The 12 Best Indie Games of the Last Two Years
2024-09-20 · 7 min read
The indie game scene continues to produce work that embarrasses major studios in creativity, emotional depth, and pure gameplay innovation. These twelve titles from 2023 and 2024 represent the best of what small teams with big ideas can achieve when corporate focus-testing isn't involved.
Cocoon by Geometric Interactive is a puzzle game where you carry entire worlds inside orbs and place them within other worlds. Designed by Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside, it's a brain-bending experience that never explains its mechanics because it trusts you to figure them out.
Balatro turned poker into a roguelike and became one of the best-selling games of 2024. You build a deck, create synergies between joker cards, and try to beat increasingly absurd score targets. It's the kind of game you start at 10 PM thinking you'll play one run and suddenly it's 3 AM.
Neva from Replika Studios is the spiritual successor to Gris, following a young woman and her wolf companion through a dying world. The art direction is breathtaking, using watercolor-inspired environments that shift with the emotional tone of the narrative. It communicates almost entirely through visual beauty.
Hades II by Supergiant Games took the formula of the original and expanded it in every direction. More weapons, more characters, more build variety, and a narrative structure that reveals itself across dozens of runs. Melinoe is a worthy successor to Zagreus, and the Greek mythology deep cuts are even more obscure and rewarding.
Animal Well by Billy Basso is a Metroidvania that rewards curiosity more than any game in recent memory. The surface game is compelling, but the layers of secrets buried beneath it, community-driven puzzles requiring thousands of players to solve, made it a phenomenon. One person made this entire game.
Other standouts include Dave the Diver for fishing and sushi restaurant management, Pacific Drive for survival driving through an anomalous Pacific Northwest, 1000xResist for ambitious narrative, Inscryption for meta-horror card gaming, Slay the Princess for branching visual novel horror, and Venba for a two-hour cooking game about Tamil immigrant identity that will wreck you.
