The Best Indie Games of the 2020s

Supergiant self-published on 17 September 2020 after nearly two years in Early Access, then became the first video game ever to win a Hugo Award, in 2021. The Mirror of Night is why the structure holds: spending accumulated darkness on extra Death Defiance charges turns a failed escape into a purchase rather than a punishment, and Hypnos has a new joke about it every time.

LocalThunk built the entire poker roguelike alone under a pseudonym, Playstack shipped it on 20 February 2024, and Game Developer reported five million copies sold by January 2025. The Jokers do the work: stacking Blueprint onto a retrigger engine until one played hand spits out a number too long to read, then finding the blind has scaled past it anyway.

Team Cherry self-published on 4 September 2025, six years after the 2019 announcement, and demand briefly knocked Steam, the eShop and the Xbox store offline on the same afternoon. Hornet is faster and more fragile than the Knight, and the Needolin — played standing still while things walk toward you — is the tensest save mechanic anyone has shipped. The difficulty complaints are fair; I disagree with them.

Daniel Mullins Games made it, Devolver Digital published it in October 2021, and it took the Seumas McNally Grand Prize plus three further awards at IGF 2022. Photographing a doomed deck to create a Death Card, which then turns up in later runs carrying your old mistakes, is the point where the cabin stops being a card game and starts being a save file with opinions.

Sandfall Interactive's debut, published by Kepler Interactive on 24 April 2025, won nine categories at The Game Awards 2025 including Best Independent Game, then took Best Game at the 2026 BAFTAs. Whether a Kepler-funded studio counts as indie is genuinely disputed, and the ceremony that called it independent also called it the best of everything. Parrying on the enemy's turn makes every fight a rhythm test.

Larian Studios financed and published it themselves, released it on 3 August 2023 after nearly three years in Early Access, and won Game of the Year at The Game Awards that December. Calling a several-hundred-person production indie irritates people and the objection is reasonable, but nobody outside Larian signed off on anything. The optional House of Hope heist, which most players never open, is the proof.

Poncle's one-man arcade experiment left Early Access on 20 October 2022 and then won Best Game at the 2023 BAFTA Games Awards, which surprised the developer as much as anyone. Levelling a Hollow Heart to evolve the Whip into a Bloody Tear is a tiny chemistry set, and twenty minutes later the screen is an unreadable wall of damage numbers. It costs less than a sandwich.

Billy Basso spent years writing this alone in a home-brewed engine, and Bigmode — the label run by the YouTuber videogamedunkey — released it on 9 May 2024 as the first game it ever published. The bubble wand is the design in one item: a toy that becomes a staircase, a projectile and a key depending on what you have worked out. Discovery continues well past the credits.

Dogubomb worked on the manor for years before Raw Fury released it on 10 April 2025, and it won Game Design at the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards. Every morning you redraft Mount Holly one room at a time, and reaching Room 46 depends on laying an Antechamber route you cannot yet see. My notebook filled with handwriting until the drafting stopped feeling random.

Andrew Shouldice started in February 2015 and finished roughly seven years later, with Finji publishing on 16 March 2022. Collecting loose instruction manual pages is the real progression system: a page arrives and a wall you walked past a dozen times becomes a door, because you finally understand the icon. Half of it is learning a written language nobody agrees to teach you.

rose-engine, a two-person German team, put it out on 27 October 2022; Steam now lists Balor Games as publisher after the Humble Games catalogue changed hands, so credits vary by source. Tuning the handheld radio until static resolves into a usable signal is the whole mood — survival horror that makes you listen rather than shoot. PlayStation-era fog, pixel portraits, an ending that does not console you.

Mossmouth released fifty finished games on 18 September 2024, each presented as software for a console that never existed, built by six people including Derek Yu of Spelunky. Barbuta, the first title on the menu, is a hostile little platformer that establishes the rule for everything after it: none of these is a minigame, and several are better than things that shipped alone.

Twenty-eight people and two cats made it at BlueTwelve Studio in the south of France, Annapurna Interactive published on 19 July 2022, and it won Best Independent Game at The Game Awards that year. The Zurk chases are the weakest thing in it. The Slums are the best, because you can scratch a rug for no reward whatsoever, which is exactly what a cat would do.

Thunder Lotus self-published on 18 August 2020; the Steam page now reads Farewell Edition after free 2021 updates, but it is the same app and the same release, not a remaster. Ferrying a spirit to the Everdoor means building their cabin, cooking what they like and then losing them, and the hug button is still mapped when there is nobody left to use it on.

Tour De Pizza, led by an artist working as McPig, launched their debut on 26 January 2023 after years of public demos. Pizza Time — the alarm that starts when you break the pillar and sends you sprinting the whole level backwards with Pizzaface behind you — is the finest use of an escape timer since Wario Land. Every frame is hand-drawn and visibly unwell.

Witch Beam, based in Brisbane, put it out in early November 2021 — Steam says the 1st, Wikipedia says the 2nd — and it won two BAFTAs the following spring, including the publicly voted EE Game of the Year. Nobody speaks. The June 2010 move tells you everything when her diploma has no wall available and every shelf already belongs to him.

MINTROCKET shipped it on 28 June 2023 while still a Nexon subsidiary, which is why its Best Independent Game nomination started a fight and why the director told VGC there was nothing indie about the studio; the team separated from Nexon in September 2024. Spearfishing all afternoon and then plating the Bancho Sushi dinner rush at night should not work as one game.

Thirteen years after Edmund McMillen first announced it, he and Tyler Glaiel finally released the cat-breeding tactics roguelite on 10 February 2026. Every adventuring cat retires after its run, so the collars that assign each animal a class have to be handed down a bloodline you bred on purpose. Losing a good cat permanently is the mechanic, not the failure state.