If your only view into what’s hot in video games was The Game Awards, you might think that 2024 was lacking in great independent games. Indies struggled to land nominations at this year’s show, with Balatro standing out as the sole breakout success story. Almost everything else indie, with one exception, was quarantined to categories like Games for Impact and Best Debut Indie. I could forgive anyone who looked at the nominee list and walked away thinking that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was the undisputed king of 2024.
Anyone who plays indie games regularly will paint you a much different picture. Deep below the year’s surface-level hits lies a layer of inventive indies that pushed gaming to new creative heights in 2024. The list of highlights runs deep. Indika is an eerie 19th-century adventure about a nun outrunning the devil, Arctic Eggs explores absurdism through fry-cooking minigames, and Minishoot’ Adventures reimagines the twin-stick shooter as a Zelda game. None of those games are anything like one another, but they’re all some of the year’s most creative, engaging works.
As we do every year, we want to highlight 10 indies that especially stood out to us this year. Some will look familiar if you’ve already read our Best of 2024 list, which was loaded with indies. It’s a woefully small list that can’t possibly contain every highlight (1000xResist, Crow Country, Arco, Children of the Sun … the list goes on). But this collection of games highlights a diversity of releases this year, spanning multiple styles and genres. If you haven’t gotten around to many of these, consider this a 2024 backlog. ~ Giovanni Colantonio, Senior Gaming Editor
Animal Well
The first time I saw Animal Well, I knew it would be special. Its eerie lo-fi atmosphere radiated off my computer screen as I watched its debut trailer. Solo developer Billy Basso promised a Metroidvania full of deep secrets that he felt would take fans years to truly uncover. It was some big talk, but the final product delivered on those promises. Animal Well is a haunting adventure that plays like a maximalist Atari 2600 games. There are secrets within secrets, with each screen hiding something underneath dense layers of mystery. Some of my favorite gaming moments this year came during the month I had with it prior to review, where I fluidly pulled back its layers alongside other critics. As a community-driven single-player game, Animal Well is a remarkable accomplishment that I’m not sure anyone will be able to replicate. ~ Giovanni Colantonio
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is one of those puzzle games that stunned me because I couldn’t believe that no one had thought of the gameplay concept before. Tile-sliding puzzle games might not be a new idea, but a game where the tiles move with players is. Developer Furniture & Mattress explores this idea to the fullest in its compact but extremely clever debut title. Arranger’s tile-sliding movement is shockingly intuitive. Yet, it’s a concept that yields a surprising depth as Furniture & Mattress recontextualizes it for everything from moving a key to boss fights. It’s one of the best indie titles to hit Netflix’s library of games, making a lot of sense on mobile even though it’s also on consoles. It has flown under the radar, but puzzle game fans should not slide past Arranger. ~ Tomas Franzese
Balatro
I’ve played so many roguelikes and card games at this point that it’s hard for a new one to make an impression. Yet, when I checked out Balatro’s Steam Next Fest demo ahead of its release, I knew we were in for something special. When I got my hands on the full game, it quickly became apparent that I was playing a roguelike that would join a pantheon of genre greats alongside Slay the Spire and Hades. Balatro is simple, only requiring a bit of knowledge about math and the different kinds of hands one can create with a deck of 52 cards. From there, it became absolutely engrossing to maximize my score with each encounter, upgrade my cards, and buy helpful Joker cards whenever I could to tilt Balatro‘s odds ever so slightly in my favor. Balatro is a game I can pick up and play for just a minute or two when I have time, but each time I do so, I risk getting sucked into its alluring loop for hours. ~ Tomas Franzese
Dungeons of Hinterberg
Dungeons of Hinterberg first made its debut in an unexpected fashion. It was tucked into one of Xbox’s most packed summer showcases, nestled between games like Starfield and Fable. At the time, I was surprised that it landed such a major spotlight. After playing it, it was an obvious inclusion. Dungeons of Hinterberg is an expertly crafted adventure game about a small Alpine town that’s transformed into a tourist trap overnight after magical dungeons pop up around town. There’s a lot to love about its slick combat, excellent puzzle design, and Persona-like social systems, but its true draw is its nuanced narrative that untangles the complicated nature of the tourism industry and its impact on small towns. It may have gone under the radar when it launched this year, but it deserves attention. ~ Giovanni Colantonio
I Am Your Beast
This year gave us a solid new Call of Duty game in the form of Black Ops 6, something that won back some much-needed good faith in the series. But what if I told you that a shooter made for a fraction of its budget blows it out of the water? It’s true: Strange Scaffold’s I Am Your Beast is far and away 2024’s best first-person shooter. The high-octane game features some of the slickest, snappiest action you’ll find in a game this year, bringing the fluid thrills of something like John Wick to a fast and furious shooter. Underneath those simple pleasures is a story about a former soldier fighting to reclaim his identity from an institution that sees him as nothing more than a living weapon. It’s riveting, ruthless, and downright awesome. ~ Giovanni Colantonio
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
As someone who loves puzzle games, sometimes it can be difficult to convince friends to play the games I love. Unlike the immediate satisfaction of action games, a great puzzle game requires patience. You need to be willing to let yourself be frustrated as you rack your brain for answers. It’s all worth it for that sweet eureka moment. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes understands that appeal and turns it into the most satisfying and uncompromising puzzle games I’ve ever played. The mysterious game, one about the intersection of art and truth, is full of bona fide brain-busters that will leave you tearing your hair out if you stare at them long enough. There’s an internal logic to its haunting world though, and cracking the code is part of the fun. If you have the patience for it and can resist the temptation to look at guides, you’ll find a landmark genre game and 2024’s most complete artistic vision. ~ Giovanni Colantonio
Mars After Midnight
If you’re a fan of true indie games, don’t sleep on the Playdate. Panic’s 1-bit handheld with a crank features a lively catalog of titles that all find clever ways to use the crank and forced minimalism that developing for Playdate requires. Playdate received its killer app this year in Lucas Pope’s Mars After Midnight. The latest game from the creator of Papers, Please and Return to the Obra Dinn, tasks players with playing a bouncer who has to decide whether to let certain aliens into events on Mars while keeping the snack table clean. It takes the deduction-based formula of Papers, Please and drops it into a faster-paced experience that leans more toward humor and an optimistic outlook on helping others. Owning a Playdate but not Mars After Midnight is like owning a Wii without Wii Sports: it just wouldn’t make sense. ~ Tomas Franzese
The Plucky Squire
2024 was a rough year in a creativity-driven industry. AI’s prevalence continues to rise, and it feels like creatives — whether they be filmmakers, game developers, artists, or journalists — are under fire from all angles. I appreciate The Plucky Squire because it reminds me of one of the core reasons people make things: to help and inspire others. A tribute to creativity like The Plucky Squire was just what I needed in an otherwise stressful and sad year. On top of all that, it kept me interested throughout its short six-hour runtime by constantly introducing new gameplay ideas, including its hallmark feature of letting players jump between the pages of a storybook and the real world. The Plucky Squire is the feel-good indie game of the year, especially if you aspire to create any form of art. ~ Tomas Franzese
Thrasher
A great VR game can make you forget that you’re wearing a headset at all. They transport you to new world and envelope you. There’s no better example of that this year than Thrasher, perhaps this year’s most underrated release. A sort of cross between Tempest 2000, Thumper and Fruit Ninja, Thrasher is a rhythm game that’s all about guiding a ribbon eel through circles and lines along to a pulse-pounding soundtrack. It’s the kind of game whose appeal can’t translate to words. It’s positively hypnotic, filled with psychedelic imagery that makes it feel like a playable drug trip. It doesn’t just take an existing game template and translate it to VR; it understands that a headset is a portal to another dimension. ~ Giovanni Colantonio
UFO 50
UFO 50 is a monumental achievement for indie gaming. Some of the space’s most talented developers, including Spelunky’s Derek Yu and Downwell’s Ojiro Fumoto, worked together to create 50 different fully-featured retro games in what can be described as an art piece tribute to 1980s game design. Each game in this collection has some sort of inspiring twist and is good enough that it probably could’ve been released on its own on Steam. My favorite is Mortol, a platformer where players have to sacrifice their lives in different ways to progress through levels. Everyone who plays UFO 50 will probably have a different favorite, and that’s the beauty of this experience. I see myself chipping away at each of UFO 50’s games for years to come. ~ Tomas Franzese
Honorable Mentions: Arctic Eggs, Arco, Berserk Boy, Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines, Indika, Isles of Sea and Sky, Judero, Minishoot’ Adventures, Mouthwashing, Mullet Madjack, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Starstruck: Hands of Time, Void Sols, Volgarr the Viking 2, Zet Zillions
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