and results in some cute tilt-shifted villages that look better than anything I’ve built in more complicated peers of Islanders.
Forager
I spent some feverish nights with Forager and I stand by my review: It’s junk food, but it’s very well-designed and addictive junk food. Combining elements of the idler/clicker genre with Stardew Valley farming and a lightweight action-RPG, it’s a genre mashup the likes of which I’ve never seen before. You mine gold to forge coins to devise ways to mine gold faster, and so on and so forth through Forager’s various crafting recipes, until suddenly it’s 4 a.m. and blinking makes your eyes sting but you have a thriving economy churning out hundreds of gold coins and a whole island dedicated to mining rocks and maybe you should just keep playing until you hit the next level.
It’s nefarious, and I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone else play it—but also I loved Forager in a perverse sort of way, and I want to recommend it to everyone. Maybe set an alarm to remind yourself to sleep.
Whispers of a Machine
One of my favorite trends over the last few years is 2D adventure games given modern mechanics. Unavowed added a BioWare-style companion system to its puzzles, which was a neat trick I’d never seen before.
This year’s Whispers of a Machine is perhaps even more impressive. A sci-fi adventure, you play as a sort-of robotic police officer (a...robocop, maybe) who can scan the environment for forensic data, shapeshift, control people’s minds, turn invisible, and more. The catch: You unlock different powers depending on your conversations with people, and will only see a select few over the course of the story, forcing you to approach puzzles differently based on how you play. It’s an ambitious and clever mechanic for a retro-looking game, and is paired with a pretty decent story as well.
Astrologaster
Astrologaster is the funniest game I’ve played in 2019, bar none. It’s like an extended Monty Python and The Holy Grail sketch, except you’re an active participant in the nonsense. You play as Simon Forman, a real historical figure who worked as an astrologer in Elizabethan England. And that’s your task here as well, divining the stars to...uh, “cure” your patients.
It’s ridiculous and silly, hoping your diagnoses land often enough to keep Forman’s reputation intact. And the presentation is stellar (heh), with a pop-up book aesthetic and a surprising amount of faux-period music, with lyrics like “We know he used astrology and doses of strong water. So what if he be not a proper licensed doctor?”
Pathologic 2
The original Pathologic gave rise to some of the best articles I’ve ever read, as Rock Paper Shotgun’s Quintin Smith delved into this bizarre Elder Scrolls-esque plague simulator out of Russia. A decade later it’s been remade (at least partially) with slightly modernized mechanics and a better translation.
Pathologic 2 is still weird as hell though, and brutal. Even on the lower difficulties, it’s a game you play until you can’t anymore, an experience you’re designed to lose. That won’t appeal to everyone, but I find it refreshing—albeit incredibly stressful as well.
Garden Flipper
In 2018 I played House Flipper a lot. Probably too much. In 2019, I’m slowly getting hooked by Garden Flipper as well, the first expansion. It’s just as buggy (or perhaps more so) than the base game, and the price is arguably a bit steep for what you get. That said, as someone who got tired of creating beautiful houses on plots of land that had scrub-grass for lawns, Garden Flipper’s letting me indulge in my inner Monty Don from the BBC’s Gardeners’ World.
I love it. I haven’t done any actual yardwork in ages, and my real-life green thumb is more the yellow-orange of dead leaves, but at least my digital house is flourishing.
Draugen
I’m still eagerly awaiting the next entry in The Longest Journey and/or Dreamfall, but Red Thread Games and founder Ragnar Tørnquist took a little tangent this year. Draugen, a short adventure set in 1920s Norway, is billed as a “Fjord Noir” and tasks you with searching a seemingly abandoned mountain town for clues to what happened.
It doesn’t hold any nostalgia for me like The Longest Journey, and even setting that aside some of Draugen’s story beats didn’t land. But Tørnquist and Co. have earned a reputation for writing good characters, and indeed that’s what sustains Draugen even when its framework weakens.
Gato Roboto
Gato Roboto was clawing at the backs of our Best Of (So Far) list. It’s fantastic, a full-fledged Metroidvania that only takes two or three hours to finish. There aren’t many of those, and even fewer this satisfying. Maybe Axiom Verge belongs in the same discussion?
But Gato Roboto is also charming as hell, which elevates it even further. You play as a cat in a mech suit—and sometimes outside a mech suit—exploring a hazard-filled space station, upgrading your abilities, and battling the occasional pesky rat. The one-bit art style looks great, especially once you unlock some of the alternate color schemes, and the game is consistently entertaining throughout. A real “Quality Over Quantity” situation, this one.
My Friend Pedro
The most stylish game I’ve played all year, My Friend Pedro is like watching gun ballet. A side-scrolling shooter, it’s all about jumping off walls, flipping a dozen times, and still nailing every single headshot on the way down. John Wick Hex might be the official film adaptation, but My Friend Pedro is every bit as skilled at emulating that unstoppable-hitman-with-superhuman-gun-capabilities feeling—albeit with way more acrobatics.
It’s wrapped inside a fever dream of a story that involves a hallucinated banana, an aspect I think feels a bit too reminiscent of Hotline Miami at times, but the core action is a lot of fun to both watch and play.
Katana Zero
Speaking of games that feel like Hotline Miami, 2019’s also given us Katana Zero. Another sidescroller, this one’s about closing the gap and executing enemies with your sword—or deflecting their bullets back at them, because you’re a badass in a bathrobe.
In some ways it’s even more Hotline Miami than My Friend Pedro, with a single hit meaning you start a level over, and the same cocaine-drenched synthwave vibe. It’s the tightest-controlling of this year’s mimics though, prompting that same sweaty-palmed feeling of “Flow.” The story’s no slouch either—even if, like My Friend Pedro, it hews a bit too close to its inspiration.
Ape Out
Here’s a third game for the obvious-Hotline-Miami-parallels pile—all three published by Devolver as well. What a year, eh? Ape Out is even more directly related than the previous two, given its top-down nature. The twist: You’re a gorilla. A very angry gorilla, who slams hapless security guards into walls with gruesome results.
The grim setup contrasts with Ape Out’s Saul Bass-inspired art direction and jazzy soundtrack. It oozes cool, and elevates an otherwise familiar experience into one of 2019’s most unique and artsy experiments.
Journey
I never expected to see Journey on PC. Thatgamecompany’s poignant multiplayer experiment is seven years old now, and seemed like it would remain a PlayStation exclusive forever.
Here it is though, at long last, and while I suspect some will complain about its Epic Games Store exclusivity I’m mostly excited to be able to dip into it again whenever I’d like. Even now, Journey remains one of my all-time favorite video game experiences, a pinnacle of indie’s PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 era golden age. While it hadn’t exactly been “lost to time,” I at least feel better knowing it’s on the PC now, safely preserved.
Amid Evil
There’s a good chance the only reason Amid Evil isn’t on our Best Of list is because I haven’t finished it yet. New Blood’s other retro-inspired shooter, Dusk, earned a last-minute entry onto our 2018 Game of the Year list, and from what I’ve played of Amid Evil it’s every bit as good.
Amid Evil will probably appeal to the same fanbase as well, even if it draws inspiration from Hexen and Heretic instead of Quake and Blood. The weapons are solid, and the action appropriately fast-paced. New Blood’s carving out a solid niche here. But what really makes Amid Evil stand out is the environments, which push well beyond what I’d expect from a throwback shooter. They’re both more beautiful and far weirder than I’d expect, and I’m looking forward to blasting my way through the rest.
Bonus: Globesweeper
One of my most-played games in 2019 is a Minesweeper variant. Whoops. Globesweeper is a fantastic Minesweeper variant though, translating the classic puzzle game to three dimensions and adding twists like hexagon- and triangle-based boards.
The original release fell prey to the same problem as classic Minesweeper, resulting in puzzles you could only win by guessing. A post-release “Guaranteed Solvable” update fixed that and cemented it as my favorite Minesweeper since the original.
Listen, Steam’s “Hours Played” feature doesn’t lie.
Deciding on the very best indie games on PC is a task that involves some painful exclusion. The great indie boom triggered by digital distribution a decade ago turned out to be more of a Big Bang, firing small-team development into a plethora of directions that now defy simple categorisation. The sheer volume is intimidating, so we have plenty to choose from when compiling our list of the best indie games. Perhaps too much.
But we should take stock, from time to time, to appreciate everything publisher-less development has given us. Some of the games listed below were built in a weekend by first-time coders, while others were crafted by former triple-A creators who’ve instilled their independent work with the same technical standards. They barely have anything in common but a healthy dose of idiosyncrasy and ideas that make Steam worth spelunking.
So what is our final shortlist of the finest indies around? It’s got everything, from puzzle games to narrative wonders, through pixelart games and the most gorgeous, graphically detailed gems. You’re going to want to play each and every one.
The best indie games are:
Telling Lies
There’s something about rummaging through the unknown that never fails to pique our curiosity. In Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies, you’ll come to see that thrill as you sift through someone’s hard drive, jumping between threads of video recorded on the computer’s facecam to learn more about each character.
We seldom see a games successfully explore the intersection between interactive fiction and gaming. Everything unfolds to a simple rhythm as you log into your computer, and a search for love instantly pops up, revealing a series of clips you can watch. To dig further, listen out for select phrases and search the ones you think will yield a result – throwing up countless new avenues to explore.
Digging into these strangers’ backstories feels tense, too. You’re never allowed to feel like you’re in the safety of your own home. A reflection of your avatar is always visible, and the odd sound of chatter outside your flat makes you worry that anyone can burst in on your snooping without a moment’s notice.
Hypnospace Outlaw
In Hypnospace Outlaw, it’s your job to police the internet. You’ll spend hours trawling through Bebo-esque profile pages, fan sites, and forums banning users for everything from harassment to copyright infringement. Anyone young enough to remember the fledgling days of the internet is set for a steady stream of nostalgia as they navigate grainy instructional videos, floods of pop ups, and a cluttered, gif-laden desktop.
But Hypnospace Outlaw is more than a jaunt through ‘90s World Wide Web culture, and it doesn’t take long for it to transform into neo noir thriller about the perils of mass surveillance and censorship. The theme is echoed in the gameplay. As Rachel says in her Hypnospace Outlaw review, “The game doesn’t hold your hand as you try to solve its puzzles, and Tendershoot’s smart storytelling and wholesome humour will keep you hooked until the end.”
Hynospace Outlaw does an extraordinary job of drawing you into its surreal interpretation of the web, and – just like it was back in 1999 – it’s all too easy to lose a couple of hours reading through teen dramas you don’t care about or customising your desktop with an unpalatable array of gifs, wallpapers, and virtual pets.
The Witness
In some ways, Jonathan Blow could be credited with kickstarting this whole indie boom almost a decade ago with time-bending puzzler Braid. His second project, The Witness, is an entirely different kind of puzzle game beast: big production values, a whole bucolic island to explore, and a real sense of ‘event’. In just two games, Blow has managed to capture the evolution of what ‘indie’ can mean.
The Witness carries an air of importance in its world and subdued narrative, but those elements betray the core experience. It’s all about the line puzzles. The same basic format is used for all the game’s 600+ puzzles – The Witness can take 100 hours to complete – but each new one you approach introduces fresh rules that complicate matters in a different way. The Witness entirely revolves around a learning curve that it expects you to discover for yourself. You first have to figure out the rules of a type of puzzle, then how to apply those rules in new ways, before usually breaking those rules in order to encompass new ones. The fact that the game helps you through this without any sign of a tutorial or rulebook is testament to Blow’s design abilities.
Rocket League
It should have been wildly obvious from the beginning that ‘football with cars’ was a formula with no other possible outcome than to be among the best indie games. And before you point out that Psyonix’s previous car-football effort – Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars – flouted that rule, it was probably the name that put people off. So there.
Go faster: With the best PC racing games
Rocket League pits two teams against each other to score goals while turning over engines at a high RPM, bouncing balls from bumper to bumper, and blasting them to the back of the net with a quick boost of acceleration.
It’s arguably simplicity that has made Rocket League a huge success story: there’s no equipment to struggle with, no metagame to master, nor classes to understand: you simply drive with a combination of tactics and aggression. Not sure of those tactics? Our Rocket League tips guide can help. Learning tricks to more successfully pass and mastering ball control adds depth should the game really strike you, but at its most fun, Rocket League is an exceptional piece of casual bliss.
Inside
New Indie Games 2020
Playdead’s follow-up to Limbo feels remarkably similar to its monochrome predecessor at first, but Inside proves itself to be significantly more refined. The muted colours feel less stylised than the bright whites and dark blacks of Limbo. Environments have more depth, detail, and the lighting is more sophisticated: cavernous factories and facilities are brought to life as you march in lockstep to evade capture.
Your protagonist’s face is blank but his groans when his jumps land and yelps when he’s pursued by rabid dogs are more expressive than many other leading characters in games. When masked people drown the boy whose life is in your hands, it’s all the more harrowing.
It couldn’t top some of the best horror games for scares, but horrifying mysteries are a major part of Inside. As you run further into its world the puzzles become more complex and lend themselves to more questions – why are corpses being re-animated, and how can you use them to progress? It’s a superb marriage of mechanics and plot that refuses to explain itself as it pulls you further into its dark world of surveillance and industrial science. Inside also has one of the most debated and intriguing final acts of any videogame. It’s absolutely worth seeking out for yourself.
Into the Breach
Not just one of the best indies of 2018, but also one of the year’s best strategy games, Into the Breach is a turn based strategy indie by Subset Games where you control giant mechs in an effort to defend human civilisation from the bug-like Vek who have been breeding beneath the Earth’s surface.
By keeping the battlefield to an intimate eight by eight grid, Into the Breach challenges you to think carefully about your approach to combat and makes you regularly switch up your tactics. Enemies can be blocked, killed, or moved around the grid, giving you plenty of tricks to deploy in your desperate bid to save humankind. Each randomly generated level requires new tactics, and realising that it’s easier to simply delay the Vek than to destroy them only adds to the strategic puzzle in front of you.
Oxenfree
Oxenfree is pretty good at everything it does, but it becomes one of the best indie games on PC for its excellence in one area: conversation. Made by Telltale and Disney alumni, this beautiful teen drama has the most natural speech system in games; well-written chatter that flows between friends and never awkwardly pauses while you choose a dialogue option. Instead, you’re offered a few choices that, when selected, protagonist Alex will slip into the ongoing conversation. Abstain from choosing and she’ll simply stay silent, allowing her buddies to continue and drive the story forward themselves.
And what a story it is. A sort of X-Files with teenagers, it sees a typical ‘cabin in the woods’ horror adventure expand into something with significantly more merit. Puzzles, exploration, and character development drives this gem, and the multiple endings will have you re-playing to experiment with how the core friendships at the heart of Oxenfree pan out.
Hotline Miami
A hazy close-quarters combat game that turns the top-down tussles of the original GTA into a new martial art, Hotline Miami is a brutal, neon-soaked tribute to grindhouse ultraviolence. Every day a mystery caller asks you in no uncertain terms to kill a building-full of bad guys. You’ll make your way through each room, murdering as you go, with a variety of blunt, sharp, and ballistic weapons. Bite the dust and a quick tap of the reset key has you ready for action again. It’s a key you’ll be pressing an awful lot.
You’ll find yourself doing things you’ve only watched anti-heroes do: opening a door into Goon #1’s face, ripping the throat and the shotgun from Goon #2, pulling Goon #1 up to your chest to act as meat kevlar, shooting the face off Goon #3 and hurling his pool cue across the table, where it connects with the chin of Goon #4. From PC gaming schlub to Ryan Gosling in just a few short repetitions.
Also like Ryan Gosling’s ultraviolent films, the follow-up, Hotline Miami 2 isn’t so great, so best stick to the original.
Stardew Valley
There’s a lot of love for Harvest Moon among the PC community despite the series being exclusive to Nintendo consoles. That’s why Stardew Valley captured the hearts and minds of so many. A cute role-playing management game, it plays to the farming strengths of the popular Harvest Moon games, while simultaneously being its own brand of charming.
You’ll begin life in Stardew Valley with an inherited farm in dire need of repair. As you plant new crops and inject life into your land your focus will shift to exploration of the world around you. The valley is in similar need of loving attention, and it makes for the perfect project to unwind with night after night. It’s also home to the marvellous Stardew Valley co-op mode – in case you’re after some co-op games – and a place to experiment with the plethora of Stardew Valley mods.
Bursting with personality, Stardew Valley is an unmissable adventure for anyone craving the village life.
Gone Home
Left to discover why the big old house on the hill recently occupied by your parents and sister now lies empty, Gone Home sees you wander between rooms and dig through the domestic debris – turning over pizza boxes and checking the sleeves of cassette tapes for clues. It’s a voyeuristic voyage that can’t be captured in a Twitch playthrough: rather than being pulled through a story, you’re pushing; sifting through the interconnected lives of three generations.
Related: The best action-adventure games on PC
The real game is in piecing together the fragments of family history, parenting problems, and teenage angst that you find, and drawing conclusions. You’ll find a revelation that you come to yourself is much more satisfying than one handed to you on a platter.
What Remains of Edith Finch
Speaking of big old houses on a hill, Giant Sparrow – the folks behind console-only The Unfinished Swan – have a mystery for you to solve in a secluded part of Washington State. What Remains of Edith Finch takes cues from the exploration of games like Gone Home and Firewatch, but it also features new ideas and refinements to this form of drama that culminate in one of the best examples of storytelling you can find in gaming.
Edith Finch is a collection of powerful stories about the Finch family and, as the titular Edith, you travel back to the family home to unravel the truth behind the ‘curse’ that’s rumoured to have caused the deaths of your relatives. Narratives spanning multiple generations cover the difficult subjects of depression and bullying thoughtfully and creatively, but it’s how these ideas are brought to life through gameplay that astonishes. Prepare to have plenty of feelings rush over you in this two-hour indie beaut that we picked as one of the best PC games of 2017.
Dead Cells
Dead Cells is a ferocious action-platformer where death comes swiftly, and often. It’s a curious concoction of different genres, but ultimately settles on the description of rouguevania, a mix of interconnected areas with unforgiving combat. It’s a neon-drenched and bloody brawler that has you explore dark dungeons and terrible towers where save points are non-existent and enemies are brutally punishing.
Read more: Here are seven other games like Dark Souls
Dead Cells is tough but you’ll keep returning to play due to its fast-paced action and variety of upgrades that stay with you even after death, letting you make incremental progress with each fresh start. The spurt of blood as you strike enemies feels amazing and speedily powering your way through monster infested areas is devious fun.
Undertale
In a traditional RPG, you’d make a start by exploring the outskirts of a troubled town before you begin to bolster the arsenal of your chosen character. It’s a safe assumption that you’ll be solving any problems you encounter with fists, swords, or magical abilities. In Undertale, however, murder can be treated as a last resort – as we sincerely hope applies to you in real life.
This 16-bit indie is one of the best RPGs around, you can subdue, pacify, and even flirt with enemies that stand in your way. How you approach everything that stands in your way throughout the game actually impacts the story and how characters treat you in the future. Leave enemies alive and they’ll show up later and probably make friends with you. But, if you’d rather go with the usual bloody murder then that’s just as valid.
Speaking of the story, you play a kid who falls into the world of monsters, and then has to find a way to escape. What ensues is an endearing adventure that’s consistently well-written, full of memorable characters and one-liners you’ll trade with friends, and a wonderful soundtrack to boot.
Gunpoint
Gunpoint is a 2D stealth-puzzle game that begins with defenestration and doesn’t ease up on the windowpane hate crime thereafter. You play as hired spy Richard Conway, who one day finds himself to be the chief suspect in a murder case (he didn’t do it, obvs).
Missions present you with a tall building to master and ask you to traverse a maze of alarms, locked doors, and armed guards to reach your goal – delicate data you’ll either retrieve or destroy.
You can point guns, if you like, but you’ll soon learn that a lightswitch is the most powerful weapon available to you. You might link it to the elevator call button, for example, so that guards are plunged into darkness the very moment you hit their floor. Or rewire the switch so that the man who heads instinctively to it when things go dark instead opens a locked door that stands between you and your target. Smug satisfaction guaranteed.
Celeste
The mountaineer that pulled at everyone’s heart strings, Celeste wasn’t just one of the best indie games in recent years, it was our pick for the best PC game of 2018. Its pinpoint, simple controls make it an excellent and challenging platformer, while its narrative takes the genre to a whole new level.
You play as Madeline who has decided to conquer the icy mountain Celeste by reaching its summit. You’ll fail countless times to Celeste’s tricky levels, but thanks to a quick respawn time and some thoughtful messages of encouragement, Celeste spurs you on even when it gets tough. If the challenging gameplay of Celeste puts you off playing, then there’s no need to worry as there are a variety of assists you can turn on so you’re free to enjoy the story regardless of your skill level.
Celeste’s story about a young woman struggling with her anxiety intertwined with its challenging platforming was why we crowned it our game of the year in our PCGN awards 2018.
Papers, Please
The year is 1982. You are an immigration inspector at the border checkpoint of Arstotzka, tasked with protecting your homeland from terrorists, wanted criminals, and smugglers. You’re under pressure to process as many arrivals as possible with any mistakes you make reflected in your salary. If that wasn’t bad enough, the money you do bring home is desperately needed to care for your family, who are inevitably going to get sick in your cramped housing arrangement. Work hard or pay a nasty price.
Papers, Please is the best indie game for examining your own morality. Bribes are waiting for you every day, asking you to risk the safety of the country you work for in exchange for the comfort of your family. Will you split up a couple who only have half the correct papers they need? The obvious answer might be no, but you’ll soon learn that the risk is they could be an enemy of the state, cleverly taking advantage of your kindness. Will you acquiesce to the bloody requests of a mysterious anti-government organisation? Or will you accept your miserable life at the hands of the communist state? It’s up to you to stamp your decision in ink.
Night in the Woods
Night in the Woods’ arresting 2D artwork pulls you in straight away. It doesn’t let up either, as what unfolds within the smooth frames of its animation is a subtle story about being a twenty-something with a lost cause. As the anthropomorphised feline Mae, you return to your home town of Possum Springs after dropping out of college. Things are very different here now that the coal mines have closed, an industry that was the lifeblood of this facsimile of small-town America.
The game’s thoughtful writing is moving, amusing, and regularly tackles big subjects like depression, the impact of economic upheaval, and mental illness. Seemingly inconsequential moments will stick in the mind long after the credits roll. You’ll probably venture back into the game to have those optional chats with Mae’s friends and locals, but you’ll still find yourself hankering for more in this narrative-driven adventure.
The 2D platforming gameplay and minigames aren’t much of a challenge as they’re mostly used to flesh out the world of Possum Springs and allow Mae to access hidden areas. The real obstacles are found within Mae’s mind as you experience the traumas and difficulties of being a young adult in this special game.
New Indie Games
Kerbal Space Program
Kerbal Space Program has a cutesy exterior that conceals a cold, unyielding space travel simulator game at its core. This is essentially NASA Tycoon – a game about doing maths and then pointing a homebrew rocket at the stratosphere, praying it makes it through.
Take off and the trajectory of your rocket are yours to worry about in minute detail. It takes a certain level of skill to fire your rockets at precisely the right time, and lots of trial and error to orbit a planet rather than overshoot or meet its rocky surface at 10,000 mph.Getting home again is for experts but it can be achieved later through rescue missions if you put your mind to it.
Kerbal rewards players willing to set themselves challenges or take on government and private contracts to raise funds and explore a branching tech tree. That tech tree could be used to create something utterly refined, or – since the game’s freedom knows no bounds – a ship from the zany world of sci-fi. Whether the latter actually works is an entirely different issue. It’s that lack of boundaries that makes Kerbal Space Program one of the best indie games we’ve played.
- More Rocket League:
Thus ends our roundup of the best indie games on PC. Be sure to seek out our list of old PC games if you want to take that indie vibe one step further a go full hipster. With that list of cultural highlights done and dusted you’re free to go and play outside, or return to your favourite triple-A multiplayer game – whichever you prefer.
New Indie Games July 2019
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