Can’t-Miss Indie Games You Should Play From 2025
Indie developers dropped some of the year's best games, including some offbeat insta-classics. Here's what you might have missed.
People have been debating the meaning of the term "indie game" for years. What is an indie game? On paper, Hades 2 and Hollow Knight Silksong are both indie games, as they're games self-published by developers that are not connected to a larger publisher.
But they're also both huge sequels to huge games—essentially guaranteed success, to some degree, unless things go spectacularly wrong. (They didn’t.) Compare that to something like Blue Prince, an original puzzle game that barely anyone had heard of before it hit storefronts this spring.
There are other games that seem to better fit the indie designation, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But that game was developed by 30-plus people, along with a number of contractors—that's even more than Hades 2, which had a team of approximately 25 people.
So as we look at indie games to include in this list, we're trying to think about the spirit of an indie game, and will be excluding bigger games that might fit the paper definition. What we want here is a small team, working on something unique or weird, without the backing of a massive publisher like Epic, Microsoft, or Electronic Arts. With all of that in mind, let's dive in.
Editor's note: All of the games on this list are traditional "Web2" games without crypto or blockchain integrations. But you might enjoy 'em anyway!
Ball x Pit
Styled as "BALL x PIT" and pronounced simply as "ball pit," this game's title can make for a confusing time when trying to search for or discuss it with friends. But this one is worth seeking out. You manage a city that’s sat on the edge of a massive pit, and for the city to survive, you have to venture into the pit for money and resources.
Ball x Pit takes a page from games like Vampire Survivors, offering a variety of unlockable characters—each with their own quirk—which you take through a time-locked gauntlet. Instead of wandering around an infinite castle, though, you're marching forward into the pit with enemies meeting you with resistance.
You'll defeat these enemies by launching balls at them, Arkanoid/Breakout-style, trying to hit as many enemies as possible with each launch. As you level up, you'll pick up new modifiers for these balls like electricity or fire. Balls and abilities can be combined or evolved, completely changing the course of a run and giving each attempt a different feel and flow.
If Vampire Survivors hit for you at all, then Ball x Pit almost certainly will, too.
Mohamed Khaled
