My Top 25 Favorite Indie Games of the 2010s

Alright. I know I’m late, you know I’m late, let’s just pretend it never happened and move on.

In many ways, the past decade has simultaneously been one of the better and worse time periods for video games. For better or worse games are taken seriously now, and now get all the same benefits and expectations as other forms of media. One of the greatest and most important evolutions over the past ten years is the massive explosion of independent (indie) game developers. As technology has evolved, the tools to make games have become quickly and easily accessible to essentially anyone with an internet connection, and the repercussions of that have been staggering. The range of experiences available to the medium, and the breadth of experimentation that’s taken place has truly expanded the definition of video games in some pretty unprecedented ways, and has forced the industry to reckon with the fact that a lot of people want something fresh, and the fact that no matter your budget, art is worthless without soul. For that reason, I’ve decided to talk about my favorite indie games released in the past ten years, and what they mean to me. They are ranked, but if I’ve learned anything from writing other lists it’s that within a week I’ll disagree with my own ranking anyways so it doesn’t matter all that much. Take it all with a grain of salt, these are just the games that I loved a lot these past few years, and think that most people should check out.

25. Baba Is You

I’m starting with a game that I will admit to admiring more than actually enjoying, but that honestly doesn’t mean I have any real issues with it. Baba Is You is one of the smartest puzzle games I’ve ever played, not because of complexity but because of its simple concept and genius presentation. The mechanics are superbly intuitive and present one of the most natural learning curves I’ve seen in a game of this style. This is the game for game designers through and through, and while I may not be particularly good at puzzle games, the “A ha!” moments were enough to keep me coming back far longer than I ever anticipated.

24. Ori and the Blind Forest

I was extremely late to get on the metroidvania boat. It’s a genre that’s been around forever and had countless classics, and yet it’s a difficult one to introduce or explain to people who have not played the two games its title derives from. Ori and the Blind Forest is the first game to show me the potential of the genre, and the beautiful exploration at its core. It does this primarily with movement and controls that put you in a state of complete flow, as the absolutely gorgeous hand-painted visuals fade into the background and you and Ori become one. It’s the definition of beauty in video games, at its core, and I can’t wait to get around to playing the recently-released sequel.

23. Hotline Miami

The year is 1989, Miami, Florida. The phone rings, and on the other end you hear a muffled voice speak a single, unforgettable sentence.

“Do you enjoy hurting other people?”

Hotline Miami is fast, it’s grimy, it’s brutal in both difficulty and presentation, and it is pure violent energy overlaying an 80s synthwave aesthetic that captures the pure grit and grime of the criminal underworld your nameless character inhabits. Every level maintains its visceral engagement as you blast through waves of enemies, knowing a single misstep could mean your demise. Hotline Miami is almost inarguably the most consistently fast game on this list, and presentation accelerates that by a factor of a thousand. It’s the definition of style.

22. Slay the Spire

I’ll say it upfront, I suck at card games. More than that, I suck at deck-building games. I’ve been playing the Pokémon TCG for as long as I can remember, and have recently started getting into Magic: The Gathering, but my greatest weakness is actually building decks in a smart way. Unfortunately that lack of strategic skill in creating synergies between cards translates a significant amount into deck-building rogue-lite Slay the Spire but, luckily for me, it manages to be fun no matter how I play it. The cards always manage to synergize in fun ways no matter how stupidly I play, and while most of my runs end up in my untimely death because I simply don’t have the strength of cards necessary, I’m never upset or disappointed. It’s incredible that a game that is so “not my thing” manages to be such an enjoyable experience for me.

21. Crypt of the NecroDancer

From DDR to Guitar Hero, osu! to Audiosurf, I eat rhythm games up for breakfast. The games have the innate ability to place you in “The Zone” and consume your focus entirely. Crypt of the NecroDancer takes the locked-in mental state of rhythm games and seamlessly integrates it in the tried-and-true formula of the dungeon crawler to create a game experience that is wholly unique. You’re forced to move, fight, and interact with the levels in tandem with the rhythms of the fantastic soundtrack, rhythms that grow faster and more complex as you progress. Boss fights make fantastic use of tempo shifts and time signature changes, forcing you to truly lock in and focus on the music in a way few other games ever do. The game also received a Zelda-themed sequel, Cadence of Hyrule, in 2019, a short game that is essential for fans of the original.

20. Papers, Please

I am a firm believer in the idea that video games have the potential to be the most engaging and important means of storytelling in the future. The potential of the medium, in my opinion, is significantly greater than most other art forms as a whole. One of the first examples I always point to when I talk to people about the potential for stories unique to games is Papers, Please. 

Papers, Please is not a fun video game, let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. It’s gruelling, grindy, and perfectly representative of what a daily grind of working to make a living feels like. It is also emotionally taxing in a way few games manage to be authentically. The choices that you, a border security agent, are forced to make, decide the fates of dozens of individuals, each with a story. Do you let the single mother with two children through to safety, at the risk of a severe penalty to your paycheck, or do you send them back to the war they’re fleeing, essentially sentencing them to a life in a war-torn hell, but giving you a few more dollars to provide for your starving family? These are the choices that plague every minute of Papers, Please, and that will continue to linger in the back of my mind for years to come. Glory to Arstotzka.

19. Towerfall: Ascension

Show of hands, who here actually bought an OUYA? Just me? Alright. The original Towerfall is probably the only good thing to come out of the OUYA, but somehow the disappointment of the platform it released on didn’t stop the game from receiving a wide acclaim and eventually getting an all-platforms release in the form of Ascension. At its core, Towerfall: Ascension is a game centered around fun party mayhem, and that’s where I’ve spent the most time with it over the years. It’s simple enough that anyone can figure out how to play just from watching a round or two, but varied enough that every round ends up wildly different, as tiny archers run around the screen frantically trying to be the last one standing, and as a myriad of laser, bomb, and drill arrows fly in every direction. There’s also a very extensive and fun campaign, a little something for everyone. The OUYA’s legacy may seem like a black mark on the industry, but at least we got this gem for our troubles.

18. FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL is a hard game for me to describe in detail. Most of the time when I play it, everything just clicks as I settle into the role of space captain, attempting to transport myself and my crew to the Federation Fleet on the other end of the galaxy against all odds, usually succumbing to said odds along the way. It’s simultaneously some of the most in-charge I’ve felt in a strategy game, and the most helpless, as rebel ships come in droves at the most inopportune times. Every element of the game feels intuitive, yet the mechanics retain the complexity that players of tactical games would expect. The best way I would describe this game is The Oregon Trail: Sci-Fi Edition, where your crew may be more likely to die of suffocation than dysentery, but the brutality and unforgivingness of the world never relents for even a second. The game may take a few tries to pick up, but once you’ve got it it’ll be even harder to put it back down.

17. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Roguelikes and rogue-lites are absolutely everywhere in the indie space. I mean, I’ve already placed a ton of them on this list, and had to skip dozens and dozens of them in favor of the other picks here. The issue that many roguelikes face, however, is a misunderstanding of the potential of the genre, and what makes them fun. It’s all about synergies, randomization, and building your run around crazy combinations of items that the game gives you to make yourself as powerful as possible. In that regard, you’ll find no issue with The Binding of Isaac. The gameplay is a simple twin-stick love letter to the original Legend of Zelda, where you move and shoot your way through a totally randomized dungeon, on a mission to get to the bottom. The hook, then, is how each run differs from one another. It’s an element I’ve noted plenty of times before on this list but The Binding of Isaac is by far the most that any game I’ve played leans into it. Hundreds of items all work differently together, for better or worse, to make each run feel fresh even after hundreds of hours of playtime. All this without mentioning the signature dark comedy of Edmund McMillain (seriously, talking about this game in public is an exercise in shamelessness,) and you’re left with one of the most standout titles ever to come from the roguelike genre, and the indie scene as a whole.

16. Disco Elysium

I have a confession to make, one that may come as a surprise to many people that know me. If I’m being honest, a huge portion of the tabletop role-playing experience is totally uninteresting to me. I love Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, and a myriad of other games like them, but to me the thing I love about RPGs is so rarely focused on in the campaigns I’ve participated in: the actual role-playing. Building up a believable character with a defined personality, and making skill checks to either bullshit my way through the most intense situations, or suddenly make a seemingly innocuous interaction a life-threatening one is one hundred percent up my alley. My issue comes the moment that combat starts, and suddenly it’s a long numbers game where everyone has to wait their turn to smack the bad guy, with very little risk most of the time. In that regard, Disco Elysium is my game. You play as a detective who has just woken up from a skull-shattering hangover, leaving your character an utterly blank slate to build a personality around, all while time progresses around you, demanding things you simply don’t know. This is where one of the most fascinating and, at times, hilarious aspects of the game comes in: your character’s mental state. Every skill is an aspect of your character’s mind, and each one expands your options with how you navigate dialogue. Your character can even adopt ideologies based on the choices you make, mine adopted communism, but after a while the game notified me (casually, I might add,) that I could adopt facism as my ideology, so I turned back. It was a wakeup call for me in a game full of them, and the lack of combat really does help to build an attachment to my player character often missing in RPGs like this. Any fan of role-playing in general should already have checked this one out, it’s truly fantastic.