The best indie games of 2025 so far
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Look Outside is an instant classic that balances body horror with compassion
Image: Francis Coulombe/Devolver DigitalLook Outside is a horror game with teeth — quite literally: They’re bursting through my neighbors’ skin and gnashing on anything that gets too close. Look Outside was originally released on March 21, and the game has since consistently floated to the top of my social media feeds as people marvel about the scares this story has in store.
In Look Outside, I play as Sam, a normal dude who’s between jobs and behind on rent. Those concerns quickly become irrelevant as a cosmic entity known as The Visitor passes Earth, corrupting and twisting everyone who looks at it. There’s only one solution: Don’t look outside. No, it doesn’t matter how much the silvery glow of the moon beckons to you, nor how sweetly your neighbor croons. Don’t look outside. Don’t look at photographs, don’t look at reflections, do not try to gaze upon The Visitor.
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Why REPO has topped Steam charts and Twitch feeds since launch
Image: SemiworkAt first, the Steam page for REPO was an off-putting sight; the game’s key art has only just recently been updated to move away from a macabre-looking emoji leering at the viewer with gnarled teeth and hollowed-out eyes leaking tears. But it only takes a couple of rounds to understand why this game has taken off with streamers and multiplayer groups. REPO snatches the core concept of Lethal Company, the viral 2024 co-op hit, and then adds a few fun complications. While much of REPO feels familiar, the game feels like proof that even just a few small changes to a great formula can radically change the player experience and create something fun and novel.
Developer Semiwork is a small studio based in Sweden, and the most immediately obvious change was the swap of the iconic workers of Lethal Company with little bean robot guys. This is a massive change to the experience, and it’s hard to explain just how funny it is to perish to some terrible fate, switch into the game’s observer mode, and watch your buddies wobble around with their big googly eyes.
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Cruelty Squad creator’s latest is a nightmare cop sim where social media is a drug and you pilot a mech with chicken legs
Image: Consumer SoftproductsIn Psycho Patrol R, social media is a lot like cocaine. While doomscrolling isn’t technically illegal in the game’s universe, it is punishable by lethal force when done in excess.
The latest from Consumer Softproducts, the independent studio run by Finnish multimedia artist-designer Ville Kallio, Psycho Patrol R is a cyberpunk immersive sim shooter made up of extremes. Extreme violence, extreme aesthetics, extreme gameplay variety and open-world potential. Given all its moving parts, the fact that it coheres as well as it does feels exhilarating once you take the time to attune yourself to its quirks and peculiar rhythms. And while, as of this writing, the early access build of the game is currently unfinished, the moment-to-moment experience is already something to behold.
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The Forever Winter is my kind of ‘forever’ game
Image: Fun Dog StudiosI have played nearly 200 hours of The Forever Winter since its early access launch in September of last year. Seldom a week has passed, let alone a day, where I have not at one point logged on for a play session or two, barring vacations, holidays, and the like.
Despite this, I’ve refrained from writing about it because it was not yet in a state where I could write a qualified impression. That is, until now. With the launch of the game’s most recent quality-of-life update, I feel now more than at any point in the past six months that my faith in The Forever Winter was well placed.
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Expelled! is the most fun you can have being accused of attempted murder
Image: InkleMy first run in Expelled! was a completely miserable affair for our poor protagonist, Verity Amersham, a scholarship student at Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls. The entire playthrough took just a few minutes; I was escorted to Miss Mulligatawney’s office, dressed down, and booted out. This was just my first attempt, and I soon found myself starting the events of the morning over and over again, completely invested in discovering the secrets of the school, my fellow students, and the events of the murder.
Expelled! is a follow-up to Overboard!, a visual novel about murdering your husband and getting away with it. Overboard! is based around moving between the rooms on a ship and interacting with the other patrons aboard on a strict schedule, eliminating evidence as to your guilt or winning allies to vouch for your moral character. Expelled! follows the same format around the academy, but with a new morality mechanic: Certain choices offer evil points, and reaching lower morality ranks opens up new, hurtful options in scenes.
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Finally, I can pretend I’m on my phone
Image: Pippin Barr via PolygonI know I’m not the only person who finds themself reflexively opening and closing apps, like perusing digital window displays to feel as if I’m doing something.
A new game from developer Pippin Barr playfully highlights how meaningless our relationships with phones can be. It’s called It’s As If You Were On Your Phone, and you can play it, on your phone, right now.
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This slimy Soulslike isn’t the cute Dark Souls alternative I hoped it would be
Image: Pancake Games/Whitethorn GamesPitched as a cute, approachable “Souls-lite,” Slime Heroes combines two of my favorite things in video games: adorable slimes and Dark Souls-style gameplay. Despite some good ideas, Slime Heroes’ recipe doesn’t quite work. Yes, it’s cute, but it also feels frustrating, clumsy, and unfinished.
Slime Heroes casts the player as a colorful, customizable blob who fights way above its weight class in an attempt to save a fantasy world from a spreading corruption. Played from a top-down isometric perspective, my slime has a variety of attacks at its disposal: a light attack, a heavy attack, and a jumping smash attack that adorably transforms my slime into a smashing fist or an anvil. I quickly earned spell-like skills that let me throw projectiles or summon a whirlwind that sucks in my enemies.
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Wanderstop is so much more than just brewing tea — but that part’s good, too
Image: Ivy Road/Annapurna InteractiveA few years ago, a sound bite went viral on TikTok: “Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job. I do not dream of labor.” As writer Caitlyn Clark put it in Jacobin at the time, it’s no surprise that the statement resonated with people: a “tighter labor market,” Clark wrote, put increased pressure on workers over the past several years. It’s an increased strain that’s put more and more money in the pockets of the richest among us, yet it hasn’t created better workplaces or a better world for the rest of us. And I’ve been thinking about this phrase — “I do not dream of labor” — as I play developer Ivy Road’s Wanderstop. Though the foot on protagonist Alta’s neck is not one of a corporation, but of an individual drive to succeed at all costs — certainly influenced by culture at large — she is ultimately worn down so severely that she can no longer continue. She’s forced to rest, to engage in a less laborious life. But her new life does, indeed, involve labor.
Wanderstop begins with prolific and successful fighter Alta failing. It’s her first major failure — something she vowed would never happen to her. She had gone to a forest in search of a woman who can train her up, bring her back to her peak form, but the journey didn’t go as planned. Where she lands, instead, is a tea shop. The affable tea shop owner, Boro, plucked her from the forest after she collapsed, no longer able to wield her sword. She doesn’t want to stay, but she also can’t leave: Every time she tries, she collapses. She can’t hold her sword. And so, she does stay. People start to trickle into the tea shop and its surrounding clearing, so she makes them tea.
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Sorry We’re Closed is a stylish, sexy survival horror surprise
Image: à la mode games/Akupara GamesI had no idea what I was getting into when I jumped into the world of Sorry We’re Closed, a narrative-driven survival horror adventure that pairs the grime and decay of Silent Hill with the stylish, sexed-up demons of Persona games. But the artists behind Sorry We’re Closed have managed to remix some of my favorite gaming memories into something unique and surprising.
That even includes pairing Resident Evil-style tank controls and fixed camera angles with arcade light-gun shooters. Somehow all of these disparate gameplay influences come together in a nearly magical way.
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Knights in Tight Spaces is a fantastic follow-up to a deck-building delight
Image: Ground Shatter/Raw FuryKnights in Tight Spaces is a roguelike deck builder with deep strategy, lots to unlock and explore, and a whole lot of style. The game is a successor to the 2021 title Fights in Tight Spaces, but while the original game was a modern spy thriller with a tightly focused combat loop, Knights in Tight Spaces sprawls out onto a much broader canvas, telling an epic tale of brawlers, wizards, necromancy, medieval conspiracies, and frantic hand-to-hand combat.
This is a sequel at its best: Knights has all the stuff I loved about Fights, but the developers at Ground Shatter seem far more confident in using the tools in their arsenal. Each battle takes place on a tight grid, and I have to carefully position my party, avoid dangers, pick up the occasional chest of loot, and ponder upon my strategy.
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Atomfall mixes STALKER, Doctor Who, and Children of Men into a very British nuclear disaster
Image: RebellionAtomfall, the new game from Sniper Elite developer (and 2000 AD owner) Rebellion, is set in the Lake District in northwestern England in an imagined version of the 1960s. It’s a world of stark mountains, creepy moorland, homely village pubs, and eccentric country folk. It’s also a quarantine zone where clanking, retrofuturistic mechs patrol a militarized town after a disaster at a local nuclear plant. Nearby, the remote forest is overrun by a lawless faction of druidic cultists. In other words, it’s Fallout, U.K. style.
Rebellion, always a cheerfully unpretentious studio, is happy to own up to this influence — among many others. According to head of design Ben Fisher, a soft-spoken Scot, the initial idea for Atomfall came from Jason Kingsley, who co-founded Rebellion with his brother Chris in 1992 and who is still its CEO. Kingsley — a history nut with a popular YouTube channel about medieval life, where he’s often found in full plate armor on horseback — wondered what it would look like to combine a popular strand of gaming with a dark footnote in postwar British history: a fire that ravaged the Windscale nuclear plant, situated on the edge of the Lake District National Park, in 1957.
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Surveillance capitalism collides with white-collar crime in this narrative strategy sim
Image: WristworkHow much is your data worth? Do any digging and it’s not long before what at first seems a simple, straightforward question explodes into a pointillist web of factors well beyond the scope of common knowledge. The answer, however complex, can be made simple: It all depends on who wants to pay for it, and ultimately what it is meant to be used for.
Faceminer, an experimental narrative-driven management sim, implicates players in the high-stakes, high-reward world of mass data harvesting, having them pore over a seemingly endless swath of faces in the pursuit of nigh-unimaginable wealth. But just how much is wealth worth in a world on fire?
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The best horror visual novel dating sim combo out there just got a massive update
Image: Black Tabby GamesI picked up Scarlet Hollow, an early-access visual novel from Black Tabby Games, sometime last summer and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Scarlet Hollow kicks off with your player-character visiting a long-lost cousin named Tabitha in a small, nearly rundown North Carolina town (which is called… you guessed it! Scarlet Hollow). It’s already a morbid affair since you’re in town for a funeral, but each day brings a new, increasingly disturbing supernatural event, with a masked figure watching you from the shadows.
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In this post-apocalyptic farming sim, you must grow crops to survive
Image: RedSaw Games Studio/Logoi GamesIt’s not all about living up to grandpa’s legacy in this farming simulator. In fact, grandpa’s probably long gone, because in this post-apocalyptic farming sim, your neighbors are the folks who live in the trailers and shipping containers near your tent. This is Doloc Town, a community that’s grown out of necessity during life after the end of the world. Here, your crops are your contribution to the town’s survival — some residents cook, some catch fish, some build new infrastructure. You farm crops and become the town’s source of food, delivered by your drone, of course.
The free demo for Doloc Town, developed by RedSaw Games Studio, is available to play through Steam Next Fest from Feb. 24 to March 3. In the demo, you learn the mechanics of the farming sim with a refreshing sense of trust in the player’s knowledge of the genre — the gameplay is self-explanatory and typical, but the setting and story make it a fresh addition to the genre. There’s a cast of neighbors to meet, all of whom hint at the town’s troubled past surviving a falling society and standing up to an authoritarian regime of some sort. I haven’t quite figured out the plot, but that’s not a bad thing; I just want to play more Doloc Town.
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I had a blast in Neighbors: Suburban Warfare, a chaotic and colorful PVP game
Image: Invisible WallsGrowing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto, I quickly learned how serious a matter like an overgrown lawn or late night tunes can become. There’s nothing more terrifying than the shadow of an active homeowners association. An upcoming multiplayer game takes that threat a step further, pitting two crews of suburbanites against each other and adding a heavy dose of Looney Tunes-style cartoon violence. Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is like Rainbow Six Siege, but with the tacticool military edges filed off.
I sat down with developer Invisible Walls for a couple of rounds of, well, suburban warfare. Each team has a house to defend, with a television, toilet, bed, and oven. In order to win, you must destroy the other team’s objectives while defending your own. Of course, this is easier said than done. Your team can barricade windows, set up traps, or simply pummel enemies into unconsciousness to defend their turf.
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What’s more fun than crawling dungeons? Designing them first
Into the Restless Ruins is a roguelike deckbuilder in which… no, wait, come back!
I get it, it can be hard to overcome your cynicism when faced with the conjunction of “roguelike” and “deckbuilder”, the two most pervasive buzzwords in indie gaming — especially in the wake of such perfect expressions of the form as Slay the Spire and Balatro. And it’s true that Into the Restless Ruins, which is currently available to play as a Steam Next Fest demo, isn’t trying too hard to differentiate itself with its pixel art and its dungeon-crawling premise. But it has one new idea, and it’s a really good one.
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Mindwave builds thrillingly on a Nintendo masterpiece
I’ve said it before: Nintendo’s WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! for Game Boy Advance is one of the all-time greats. The 2003 minigame compilation is an absurdist deconstruction of gaming itself, and an irreverent, scattershot creation that stands as perhaps the most punk-rock thing Nintendo has ever done. But while the masterpiece prefigured everything from the 2000s casual gaming boom to the coming mobile gaming revolution, it’s seldom been imitated, except by its own (still going) series of sequels. Until now.
Mindwave, a (very successfully) Kickstarter-funded game by HoloHammer, is an explicit tribute to the first WarioWare, from its overall anarchic presentation down to the coarsely digitized sound of the “yeah!” sample that greets a successfully completed microgame. It’s also doing its own thing.
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The Executive’s spoonerisms bring silly joy to a fun movie-studio sim
Image: Aniki Games/Goblinz PublishingThere’s a long history of games using… let’s say creative solutions to get around licensing problems. This is especially true in sports games: Baseball video games long had to figure out alternatives to superstar Barry Bonds, who famously refused to license his name and likeness for games. (It’s the same for football games and coach Bill Belichick.) College sports games stopped entirely because they were sued after using players’ likenesses while substituting in fake names. (The situation is different now.) The Pro Cycling Manager franchise slightly alters the names of cyclists it doesn’t have the rights to — Remco Evenepoel becomes Remi Edendoel, Julian Alaphilippe becomes Jules Alaphilipi, etc.
But there’s a new game out there with a delightfully silly approach to this problem: spoonerisms.
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Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall is shaping up to be a worthy heir
Image: Brave at NightI missed out on the original Yes, Your Grace when it launched in 2020, but I devoured it on my phone in a single evening. My only issue with the kingdom management title? There wasn’t enough of it. Thankfully, the launch of its sequel, Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall is right around the corner, and a free Steam Next Fest demo is now available, full of morally ambiguous decisions to weigh heavily on your soul.
Snowfall picks up shortly following the events of Yes, Your Grace, with a short animatic to fill you in, if you didn’t get around to playing the original. Yes, Your Grace focused on the trials of the established patriarch of a royal household attempting to secure his legacy and keep his subjects satisfied. The major narrative threads in the original carry over to the sequel, and while you’re presented with the option to have a default storyline chosen for you, you can also fill in your choices from the original title.
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TankHead is a terrific roguelike vehicular combat twist on Shadow of the Colossus
Image: Alpha ChannelWe’re roughly two months into 2025 now, and we’re already spoiled by the plethora of great new video games to choose from. Even still, there have been more than a few titles released late last year that slipped off our radar and nevertheless merit attention. TankHead, a roguelike vehicular combat adventure that stealth-dropped on Epic Games Store back in December, is one such game.
Created by Toronto-based indie studio Alpha Channel, TankHead centers around Whitaker, a digitized human consciousness housed within a drone body. Set several years in the wake of a cataclysmic event, TankHead has players controlling Whitaker as he ventures into the “Event Containment Area” — an irradiated region where ordinary humans can no longer survive — on a mission to return to the site of his former home, the fabled floating city of Highpoint.
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Keep Driving’s perfectly annoying hitchhikers are a game-design master class
Image: YCJY GamesOn my second run through Keep Driving — a wonderful, turn-based, pixel-art game about taking long road trips as an aimless youth in the early 2000s — I picked up a hitchhiker called The Hurricane. This young woman was attractive and cool, much cooler than me. But she was also kind of annoying. She kept filling up the precious inventory space in my car’s trunk and the well behind the front seats with useless trash: used toilet rolls, packs of cigarettes with only one smoke left in them, spilled coffee cups. And she really wanted to party, which ended up getting me into terrible trouble.
Before I tell you about that, let me tell you how hitchhikers work in Keep Driving. They have unique skills, which can be used in the turn-based sort-of-combat encounters that occur as you drive — because you’re stuck in traffic, or there’s a bee in the car, or you’re being menaced by a gang of bikers. The hitchhikers also have traits, which can be helpful or not — like The Hurricane’s trash habit. They level up as you drive, acquiring new skills and traits as the trip goes along. And sometimes they give you quests and unlock new possible endings for your road trip.
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Somebody spilled Nier and Pokémon all over this Metroidvania
Image: Adglobe, Livewire/Binary Haze InteractiveEach year, hundreds of games try to smash together beloved franchises into something shamelessly, shallowly commercial. At first blush, you might mistake Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist for one of these offenders. The new 2D indie game combines the design of Metroid, the look and sound of Nier, and the progression of Mega Man — with a twist of Pokémon-style creature collecting.
What differentiates Ender Magnolia is the glue. Developers Adglobe and Live Wire bind their inspirations together with thoughtfulness and care, keeping what works, trimming what doesn’t, and making sure — above all else — that the game comes together holistically.
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For fans of holes, here’s a game about digging them
Image: Cyberwave/Rokaplay Boutique, DrillhoundsI’ve been saying for a long time that video game titles are stupid. What does Horizon Zero Dawn even mean? Aren’t Dead Space and Killzone the same titles in a different font? Games need to be more honest with their names, like A Game About Digging a Hole.
There’s nothing to hide with this one: You have a shovel and yearn for a really big hole. It’s a small hole at first, but it gets bigger with time. The deeper you go, the more secrets you find, and by secrets I just mean different rocks. There are a lot of rocks and they fill your backpack up pretty quickly, pulling you away from the hole every few minutes to sell them on the computer. I don’t know who is buying them and A Game About Digging a Hole, as we’ve established, isn’t about that, so I won’t be asking questions.
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This ultraviolent indie game would have pissed off Congress in the 1990s
Image: David SzymanskiMario collects mushrooms. Donkey Kong collects bananas. The naked, blood-lusting loner of Butcher’s Creek collects snuff films.
More than likely, you already know whether you’re the sort of person who will play the latest gorefest from Dusk creator David Szymanski — or the sort of person who wonders how this shit is legal. I’ll share the grimy details for the few people still balancing on the entrails-covered fence.
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This $5 Soulslike is overflowing with gloomy vibes and evil ants
Image: WabbaboyLate last year I caught a post by solo developer Wabbaboy about how they “got quirky with the tutorial messages” in their upcoming game about a fly with a sword. It wasn’t just the tutorial messages that intrigued me, though. It was, well, everything about FlyKnight, a dreamy retro Soulslike about fighting bugs.
FlyKnight, which was released on Steam last week, is a mix of RPGs I’m not quite old enough to appreciate and Soulslike elements ripped right out of one of my favorite games of all time, Dark Souls. It has the lethargic, melee-based combat of King’s Field and the trials of a Dark Souls level full of enemies waiting to ambush you. And you play as a fly who can swing a sword, cast magic, and equip fish for the passive buffs.
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