Indie Games of the Year 2025

Every year around the holidays, the question pops up in our Discord server: What was the best game of the year? The answer, as much as we want it to be, is never clear-cut. Because when you spend your days immersed in rough-edged worlds, new mechanics, and deep stories of the thousands of indies that come out every year, “best” starts to mean very different things to different people. For some of us here, it was that roguelite beat ’em’em up that kept us up till 3 AM with promises of “just one more run,” or that narrative rabbit hole of a game that made us look inwards, or that one game that had a concept so mesmerizing we couldn’t stop playing. 2025, in many ways, feels like the year indies grew up. In this article, our writing staff shares their personal favorite indie game of the year. These are the games that moved us, challenged us, and reminded us why indie games are the most exciting and innovative space in the art form.

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Blue Prince is one of the most important games of the year, not simply because it invented a whole new genre, “The First Person Architectural Adventure,” but because it offered an experience that simply cannot be found elsewhere. The measured, methodical anticipation of opening a door and hoping it leads to a room that you haven’t run across before becomes this exercise in planning, strategy, and hopefulness that very few games can replicate.  It disguises itself as a roguelite, “Metroidbrania” style puzzle game about a boy walking through an ever-shifting mansion, bequeathed to him by his ancestor, but it slowly evolves into so much more. It’s a masterclass in visual storytelling and has immersive gameplay that bleeds into the real world. The gameplay thus becomes a meditation in remembering bits of lore, solutions to puzzles, and dealing with the uncertain. Progress can often be fragile, runs ending seemingly out of nowhere, but failure is never punished. It folds back on itself with experience and knowledge, knowing you made it just a little bit further this time.

The slow, methodical pace of Blue Prince is its most remarkable feature. No one’s chasing you, there are no monsters, no weapons, no constant escalation. The mansion is the antagonist, sure, but it is also a living archive of half-remembered floor plans and paths that led nowhere. The other thing that we loved about Blue Prince was that the game respects the player’s curiosity, no run feels wasted and it doesn’t hurry you to get to a solution. It’s a thoughtful and precise experience about opening doors that may lead to nowhere, but you can only find out by stepping through.

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Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo is an adventure about an undead snake named Kulebra. He awakens in Limbo, a colorful and sad afterlife where spirits are stuck in an eternal Groundhog Day. The spirits are fleshed-out entities with regrets and stories, and are as much a part of the game as the puzzles and items that Kulebra collects. As you rattle and roll along, you listen to these souls and try to help them move on from their angst. Slowly, these relatable stories reflect on the players, and you might find yourself wondering about certain situations in your life.  Because the narrative is entwined with basic fundamental human truths, it is a surprisingly resonant experience. It is storytelling with a purpose, and we wish more people had played this beautiful game.

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Silksong landed with the cultural impact of a meteor, crashing store fronts, dominating sales charts and making other games push their debuts back just to get clear of the blast radius. But as much as it was a gaming juggernaut it was also deeper look at how we understand growth, challenge and artistic ambition in games. As you waltz through the Kingdom of Pharloom as the agile Hornet, you start to realise how much care and love was put into the game. Everything is handcrafted, waiting for you to discover it. Every character has their own vibe, own little song, own place in the world. But beyond all of that, it’s the game’s design that pushes you to confront your need to go on. Most of us here at IIG at some point needed to take a break from the punishing difficulty of a particular boss fight or a heinous corpse run. But much like Miyazaki’s epics at FromSoft, each victory in Silksong feels personal because the defeats feel like lessons. It’s never the game failing you; it’s always you.

This personal conversation between the game and the player is why this game will long be considered a classic. It resonates with you on a level far beyond simple gameplay mechanics and asks questions of you. Like the very best of games, it asks us why we keep returning to worlds that test us or, at the very least, try to break us. And you can’t help but wonder if it’s the music, the world, the characters, the art, the mechanics or is it simply because it’s human nature to persevere.

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Absolum is the very definition of doing one thing well. In this case, it’s two things. Roguelite progression and pixel-perfect side-scrolling action. Absolum isn’t a complex game, in terms of systems. Instead, it creates its complexity and its appeal from one basic principle. Mastery itself is engaging enough. Like the very best roguelites it never feels like you are spinning your wheels. Every run teaches you something about the world and the enemies, and rewards you with abilities. Every run teaches you to fight better, to learn enemy patterns and get better with your own timing. It is a combination of progress and mastery that makes it such an unforgettable game.

While it doesn’t constantly reinvent itself every run, it never needs to. It doesn’t feel procedural when the combat encounters change up on you, it all feels deliberate and measured to get the best out of you. Parries, dodges and charge attacks along with the excellent progression system become a tool for variety rather than frustration. Absolum is nearly alchemical in the way it integrates two different genres and polishes them to an utter shine.

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There isn’t much that needs to be said about Sandfall Interactive’s magnum opus that the current gaming discourse hasn’t already discussed. It won many awards, many hearts and broke a few controllers. But beyond all that is a game that is part poetry and part love letter to what has come before. Inspired by Final Fantasy and the traditional JRPGs of old, it marries real-time responsiveness with turn-based strategy. But what has stayed with all the millions of players is the story and how the game made them feel. It’s rare for a game to make you feel seen, and in turn, you get to see the love and care that was poured into the game.

The best games are always a conversation. Between the players and the developers. We assign meaning to their labour of love. Think about all the best games you have played, it is always a meaningful dialog about some aspect of the human condition. Love, hate, anger, politics, money, greed, loss. It carries weight and has depth that allows you to immerse yourself in familiarity. Not because you have seen this Belle Epoque-inspired world before, but because you recognize some part of yourself on the screen. From the haunting soundtrack to the muted colors to the absolutely broken characters, Expedition 33 is a celebration of struggle as an art form.

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Once you load it up Winter Burrow feels like a long forgotten folktale that is drenched in old world wisdom and is about to teach you something. And it does. Upon first glance, it looks and plays like a game that’s about foraging, crafting, knitting, baking and building a home. But beneath its storybook and hand-drawn visuals is a story about putting a life back together. Like life, the game has no map, so each expedition is an attempt to remember directions and locations. While on these expeditions, you run into bugs and other critters that are effectively obstacles to your already perilous mission. Warmth, hunger, stamina and health gauges need to be monitored and you carefully keep the cold at bay. Beyond a simple “cozy survival” game, it is also a slow, pondering deliberation on the act of rebuilding. And that meaning can come from simplicity. The mechanics reflect the act of gathering the pieces of a life once lived and that a small measure of comfort can be found in this world’s harshest places.

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Arc Raiders sits in a weird position in 2025’s gaming ecosystem. It is not an indie in the strictest sense, given its mid-tier budget and having a publisher in Embark Studios. But it has the heart of a DIY indie AA game that evolves its gameplay through emergent stories instead of big scripted set-piece moments. Arc Raiders is a PvPvE extraction game much like Escape from Tarkov, and the gameplay stems from scarcity as Raiders have to fight deadly AI robots and other players on a post-apocalyptic world, scavenging for loot and making it back safely down below.

What makes it different from the polished Call of Duties and Battlefields of the world is that the emergent gameplay is of a much more personal nature. A quiet betrayal over loot in a blizzard, a desperate mad sprint for extraction through a dust storm, or an uneasy alliance against a towering machine. These little stories elevate the game into an elegant tension machine while keeping its extraction shooter flourishes razor sharp.

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The Alters takes an established genre and elevates that genre to something much greater than the sum of its parts. It mixes existential crisis with grounded scifi and the familiar survival gameplay mechanic of resource gathering and crafting. Developed and published by 11 Bit Studios, you take on the role of Jan Dolski, an engineer who has crash-landed on a strange planet. Your path to survival involves taking on multiple roles to keep your circular base running. This then leads to using a sci-fi mineral called Rapidium to create clones of Jan. Plucked from his own timeline, born off paths he didn’t take, these clones are his only means of survival on this harsh planet.

Time is not on your side, with a deadly sun bearing down on the mobile base, you need to get moving before you are burnt to a crisp. All that is the gameplay side of things. What the game excels at is the existential questions the game poses through the clones. The clones you make aren’t from another dimension; they are you. They aren’t “units”. They are living arguments about identity, regret, and the burden of choice. It is a contemplation on self and identity wrapped in a survival resource management game and we couldn’t recommend it enough.

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Those are our picks for the best games of the year. We at Into Indie Games would like to thank all of you for your support throughout the year. We hope to see you here again next year.