First :

• Outer Wilds
• Disco Elysium

Then :

• Inscryption
• Carto
• Spiritfarer
• Pyre

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.

• 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.

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.

Stardew

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.

FTL: Faster Than Light

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.

Valheim. Bought it late January and already got almost 400 hours on it. Play it vanilla first then modded. I played it with friends, beat final boss on Day 997, we took our times, building and all along the way. Then I started over solo with x3 resources, no raid, and move metals through portal. I just wanted to see if I could solo all game and today I just finished basically everything. So right now, I'm just collecting resources for gears and buildings. Going to make few houses across the map.

Balatro

Obra Dinn

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

Factorio.

Honourable mentions:

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

N++

Undoubtedly the best, most complete 2D platformer I've ever played. Super tight controls and incredible level design, coupled with an episode-long timer mechanic that you can influence makes this one absolutely unmatched. Sure, games like Celeste are flashier, but nothing is a better game than N++. I think I put something like 120 hours into this to get the platinum on PS4. I would happily start over and play the whole thing from scratch again.

I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I've since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.

One game I love that hasn't been mentioned yet is Subnautica. The only survival crafting game I ever finished. The story telling and athmosphere are unmatched.

Inside

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Eternal Strands

Disco Elysium

All very different and unique. All fantastic!

A Hat in Time

UFO 50

Outer Wilds

Hylics

Hylics 2

Pizza Tower

Celeste

It's hard to pick one lol

Here are a few, hopefully they aren't mentioned yet:

• walking simulator/light puzzle game - Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, INSIDE, A Juggler's Tale, Abzu, Nuts
• puzzle - Manifold Garden, The Case of the Golden Idol, GNOG, Gorogoa
• misc - Inscryption, Pony Island
• 3d platformer/adventure - Yooka Laylee
• metroidvania/platformer - Blue Fire
• programming - Human Resource Machine, TIS-100
• souls-like/boss rush - Furi, Titan Souls

Some of these might be AA, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. I have plenty more where that came from. :)

Cave Story, the original 2004 version.

I played it a long time ago and I still think about that game from time to time.

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.

Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita's world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone's offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.

The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.

Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.

Balatro. It's a great Maths game.

I'll put Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead up there with FTL and Dwarf Fortress.

Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.

I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)

There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.

A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.

Slay The Spire Fury Ori And The Blind Forest

Judging by the playtime, Rimworld. It is such an important part of my life at this point, it's not even funny. I've played thousands of hours, and don't regret it

I am having a lot of fun with Timberborn and Big Ambitions.

Timberborn is a colony builder where you are in control of beavers. You have to survive between times of good water, bad water, and no water.

Big Ambitious is a business sum in new York make by the same person who made Startup Company.

I guess either Shovel Knight or Hades

ya know what, I'mma round it out as a Top 5, so let's throw in Bastion, Bloodstained, and Dust: An Elysian Tail as well.

Dave the diver! /s

But seriously I'm a real sucker for platformers, and so A Hat In Time is my most favorited one. It brought back this sort of charm I haven't felt since the n64 days and I love it!

Stray and Kena: Bridge of Spirits are pretty awesome too, would be my second and third favorites

I can't say it's my favorite, but after checking out all of these games, I'm just gonna post one I think all you guys would love.

NOITA

Here are the ones that don't get uninstalled from my potato box:

• Sable

• Ion Fury

• Torchlight

• Ziggurat

• Baba Is You

• Edritch

• Fez

• Plunge

• Valley

• Into The Breach

• Journey

(Disclaimer: some are very old, some may not be indie, eh, I did my best.)

Factorio.

Vampire Survivors

It might just be because I was actually early aboard the hype train for this one; but this one just scratched that “one more go” itch until 2am like nothing else.

Enter the Gungeon

Randomly came across this via a YouTube short, and the art-style just meshed with me. Absolutely love the messy bullet-hell quick-play genre in general.. Hades being another great example of this.

Crosscode for sure! They have a new game in the works as well, it looks like it will be just as good. Great time to get into it

Slay the Spire

Brotato

Shadow Empire. Best 4X wargame ever. 400 page rulebook included. Realistic logistics and planet generation 6000 years in the future!