The Best Indie Games to Play in 2026
The indie space has never been deeper, which is a polite way of saying it has never been harder to know what to play. Storefronts surface hundreds of releases a week, and most "best of" lists are either exhaustive to the point of uselessness or recycled from someone else's. So this is deliberately short: a handful of games with a strong case for your attention, and the case for each.
Balatro
Yes, everyone has already told you to play Balatro. Everyone is right. LocalThunk's poker roguelike is the purest example this decade of a simple ruleset producing bottomless depth. You build poker hands, jokers warp the scoring rules, and within twenty minutes you are constructing engines that multiply scores into the millions. What makes it endure past the honeymoon is the way every unlocked deck and stake level changes how you have to think. It runs on almost anything, including your phone, which is dangerous information.
Animal Well
Billy Basso's solo-developed puzzle metroidvania looks like a moody pixel-art platformer and reveals itself, layer by layer, as one of the most intricate secret-boxes ever shipped. There are no conventional weapons. Your tools are toys, and most of them turn out to have three or four uses the game never explains. The first credits roll long before the game is finished, and the layers underneath were built to defeat solo effort: Basso expected some puzzles to take years, players pooled findings and cracked them inside a month, and one third-layer puzzle needs partial solutions from at least fifty different players. If you liked the feeling of Fez or Outer Wilds, of a game trusting you completely, this belongs at the top of your list. We wrote more about its visual craft in our pixel art feature.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
The long wait ended and, remarkably, the game held up. Team Cherry revealed Silksong in February 2019 and shipped it on 4 September 2025, so roughly six years of accumulated expectation landed on it at once. Silksong is faster, meaner and more acrobatic than Hollow Knight. Hornet controls like a dream, and the game assumes you can keep up. It is also front-loaded with difficulty, steep enough that plenty of Hollow Knight veterans bounced off Pharloom's opening hours, and critics split the same way: some read the challenge as the thing that gives the game its character, others found it wearing. As a piece of world-building, Pharloom stands with the best settings in the genre.
UFO 50
Fifty complete games presented as the back catalogue of a fictional 1980s studio that was obscure but ahead of its time, built over about eight years by the team around Spelunky creator Derek Yu and co-designer Jon Perry. The astonishing thing is not the quantity but the hit rate: a good dozen of these would justify a standalone release, and the collection rewards playing broadly rather than cherry-picking. It doubles as a quiet argument about design history, because you can feel the invented hardware limiting and shaping each title. For retro sensibilities without retro friction, nothing else comes close.
Blue Prince
A puzzle game about exploring a manor whose rooms you draft, one door at a time. Your great-uncle's will leaves you the estate only if you reach a hidden 46th room in a 45-room house, and the floor plan reshuffles every day. Blue Prince sits somewhere between a roguelike, an escape room, and a novel, and it is the rare game where taking physical notes is not an affectation but a necessity. Some days the draft betrays you; that is the price of a design this committed. When a run clicks and three notebook pages suddenly connect, few games can match the feeling.
Nine Sols
A "taopunk" action platformer that borrows Sekiro's deflection-first combat and translates it into 2D with remarkable clarity. Nine Sols starts as a stylish metroidvania and gradually reveals a story with real emotional weight; its late chapters land harder than almost anything else in the genre. The bosses are demanding but fair, and the parry timing becomes second nature in a way that makes replays a pleasure. It earned its place in our metroidvania ranking.
Hades II
Supergiant's sequel does what good sequels do: keeps the skeleton, replaces the muscles. Melinoë plays nothing like Zagreus, slower and more deliberate, built around casts and channeled attacks, and the dual-direction structure of descending and ascending routes keeps runs fresh far longer than the original managed. The writing remains the studio's superpower. One thing worth knowing if you tried it early: it spent about sixteen months in early access before Supergiant shipped v1.0 in September 2025, so the build people argued about in 2024 is not the one on sale today.
Crow Country
A compact survival-horror throwback with PS1-era visuals and a refreshing respect for your time. Crow Country gets right what modern horror often gets wrong. The puzzles are readable, the map is small enough to become familiar rather than tedious, and the ending is reachable in a weekend. It pairs nicely with a broader retro kick, so if that is where you are heading, our piece on collecting retro consoles makes a good companion read.
What this list leaves out
Every game above is something you play by yourself, which says more about the shape of this list than about the state of the scene. The same stretch produced an equally strong run of small multiplayer games, and none of them fit here, so our couch co-op roundup covers that side instead. The other deliberate omission is anything still in early access. A game that changes shape every patch is hard to recommend honestly, which is why Hades II qualifies now and would not have a year and a half ago.