Games

Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion. Top 3 shmups of all-time and best shmup on Steam, IMO.

Absolute favorite is Outer Wilds. The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't experience it again. A true masterpiece of a game.

After that, probably Noita for sheer insanity. Deeply unfair, but getting a god-run going is that much sweeter. It took me ~100 hours to beat it the first time, now I can consistently win if I try but I'm addicted to doing stupid things to see what happens.

Stardew Valley

Anything of Soldak - https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/soldak/ : 2 series - space shooters Drox and hack n slash Dins - Super coarse graphics, action, fighting, but their living worlds, like nowhere else. No other game where worlds freely grow based on player actions. Did You ever left main quest for exploration, lvling up or side games, oh well, here, world will not allow You to, as enemies won't stay idle or wait for You, they do their business.

Orb of Creation - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1910680/Orb_of_Creation/ Semi-clicker (intense clicker, not much of idle) and immersive mage simulator, where You don't make Your mage-avatar, but are the mage. Still beta, but already big.

Banished, you can't get more Indie than just one guy's passion project.

I don't know what it is about that game but it really struck a chord with me and I've come back to it over and over. It's my favorite game to play when I'm sick and can't do anything. It's relaxing and peaceful and cozy while also being complex and ruthlessly challenging at the same time, so it's like spinning plates. Seems easy when you get the hang of it but it can all come crashing down if you make a bad enough mistake. It's spawned some copy cats, and I've tried them, but the original just gets me somehow.

Swapper

Not my actual favorite, but it's very high on my list, and I didn't see it posted yet.

Slay The Spire

Fury

Ori And The Blind Forest

Check out Tunic. I would recommend going blind.

Sticking only to ones I haven't seen mentioned:

• Tandis : geometry puzzler
• Gateways : a 2d portal-style puzzler
• Elliot Quest : pixel adventure
• Phoenotopia Awakening : also a pixel adventure, had trouble with the final boss but the rest is great
• Wuppo : flash-animation-style comedy adventure
• Alba : sweet game about a girl who loves wildlife
• Salt and Sanctuary : 2d soulslike
• Legend of Grimrock : tile-based first person dungeon crawler ("dungeon master" spiritual successor)
• A Short Hike (really short but amazing exploration game)

Ones I have seen mentioned but can't bear not to mention:

• TIS-100 : the finest of the Zachlikes; a programming puzzle game
• Crosscode : 2d adventure with incredibly fine-tuned combat and puzzles
• Outer Wilds : fantastic time-loop puzzle
• FTL : space adventure "one more run!" game
• Slay the Spire : deck-drafting "one more run!" game

I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:

• Autonauts and Autonauts Vs Piratebots - Cute automation games
• Spelunky - Elegantly simple and well executed platformer
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute - Rhythm FPS. Others have tried. None I have found have been as good.
• Immortal Redneck - FPS roguelite
• Ziggurat - FPS Roguelite
• Receiver II - Unique FPS roguelike. Every part of everything that moves is simulated. The hammer on your gun hits a firing pin which hits the primer on the cartridge. You can get stovepipes, misfires, double feeds, etc. You don't reload by hitting 'reload' but go through the full manual of arms in a shooter where the tolerances for failure are fairly slim.
• Valley - running game. The feeling of letting a hill propel your running to otherwise impossible speeds, bottled. Nice little story too.
• Dredge - Lovecraftian fishing game.
• Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician simulator. Build a network to allow communication between computers in an underground society with unspeakable horrors occasionally destroying your mind/body.
• Opus Magnum - Programming puzzles
• Vagante - roguelike with tight tolerances
• Ruiner - Cyberpunk slash n dash with a soundtrack half by Sidewalks and Skeletons. Very fun.
• Tails Noir - Detective story. Normally find the anthro thing a bit tiresome but this was pretty good. Well written.
• Elderborn - First person brawler
• Webbed - be a peacock spider. Rescue your lady spider. Help insects. Fight a bird. Dance.
• A Story About My Uncle - Movement game. Jump, dash, grapnel. Simple and elegant.
• Tormentor X Punisher - Top down twin stick shooter. Everything dies in one hit. All the enemies, and you.
• Tin Can - Survival game in which you try to keep up an escape pod long enough to be rescued, which is hard when it seems to have been made by the lowest bidder's lowest bidding subcontractor and maintained with all the loving care of a convenience store bathroom.

Rimworld

Celeste is one of my favorite games period, and it qualifies. The gameplay parallels the story better than any other game I've ever played or seen played, and the soundtrack, art, and characters are amazing. Top tier gameplay and a great story to go with it.

Alternatively, if you're looking for absolutely unhinged strange gameplay made by a programmer rather than a game designer, check out Fractal Block World. It's pretty fascinating!

Factorio.

Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don't find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!

Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.

Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers' solidarity and union struggle type of plot.

Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.

Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.

Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.

Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.

Dwarf Fortress. It's Dwarf Fortress.

WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.

Descenders. Crazy fun downhill bicycling game.

Dyson sphere program is still one of my enduring favorites.

Some I really appreciate that I'm not seeing on this list:

I'm currently enjoying Blue Prince which is a fairly new rogue-like puzzle/mystery game it's hard to explain without spoiling but it's worth looking up.

Portals of Phereon is one of my absolute favorites. It's a fairly deep tactical RPG thing with loads of replayability. It's kind of like a Pokemon x FF Tactics but with monstergirls and it's also currently free while it's in development. Be aware it's extremely NSFW and horny, which I suspect is the main reason it's not as popular as some of the others listed (IE rimworld, stardew valley, etc.) however the horny is such a key point to it's original gameplay and world-building that it wouldn't be the same without it.

Thea: the awakening is a decent tactical RPG. I love it for it's original battle mini game, crafting system and world-building. It unfortunately has some balance issues and jankiness that prevents it from being an all time favorite, but it's definitely one I would encourage at least trying.

Thought of a few others:

• Reus (2nd one's alright, first one's excellent)
• Library of Runia
• Book of Hours
• Kenshi (saw it listed one other time, but it deserves a lot more love)

Just looking though some of my higher playtime games, here's a few I haven't seen mentioned: (I think they're all indie or small studio)

Gunfire Reborn - Roguelike fps with infinite replay.

Troubleshooter Abandoned Children - XCOM style battle system with a really really fun way to customize how your character fight. Story is pretty lame though (I ended up skipping it) and it's pretty grindy.

Thronefall - Pretty challenging base defence.

The last spell - Turn based base defence with lots of different ways to build your characters.

Ratropolis - Roguelike real-time card strategy base defence. Pretty good, although not well balanced at highest difficulties.

• Skullgirls - Still the best damn fighting game ever made. I've been grinding for a full decade now, and I'll be entering Combo Breaker 2025 once again this year.

• Slay the Spire - The game that ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about StS is that it never lets you get complacent, never lets you lean on just one good synergy that will carry you the entire run. You always have to keep adapting, and you have to have a well-rounded deck to deal with enemies that are designed to counter players who try to rely on only one thing. And when I eventually got to the point where I'd had my fill of vanilla, there's so much fun stuff from the modding community to play around with. Packmaster is incredible.

• CrossCode - It's been years since I finished this RPG and its colorful cast still lives rent-free in my head. This is a game that is perfect in every way and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fantastic combat, tons of side content, endearing characters, emotionally powerful story, beautiful visuals, amazing soundtrack.

First :

• Outer Wilds
• Disco Elysium

Then :

• Inscryption
• Carto
• Spiritfarer
• Pyre

I suppose I've plugged it recently, but Another Crab's Treasure.

It opens pretty plainly as an ocean-based Soulslike parody with a simple story premise and some self-subverting humor in the dialog with other crabs. As you go on though, every 20th conversation becomes really pointed and real-world-connecting, going beyond just "pollution bad". It's not quite Spec Ops: The Line, but it at least has something to say about society.

The combat is frustrating but addictive, much like Souls games - and it's okay with handing off a number of allowances like accessibility modes and tip systems. It's even helpful that, if I die to a glitch or something bogus, I can actually just choose to re-obtain my microplastics (souls) through a menu.

Super Daryl Deluxe

That game has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game.

A Hat in Time

UFO 50

Outer Wilds

Hylics

Hylics 2

Pizza Tower

Celeste

It's hard to pick one lol

Magicraft.

Hollow Knight

I love it so much that I can't finish it, I always stop when I'm about to fight the final boss. I just don't want it to end.

Maybe when Silksong came out I finish it once and for all.

Can't really add much to all of the great games already mentioned. But I'll add one, because it was one of the best games I played in recent memory. Chants of Sennaar. Where to even start? Point-and-click adventure/puzzle game that is all about language puzzles. With great visuals and music. Really dig the eurocomics inspired style. I don't know why, but this game really touched me - maybe it's because the game is about uniting people in an age of discord.

Used to play battlefield 2, BC2 and 3 alot. Then I stopped playing online games and recently started playing "Ravenfield". It's succesfully filling the void, there are even battlefield maps and some vehicle/heli/jet/tank mods and ignoring the fact that it looks like battlefield heroes (very indie-style graphics), the physics/handling feels pretty close, especially when flying heli and shooting rockets

Factorio.

Honourable mentions:

• Chants of Sennaar
• Blue Prince
• Animal Well
• Raft
• Citizen Sleeper

For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn't been topped. Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.

Lethal Company. It was developed by one person, yet it outsold Call of Duty. It trended from 2023 to 2024, but I still play it at least weekly. A couple Lethal Company clones have since come out and some say one (R.E.P.O) is better, and graphically I would say yes, but nothing quite matches Lethal Company’s charm.

It’s a scrap-collecting + space horror survival + comedy game. The comedy feels very unintended and that’s why it’s so fucking funny. You encounter very horrifying creatures, then see your friends die the funniest death. Then you hope to collect enough scrap to survive another day.

The vast majority of my favourite games have been listed, many multiple times, so I'm gonna go with some I didn't see, though I didn't look exhaustively, here we go:

Horace

Quite a hidden gem in my opinion, almost no one I mention it to has heard of it. 2D platformer with an amazing story and some interesting gimmicks. One of the most surprising and unforgettable indie games I've played.

The Messenger

Ninja action-platformer that is way more than it first appears if you stick with it. Hilarious writing, great controls, and amazing music. Genuinely one of my favourite games.

Yoku's Island Express

Almost entirely unique in it's idea. It's a pinball-metroidvania where you're a postman dung beetle, and it really works. Gorgeous world, super chill vibes, clever puzzles... What metroid prime pinball should have been.

Factorio, hands down

600 hours and counting. The space age expansion basically quadrupled the content, and is the first time I've played the game 100% vanilla with no mods in probably 10 years. Great times.

Dwarf Fortress. Not even just my favorite indie game, but favorite game ever.

FTL: Faster Than Light

From the top of my head

• crawl stone soup. Classic traditional rogue like. Less fiddly than net hack, but very good.
• untitled story (an older game by the main person behind Celeste. Looks like Ms paint but is utterly charming)
• everything supergiant did. Hades, bastion, pyre
• binding of Isaac is a classic.

Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta... Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.

Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.

Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything... and everything in it is immaculate. It's still free for the original version as well.

Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out... also goes on sale really cheap.

Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you're from the PNW, it will hit even more.

Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.

OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.

If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).

If you want a game that's beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af... definitely check out Rain World.

Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It's how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.

Rusty's Retirement... isn't so much a game.. sorta.. but yeah.. check that out.

Stardew

i'm not sure The Ur-Quan Masters counts as indie

Kerbal space program (the first one) And The Long Dark

Can’t really decide which I like more, and they are vastly different

I have a personal soft spot for Doki Doki Literature Club because it got me into programming when i was young, but that's far more sentimental and to be honest i wouldn't play it again as an adult really. If i had to pick something functionally though I'd say Project Zomboid. there's a fuck ton of fun to be made in that, especially with Multiplayer. Even in singleplayer i like to turn on a NPC mod and assemble my own makeshift Walking Dead cast

Synthetik is my top steam game with, like, 900 hours.