The best indie games we’re playing right now

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.

Colonialism is not merely about occupying nations. It’s a project of mass violence, part of which involves total erasure and the widespread theft of some of the most culturally significant artifacts in the world. Even today, colonizing nations proudly display stolen artifacts, acting as peacocking robbers under the guise of tourism. See, for example, the British Museum’s continual hold of the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, the so-called Benin Bronzes, and the Ethiopian Maqdala collection. Colonized nations have sought to reclaim their stolen culture.

But what happens when kind requests and diplomatic maneuvers are not only insufficient but undeserving of the ongoing crime? This is where the fantasy of the moral heist comes in — and no game has done it better than Relooted.

When the Mewgenics team announced in 2024 that it had added autism to the list of disorders the game’s cats could inherit, developer Edmund McMillen — best known as the co-creator of Super Meat Boy — was unprepared for the reaction.

“It was like the most positive response I’ve ever had to anything I posted,” he says. On Reddit and TikTok, fans expressed gratitude and excitement for the inclusion. “Everybody was like, ‘This is the perfect representation for autism. I feel seen,’ etc., etc.,” McMillen says. “That felt like somebody opened the door and said, ‘Go on. Go ahead, do your thing.’”

I’m an awful rock climber. Being scared of heights probably doesn’t help. But when I’ve tried it, I’ve loved the slow, methodical work of moving from one ledge to the next. It reminds me a lot of why I love running; in both sports, you achieve goals that seem insurmountable by taking them one step at a time. Cairn, a new game from The Game Bakers, is one of the few games I’ve played that truly captures that feeling.

You play as Aava, a famous climber obsessed with summiting a mountain called Kami. You climb by moving all four of Aava’s limbs, one by one, to find safe cracks, bumps, and ledges to let you inch your way higher, all while managing tools and resources carried in your backpack. Climbing games are becoming something of a trend, but Cairn is different from Jusant, where you just control the character’s hands, or Baby Steps, a sillier game where you just control the character’s feet.

There’s a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she’s recently moved to a place simply called “the City” from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she’s an avid writer. But these biographical details aren’t the important thing; it’s the way she’s painted by the game’s incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen. There are a lot of characters in media that are awkward or socially anxious, but few that are drawn with such piercing specificity.

The point-and-click game is minimalist in its mechanics. Consisting mostly of conversations, it’s broken up by a few puzzles, object interactions, and minigames. This is not a complaint: it’s in talking to people that the game shines, because it’s how we get to see most of Mara. And she’s such a realized and resonant portrait of a person that I found myself grasping at where we were different as a coping mechanism against spending the whole time introspecting. I pride myself, for example, on never having had an awful boyfriend. In this, surely, I could find some self-soothing superiority over this poor video game character.

We’re living in a pretty great time for detective games. Over the last few years, developers have been experimenting with all kinds of different ways of turning the act of investigation into a compelling game, which has led to the likes of Her Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, and the Golden Idol series, to name just a few. Now you can add TR-49 to that list — a game that builds on the genre by introducing a bizarre code-breaking computer.

Developed by Inkle, the studio behind 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, TR-49 is confounding from its very first moments. When you start the game you have no idea what’s going on — and neither does your character. You play as a woman who wakes up in a church basement with no memory of who she is or how she got down there. In front of you is a strange WWII-era computer. It has a big circular screen and you control it by using the kind of lever more closely associated with factory machinery than high-end computing. Soon, you hear the voice of a man who tells you what you need to do: find a missing book.

While playing Big Hops, a new 3D platformer starring an adorable frog, I kept feeling like I was breaking the game — and, like with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, breaking it is kind of the point.

In Big Hops, you play as a frog named Hop. Early on, Hop is taken away from his home, and he works to get back by collecting airship parts from a few different areas, each with its own cute animal characters and storylines. Because he’s a frog, the primary way you interact with things is by slinging his tongue. You can use it to grab pots to toss and break them for coins, as a grappling hook to reach new areas, and to snag foods with special powers you can find littered throughout the game’s colorful, cartoony worlds.

Diora might be the most ambitious game I’ve played on the Playdate. It’s all about perspective: You turn the handheld’s crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, like little dioramas you can spin around in your hands. But the most impressive part is the puzzles that will have you twisting your brain as much as the crank.

In Diora you play a “network technician” traveling to various locations across a city, fixing up machinery in the wake of a strange accident. Repairing things is easy; all you have to do is reach the computer at the end of each level. Getting there is the hard part.

One day, video game critics and journalists will put together a comprehensive study on the impact Balatro had on the industry — of how so many games that came after tried to capture its essence by adding complex systems to otherwise simple, easily understood games. Until then, I’m gonna play Dogpile.

Dogpile is a deckbuilding match-3 roguelike that builds on the style of merge games like Suika Game by adding a Balatro-like twist. The result is a cute, cozy (in both genre and vibe) game that appeals to both the numbers-go-up and the dog-loving sicko in me. Drop matching dogs on top of each other to create bigger dogs that reward you with points to unlock higher levels. The smallest unit of dog is a Chihuahua, two Chihuahuas merge to form a Pomeranian (at least that’s what I think it is), and so forth. The dogs pile up the playing field kinda like Tetris, and also like Tetris, if the dogs spill over the top of the field, it’s game over.

Sektori is an old-school twin-stick shooter. Created by a former developer at Returnal studio Housemarque, it puts you in the role of a little ship that blasts through swarms of enemies, and you have to weave through them to get upgrades to help you survive. Often, my runs end after less than a couple minutes, like a retro arcade game. But creator Kimmo Lahtinen brilliantly weaves modern ideas from roguelikes with pulsing visuals and music that make Sektori a mesmerizing experience.

A key part of what makes Sektori good is how it puts you into a flow state. “Sektori is a place, a form of being, a method of transformation,” reads the description of the game’s campaign mode. “Sektori is seeking, processing, shaping. Sektori is a specter of your zero state.” It may be fancy, high-concept language, but bear with me as I detail how the game actually works. It took me a while to understand it, and how everything connects is what makes the game actually reach those lofty heights.

Skate Story is two very different things simultaneously. On the one hand, it’s a visceral take on skateboarding, providing a tight, fast, ground-level view as you brute-force your way through tricks and combos. But it’s also a surrealist trip through the underworld where you control a skateboarding demon who faces off against the devil. Think of it like Dante’s Inferno meets Thrasher magazine, and you’re most of the way there.

The premise is actually quite a bit stranger than just skating through hell. You play as a demon made of glass, who is both hungry and tired, and so decides to… eat the moon. This pisses off the devil, and your response is to delve into the deeper layers of hell where even more tasty moons of various colors await. You’re guided by a talking rabbit, and at various points you’ll meet a pigeon blogger, frog barista, a cute bag of trash, and a whole lot of talking skeletons.