The best indie games we’re playing right now

There are a lot of games that remind me of summer — hot days in the backseat with a copy of Dragon Warrior III, cooling off in the basement while grinding Gran Turismo races — but there aren’t a lot of games that are actually about summer. That’s part of what makes Kabuto Park so charming. It’s a game that manages to not only capture the fleeting moments of a childhood summer, but also cram a Pokémon-style adventure into a game that lasts only a few hours.

Kabuto Park actually launched last year on PC, but it’s available now on both Xbox and the Switch, the latter being probably the ideal platform for it. It takes place over the course of a single month, and you play as Hana, a young girl who is working her way up the competitive ladder of the beetle battling championships while on a summer vacation. You do this in traditional fashion: by collecting bugs, raising them to be strong, and pitting them against other collectors.

Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there’s steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps the best part is that Slots & Daggers is short: Solo developer Friedemann describes the game as a mini roguelike, and I completed it, including all 12 achievements, in just under six hours. This month, Slots & Daggers came out on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S, and it’s been the perfect excuse to revisit it.

Slots & Daggers has a game-within-a-game perspective. On your screen, you’re looking down at a seedy table littered with things like a drink, cards, dice, a knife, and a cigarette on an ashtray, and in the middle of the table there’s an electronic machine, which is the thing you actually interact with. At the beginning of a run, you pick three pieces of equipment to kick off the quest, like a rusty dagger or a poison blade or a shield.

After rolling credits on Mina the Hollower, I did something unusual for me and immediately started a new file. I’m not typically one to replay games right after I beat them. But Mina, a new action-adventure title from Shovel Knight creators Yacht Club Games, offers something that got me to jump right back into a brand-new adventure: a built-in randomizer.

Randomizers shuffle things like items and enemies so that players can experience games they might be very familiar with in a whole new way. Imagine tackling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but not finding the Kokiri Sword in the chest it’s supposed to be in. A randomizer forces players to adapt on the fly, which can breathe new life into familiar games — and they can be extremely entertaining to watch, especially in races. I’ve always wanted to try one myself, but I haven’t because they’re typically mods for classic games that require a bit of tinkering to set up; having one baked into Mina could open them up to a broader audience.

Finding a cafe that fits you can be a revelatory experience. For me at least, there are few places outside of my house that I can truly feel comfortable in. I’m lucky enough to have two options in walking distance: a coffee shop that’s bright, airy, and full of art, and another that doubles as a plant shop so that I’m surrounded by greenery while I write. They’re third places that have become central to my life. But in the virtual realm I have an option as well — and while it’s not a place for getting work done, it’s just as relaxing.

The Coffee Talk series kicked off in 2020, with a direct sequel three years later, and the title really says it all: These games are about coffee and talking. They’re visual novels, which means much of the experience is reading dialogue, like an interactive book. In each game, you play as a barista who runs a late-night cafe and also serves something of a therapeutic role, listening to your patrons’ problems and helping them out. You also have to make them drinks, using a simple gameplay system to brew everything from espressos to exotic cold teas. Oh, and you exist in a fantasy world, so you’re serving vampires, elves, and other mythological creatures.

Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They’re worried about looking cool at a big party. They’re obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is a meaningful story about nostalgia, friendship, and teenage angst — and it’s all backed by a great soundtrack packed with classic hits.

Mixtape takes place over the course of a summer day. You play as Stacey Rockford, a music obsessive and recent high school graduate. Rockford is leaving her sleepy California suburb for New York City the next morning on a quest to become a music supervisor, and she and her two best friends — the low-key Van Slater and the rebellious Cassandra Morino — are whiling away the day before a big party in the evening.

Water gets all the credit. When gaming companies want to show off new graphics technology, things tend to get wet; splashing waves that are only possible with the latest physics engine, or puddles that can reflect the world around them thanks to ray tracing. But there’s something special about snow. It might not be as technically impressive as water, but when it comes to creating a mood in a game, snow can be very powerful. And two recent releases — Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth and Froggy Hates Snow — really capture just what snow is capable of.

Let’s start with the Moomins. Winter’s Warmth is the second game based on the iconic Finnish fairy tale creatures, but, as the title suggests, this one is set during the frigid Scandinavian winter. You play as Moomintroll, the only child in a family of rotund trolls that more closely resemble upright hippos. Usually at this time of the year, the family are all asleep, hibernating through the bleak winter. But something has woken him up early, and the game follows his adventures as he learns just what the world is like during this time when he’s normally asleep.

It took me a while to get into Esoteric Ebb, a new CRPG from developer Christoffer Bodegård. The elevator pitch is basically Disco Elysium, but in the fantasy style of Dungeons & Dragons: You play as a cleric wandering around a small town who’s trying to figure out, among other things, the mystery of why a tea shop in town exploded, and all the while, you’re having conversations with different character traits in your head. Like Disco Elysium, you see the world from an isometric, top-down perspective. Also like Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb requires a lot of reading, weighing the opinions of your competing voices, and making some bold dice rolls that don’t always work out. The first few days I played the game, I felt like I was slowly and aimlessly mucking through. But by the end, I found myself engrossed — and laughing out loud more than I have with any game in recent memory.

When you start Esoteric Ebb, you build your cleric by assigning out different ability scores — the traditional D&D ones like strength, wisdom, and charisma — and a background focus to give your character some history. There are also a handful of prebuilt characters if you don’t want to spend too much time tinkering, and I picked the one with the highest charisma stat, “Unstable Cleric,” because I like having persuasive conversations in these types of games. (This option also has a high dexterity score, which was great for pickpocketing things off of people.) After I set my character, the game’s intro said I was the “dumbest cleric imaginable.” You can get other descriptions of your cleric depending on your starting stats, but in my case, it was very useful framing; instead of always trying to get the “best” outcomes, which is what I often default to in RPGs, I instead followed my silliest instincts just to see what would happen.

The first rule of Titanium Court is that you can’t explain Titanium Court. Not because we’re living under the omerta of an 8-bit Fight Club, but because it’s one truth I can stand by. For the past week, I’ve been facing the consequences of getting isekai’d into a digital pastiche of the entire history of dramatic allegory and contemporary humor, leading a whimsical quasi-sentient court of wildly unmedicated faeries to their doom. They try, in their roundabout faerie way, to be helpful, because I don’t know what I’m doing. “I’m looking forward to you explaining the game to me,” said my editor Andrew Webster — words he silently swallowed after I tried to do just that.

This isn’t to say that Titanium Court is unknowable. It is simply one of those things you have to experience for yourself. The most straightforward description, to paraphrase from developer AP Thomson’s game credits, is “a match-3 tower defense game for people who love to read.” This is a bit of an understatement because Titanium Court is also a point-and-click roguelite RPG, a resource management game, a deckbuilder, a visual novel metacomedy of manners, a whole helping of postmodern theater, an ode to HyperCard, the equivalent of ludic ASMR for appreciators of the victory animation from Windows 98 Solitaire, and, if you grew up reading Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Titanium Court is a rare and precious gift.

When Vampire Survivors first exploded onto the scene, it was pretty much all I could think about. The formula of jumping into runs, taking on thousands of enemies, and becoming absurdly overpowered kept me picking up the game again and again — Steam says I’ve played it for more than 60 hours. Over time, though, despite the game’s many updates and expansions, the formula got stale, and I haven’t played it in more than a year. But I’ve become obsessed with the Vampire Survivors universe once again thanks to the new spinoff Vampire Crawlers.

Vampire Crawlers — technically, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors — successfully translates the Vampire Survivors experience into a whole new style of game. This time, instead of a shoot ’em up crossed with a roguelike, it’s dungeon crawler mixed with a roguelike deckbuilder. You’ll still play as different characters, take on waves of enemies, and craft laughably strong builds, but instead of fighting bad guys in real time, you hunt them down by walking through retro-style dungeon crawler maps and dueling in turn-based deckbuilder card battles. The maps still have a charming pixelated style — many enemies look like blown-up versions of the enemy sprites from Survivors, which is really silly.

With a vacation comes a big choice: What game should I focus on during the trip? I thought about grinding out the harder levels of Super Meat Boy 3D, but I was looking for something more chill. I could have dabbled more with Slay the Spire II, but I already know that’s a game I’ll be playing for a long time. I wanted something that I could really get lost in and finish in a little over a week. People of Note, a new music-focused RPG from Annapurna Interactive and Iridium Studios, turned out to be exactly what I needed.

In the game, you play as aspiring pop singer Cadence. What starts as a journey to outperform a popular boy band turns into a sprawling adventure where the fate of the world is eventually decided by Cadence and the ragtag band she puts together. But in People of Note, just about everything is about music in some way. Each major character gets a fully animated musical number. Areas of the game are themed after different musical genres. Most lines of text include some kind of musical terminology or pun. I even found a sign near a birdcage offering a “free bird.” Sometimes, all of the music references feel a little overboard, but I respect the commitment.

There’s one very specific reason I keep a Wii U handy, and that’s so that I have an easy way to play the classic pinball game Devil’s Crush. Over the years, it has become a comfort game for me. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but there’s something about the combination of familiar pinball gameplay and the demonic imagery that works so well together, and lets me lose myself in the chase for a high score. But now I have something else to fill that need, and it comes in a much smaller package.

Devils on the Moon Pinball for the Playdate has an extremely literal title. It’s a game about playing pinball on the moon, which happens to be home to a bunch of little devils. It only has one pinball table, but there are three different tiers, and it’s all designed around occult and astrological themes. In addition to that, you can unlock various one-off challenges on smaller boards, like having to hit every pin onscreen before time runs out.

The original Super Meat Boy is one of the best-known indie games of all time. Released in 2010, it’s a brutally difficult 2D platformer, but so fun to play: The short levels almost feel like speedrunning puzzles, and even though they’re filled with traps and buzzsaws, dying isn’t so bad because you revive nearly instantly. Super Meat Boy 3D has much of the same spirit; it’s just as infuriating, and just as satisfying.

Moving around as Meat Boy in 3D feels very similar to 2D, particularly his really floaty jump. Wherever you run (and where you die) you leave blood splatters, which are helpful visual reminders of where to go (or where you died) when you retry a level. Levels are riddled with obstacles like saws, lasers, spikes, homing missiles, moving platforms, and tricky walls to climb, and sometimes, you’re dealing with multiple problems at once. But the switch to 3D also means that you have to think about how Meat Boy moves in 3D space, meaning you have to pull off moves like treacherous diagonal jumps and running across multiple walls. The change adds new elements without fundamentally impacting the Super Meat Boy experience.

One of the year’s most intriguing games was developed using software first released 40 years ago. Transfer Point looks and plays like a classic Mac point-and-click adventure game, and there’s a very good reason for that: It was developed using World Builder, a game creation tool first released in 1986 that has since become freeware. “The initial motivation was wanting to share this tool that was really innovative at the time, and meant a lot to me as a kid,” says developer Mike Piontek. “But the plan was to spend a few weeks on it, and I ended up doing it for over a year.”

Piontek first became obsessed with adventure games as a kid, and a lot of that was due to Silicon Beach Software, the now-defunct developer behind titles like Dark Castle. The studio also put out creative tools like SuperPaint and World Builder, and from the age of 11 Piontek began experimenting with designing his own point-and-clicks. Now he makes a living as a software developer, but he still shares his love for classic games on Twitch — and that’s where Transfer Point began.

The Legend of Zelda games are grand adventures, but they can also be very comforting, with quaint villages to explore and warm landscapes to take in. Under The Island takes that idea a step further. It still offers the sense of exploration and puzzle-solving that makes Zelda games so satisfying, but it also takes place in a cozy, lighthearted world with an energy reminiscent of Stardew Valley. It’s the kind of place you’ll want to hang around in even when you aren’t slaying monsters.

The game puts you in the role of Nia, a new resident on the seemingly normal Seashell Island. But soon it becomes clear things are much stranger than they appear as Nia is pulled into saving the island from sinking into the ocean. In the grand tradition of Zelda, this involves traveling around the island to collect important objects, and while Seashell may be a relatively small island, there’s a lot going on; forests and beaches filled with monsters, dungeon-like buildings with plenty of puzzles to solve, and townsfolk who always seem to be in need of a hand.

The funny shape of eggs is the curious lifeblood of Oeuf, the new physics platformer by prolific developer Increpare Games. In a gaming landscape saturated with complex systems dropped into simple games, that grapples with metaphor within straightforward narratives, and that is desperate to bring cinematic sensibilities into gaming, Oeuf only asks that you briefly consider how an egg might move as you roll, slide, and hop across its world.

That world is realized in crunchy, ’90s-era 3D that brings to mind Ultima and Might and Magic. Like this archaic-seeming style — that Oeuf was released within a month of Resident Evil Requiem is a fun graphical comparison — Oeuf is refreshingly simple. Blown from the nest atop a church steeple, you, a brown-speckled egg, must navigate church grounds, climb up trees, cross sloping roofs, and clamber over jutting bricks to get home.

I just got back from the GDC Festival of Gaming, a big industry-focused event in San Francisco that was formerly known as the Game Developers Conference. While the show is mostly about educational sessions and networking opportunities for working developers, there were also a bunch of games that I got to play. Here are some of my favorites, listed alphabetically. Best of all, these could all launch this year — hopefully well before Grand Theft Auto VI.

At Fate’s End is a gorgeous new action-adventure game from Spiritfarer developer Thunder Lotus all about grappling with sibling relationships through exploration and battles. I got to see two fights with just the first of the main character’s siblings. But even those early battles were thrilling skirmishes with dramatic animations, full-screen lightning attacks, and dialogue choices that can influence which ending you get. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the game all week. At Fate’s End is set to launch in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S.

There are a lot of games that try to emulate The Legend of Zelda, but few that manage to capture that spirit in such a small, concise package as Ratcheteer DX. The postapocalyptic game only takes a few hours to complete, but over that span it nails the classic Zelda vibe almost perfectly, offering a real sense of adventure along with the satisfaction of figuring things out on your own.

The game is set in a bleak future when most of humanity is hibernating beneath the Earth’s surface in order to wait out an ice age. To keep things going, mechanics are awakened every so often to perform maintenance on all of the machinery that keeps everyone alive. But when your character wakes up, basically everything has gone wrong: facilities like the power plant and water treatment facility have broken down, and your mentor has gone missing. Fixing all of that involves navigating plentiful obstacles both below and above the surface.

I never knew how easy it was to die in an orgy. But that’s just one of the many threats facing Geralt of Rivia in his latest adventure. The studio behind the Reigns series of Tinder-like choose-your-own-adventure games has now adapted The Witcher, following a handful of original titles and a take on Game of Thrones. And for Francois Alliot, creative director at Reigns studio Nerial, the series’ structure actually makes it an ideal way to ease players into sprawling fantasies like this. “There’s something about the way you can bring really complex universes, lore, and storylines to simple actions,” he says. “It can work in a lot of contexts.”

What makes Reigns so approachable is the way it distills every action into a binary choice. As you play, you’re presented with cards, and you progress by either swiping right or left. In the case of The Witcher, for instance, an elf might ask Geralt for protection, and your options are simply to say either yes or no and then deal with the consequences. Each run through the game involves making a number of these decisions to progress a storyline until, well, you die.

I’ve always wanted to go skydiving. Aerial_Knight’s DropShot, from indie developer Aerial_Knight, lets me live out that dream — at least in a safe, virtual kind of way. It also lets me shoot bullets from finger guns, wield laser skulls, and wear cool sunglasses while I’m falling through the air. So maybe it’s better than the real thing.

Playing as a character named Smoke Wallace, who was bitten by a dragon that gave him the finger gun that can actually shoot bullets, you plummet toward the ground and try to pick off bad guys with that finger gun or by punching them up close. It’s a first-person game, and the perspective really helps sell the feeling that you’re falling through the sky.