Ten Indie Games You Probably Missed This Year

Thousands of games launch every year, and many of the best slip by unnoticed. These ten deserve your attention. They arrived in a year crowded with sequels, giant open worlds and live-service launches that swallowed the headlines, and most of them launched with little more than a trailer, a store page and a handful of early fans shouting into the void. We played each one to the end, argued about them in the office, and kept coming back to the same short list. None of them will cost you more than a night out at the movies, and several can be finished in a single weekend.

We picked games that do one thing better than anything else this year, whether that is a clever mechanic, a moving story or simply a mood you cannot find anywhere else. We left out anything that already topped the charts. If you have heard your friends talk about it nonstop, it is not on this list.

For puzzle lovers

Paper Lanterns, a puzzle box game about folding light, and Signal Lost, a radio-tuning mystery, are the two games our team recommended most often this year, and they could not be more different in tone.

Paper Lanterns hands you a small paper lantern and a single candle. Each level is a folded sheet, and by creasing, turning and flipping the paper you redirect the light to wake sleeping paper animals. It starts simple, then quietly asks you to think in three dimensions. By the final chapter you are folding shapes that cast shadows into other rooms, and the moment it clicks feels like real discovery rather than trial and error. It takes about six hours, and there is not a wasted minute.

Signal Lost puts you in a remote listening station somewhere in the high desert of New Mexico. You turn dials, adjust antennas and write down fragments of broadcasts that should not exist. The whole game is played through a radio, a notebook and a map, and the notebook is yours to fill in. There are no quest markers and no hints unless you ask for them. When you finally line up the frequencies and hear a full voice come through the static, the hair on your arms will stand up.

Tiny builders and quiet worlds

The city builder had a huge year among small developers, mostly by thinking smaller. Instead of sprawling metropolises, these games give you a single street, a floating island or a village of twelve people, and ask you to care about every one of them.

• Lantern Hollow lets you build a mountain town one cottage at a time. Each villager has a daily routine, and a badly placed bakery can ruin someone’s morning walk. It is soothing, funny and surprisingly deep.
• Pocket Harbor is a city builder that fits on a single dock. You arrange shops, piers and fishing boats on a tiny grid, and every piece touches every other piece. Sessions last about twenty minutes, which makes it perfect for a lunch break.
• Moss and Mortar is about restoring a ruined castle garden. There is no money, no timer and no way to lose. You just plant, trim and watch the seasons change.
• Skyline Shepherd gives you a flock of sheep and a floating island that slowly breaks apart. It is half builder, half puzzle, and the gentle music makes the ending hit harder than you would expect.

What these games share is respect for your time. None of them asks you to log in every day, and none sells you anything after you buy it. They are complete, polished and finished.

Most of these were made by fewer than five people. That still amazes me.

Rafael Ortega, Respawn indie editor

For something different

Soup for Two, a short cooking game about memory and loss, will stay with you for weeks. You play a man named Walter who cooks his late wife’s recipes from a stained notebook. Each dish unlocks a memory, told through small kitchen objects rather than cut scenes. Chopping onions becomes the story of their first apartment in Chicago. A burnt pot of chili becomes the story of a fight they never really finished. It is about ninety minutes long, and nearly everyone on our staff admitted to crying at least once.

The cooking itself is simple. You drag ingredients, stir, taste and adjust. The genius is in how the game uses those actions. When Walter forgets a step, the controls feel just a little off. When he gets the recipe right, the kitchen fills with warm light and the music swells. It is a rare game that uses play itself to tell a story about grief, and it does so with real tenderness.

Night Shift Diner belongs in the same corner. You run a roadside diner in Nevada between midnight and dawn, serving coffee to truckers, nurses and people who cannot sleep. The menu is short and the conversations are long. Some customers come back every night, and slowly you learn what is keeping them awake.

For action fans

Not every hidden gem is quiet. Two of our favorites are loud, fast and difficult in the best way.

Neon Courier is a top-down delivery game set in a rain-soaked future Los Angeles. You ride a hover bike, dodge traffic and race the clock to deliver packages across districts that rearrange themselves every night. The controls are tight, the soundtrack is relentless and the leaderboard is brutal. One run takes about four minutes, which makes “just one more” a dangerous phrase.

Ashfall Rangers is a two-player co-op shooter about fire lookouts in a fictional Montana forest. One player spots, the other moves, and you swap roles every level. It rewards communication more than reflexes, which makes it a great pick for couples or friends with different skill levels.

Key takeaway: if a game here sounds even slightly interesting, try the demo or watch ten minutes of play. Small studios live or die on word of mouth, and your recommendation to a friend matters more than you think.

How we chose and how to find more

Every game on this list was played to the credits by at least two members of our team. We avoided anything still in early access, anything with aggressive in-game purchases and anything we would not hand to a friend without a warning label. We also tried to cover a range of prices, play times and moods, from a ninety-minute story to a city builder you could play for a year.

If you want to keep finding games like these, a few habits help. Follow small studios you like on social media, because they often share the work of other small studios. Check the indie spotlight on our homepage each week, where Rafael and the team pick one game nobody is talking about. And do not ignore seasonal store festivals, which are packed with free demos from developers who cannot afford big marketing budgets.

The bottom line

This year proved again that some of the most memorable games come from the smallest teams. A folded paper lantern, a crackling radio, a pot of soup for someone who is no longer there: these are the moments we will remember long after the blockbusters blur together. Pick one game from this list, give it an evening, and then tell us which one you would add. Next year’s hidden gem might already be sitting on a store page with forty reviews, waiting for someone to notice.