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: the games we keep coming back to, keep recommending, and would defend in an argument.
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're constructing engines that multiply scores into the millions. What makes it endure past the honeymoon is the way every unlocked deck and stake level genuinely changes how you have to think. It runs on 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 weapons — your tools are toys, and every one of them turns out to have three or four uses the game never explains. The first ending is maybe eight hours in. The community was still excavating secrets months after launch. 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 under the weight of seven years of expectations. 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 genuinely difficult in its early hours, enough that we published a dedicated beginner's survival guide. As a piece of world-building, Pharloom stands with the best settings in the genre.
UFO 50
Fifty complete games styled as the catalogue of a fictional 1980s console, made over nearly a decade by the team around Spelunky creator Derek Yu. 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 is also a quiet masterclass in game design history — you can feel the fictional console's "hardware" 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, trying to reach the rumored 46th room of a 45-room house. 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's 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 honest, 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, more deliberate, built around casts and channeled attacks — and the dual-direction structure (descending and ascending routes) keeps runs fresh far longer than the original managed. The writing remains the studio's superpower. If you bounced off it in early access, the full release is markedly better tuned.
Crow Country
A compact survival-horror throwback with PS1-era visuals and a refreshing respect for your time. Crow Country gets everything right that modern horror often gets wrong: readable puzzles, a contained map that becomes familiar rather than tedious, and an ending you can reach in a weekend. It pairs nicely with a broader retro kick — if that's where you're heading, our piece on collecting retro consoles makes a good companion read.
How to actually pick
If you want one game to disappear into: Silksong. One game to play in bed: Balatro. One game to talk about with friends: Blue Prince. One game to remind you why you love the medium: Animal Well. You can't really go wrong — which is, honestly, the healthiest state the indie scene has ever been in.