Outshining

Spending $300 million on a game is one way to set that game on the road to success; ultra-detailed, immersive games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows and next year’s Grand Theft Auto 6 appeal to gamers looking for a cutting edge experience.

But $300 million doesn’t promise you a good game—just a big one. We’re not even six full months into 2025, and indie developers can’t stop dropping great games on us, from genuine all-timers to zeitgeist-catching games that we all can’t resist picking up and checking out.

Making it even more impressive is how many big mainstream releases we’ve had so far this year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Monster Hunter Wilds, Avowed, and Doom: The Dark Age would make for a great year so far on their own.

But small teams are as scrappy as ever, bringing us unique, special games—and they’re outshining and making headlines just as much as the big guys. Here are this year’s biggest, must-play indie gems so far.

Blue Prince

Puzzles within puzzles within puzzles. Blue Prince is one of the most lauded games of the year, with an impressive 92 critic rating on Metacritic, and was developed by a single person over the course of eight years—a true indie title.

In this one, you’re exploring a house ostensibly to find the hidden 46th room, but there’s a lot more going on. This game quickly caught on with fans of puzzle games, earning comparisons to the legendary Myst and games like Fez. Those of us who listen to video game podcasts couldn’t miss it—no matter where you turned, gaming people were talking about it.

It’s as divisive as any puzzle game—some of us just aren’t there to do math in video games—but it’s rare for a game to be as well received as Blue Prince.



Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Let’s get it out of the way: The title of this game makes it sound terrible and generic. But it’s not. Instead, it’s a haunting tale of a dying world, with a story told via excellent voice acting and writing.

From French indie developer Sandfall Interactive, this game punches way above its weight. It combines ideas from classic Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) with twists from other genres to make something new, prompting fans to dub it an FRPG, or French role playing game, to demonstrate the differences and commonalities.

The team at Sandfall is relatively small, considering the visual fidelity and size of the game, though it’s important to note that Sandfall used contracted work—just like every other studio building an ambitious game these days. Even with those contractors, though, it’s still a demonstration that games developed by big studios don’t need to be so big and complex to capture an enthusiastic and receptive audience.

Schedule I

If you’re an old gamer who came up in the days of graphing calculators, you might’ve played, or seen friends play, a game called Drug Wars. Schedule I jumps off the same idea. You play a drug dealer who must grow and manufacture a variety of illegal drugs and drug variants, and then sell them to interested buyers—all without getting caught.

Despite being a single-player game that looks like a South Park knockoff, Schedule I raced to the top of the Steam charts quickly. It’s still in Early Access, which means it’ll get a bunch more content—but even in its early state, it had over 400,000 players playing at once in April and March, putting it in the top three PC games during those times (right below Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2).

R.E.P.O.

Games with cooperative gameplay and proximity chat have been growing in popularity the last few years, and R.E.P.O. is the latest to do it—and also maybe the funniest. You and your friends play as stout little robots who must extract valuable items from haunted places, avoiding monsters like “girl with sword hands” and “frog chef with a knife.” Not to mention the gnomes.

As you talk and look around, though, the top of your character’s head bobbles, and the eyes track where you’re moving the mouse, which make for very expressive characters despite the simple designs. Even just looking at your friend and quietly saying “hey” can be enough to get a laugh, but the screams suddenly cut off by a monster sighting are the best part.

Wanderstop

Davey Wreden is best known for The Stanley Parable, and his latest game, Wanderstop, is something completely different. It’s the very definition of a cozy game, with warm, cartoon-y art, telling a story about career burnout and change as an ex-warrior reluctantly learns to manage a tea shop.

It also acts as a sort of commentary on cozy games in general, as a narrative game that offers very little in the way of traditional progression. You won’t level up your tea machine or upgrade your shop here; Inverse’s review nailed it with this quote: “If cozy games are a reaction to the power fantasy of action games, Wanderstop is a reaction to the fantasy of productivity and self-sufficiency that cozy games offer.”

How the game hits for you will depend on your relationship to those kinds of games, but it’s the willingness to peel the veneer off a well-trodden genre and examine it like this is perfectly in line with Wreden’s previous work, and makes it a standout indie game.

Keep Driving

Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG. Management games are so often about places, but this is a management game about an experience. You’re not trying to make a self-sustaining store or restore an entire town. You’re just trying to keep your road trip going.

You’ll pick up hitchhikers along the way, as well as upgrade and customize your car. There’s a soundtrack of Swedish indie bands and a bunch of endings to keep the game compelling, and the art feels like it would fit into a game published during the early 2000s setting of the game.

Despelote

Despelote is a short but beautiful autobiographical story from its creator, told about living in Quito, Ecuador, and the way soccer affects the citizens of the city as Ecuador comes closer and closer to qualifying for the World Cup. The story is told through the eyes of 8-year-old Julian, as you kick the ball around and listen in on adult conversations as you explore your corner of Ecuador’s capital.

The game features unique art, with backgrounds that bring Return of the Obra Dinn to mind, and simple, hand-drawn characters. This is a quiet but affecting little narrative game, telling the kind of personal story a huge AAA game simply can’t.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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