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Nearly 19,000 games were released on Steam in 2024. That’s a number that’s been only growing annually since 2019, making it impossible to play everything that’s been released — not to mention the many new games every year that aren’t released on Steam, either. While big, expensive games from massive publishers like Activision or Ubisoft tend to get the majority of media attention, some of the best video games independently released in a given year risk flying under the radar.
Here at Polygon, plenty of our full-time jobs revolve entirely around video games, but it’s impossible even then to keep up with everything. But we’re making room every day to seek out indie games across all genres — weird, wonderful takes on first-person shooters, wacky reinventions of card games, and dark, creepy typing games included. We’re defining indie games as made by an independent studio untethered from a major publisher. Some of the games here may have financial backing or support from a big-name publisher, but are technically independent.
Here are all the indie games we’ve liked and written about this year.
For fans of holes, here’s a game about digging them
Image: Cyberwave/Rokaplay Boutique, Drillhounds
I’ve been saying for a long time that video game titles are stupid. What does Horizon Zero Dawn even mean? Aren’t Dead Space and Killzone the same titles in a different font? Games need to be more honest with their names, like A Game About Digging a Hole.
There’s nothing to hide with this one: You have a shovel and yearn for a really big hole. It’s a small hole at first, but it gets bigger with time. The deeper you go, the more secrets you find, and by secrets I just mean different rocks. There are a lot of rocks and they fill your backpack up pretty quickly, pulling you away from the hole every few minutes to sell them on the computer. I don’t know who is buying them and A Game About Digging a Hole, as we’ve established, isn’t about that, so I won’t be asking questions.
This ultraviolent indie game would have pissed off Congress in the 1990s
Image: David Szymanski
Mario collects mushrooms. Donkey Kong collects bananas. The naked, blood-lusting loner of Butcher’s Creek collects snuff films.
More than likely, you already know whether you’re the sort of person who will play the latest gorefest from Dusk creator David Szymanski — or the sort of person who wonders how this shit is legal. I’ll share the grimy details for the few people still balancing on the entrails-covered fence.
This $5 Soulslike is overflowing with gloomy vibes and evil ants
Image: Wabbaboy
Late last year I caught a post by solo developer Wabbaboy about how they “got quirky with the tutorial messages” in their upcoming game about a fly with a sword. It wasn’t just the tutorial messages that intrigued me, though. It was, well, everything about FlyKnight, a dreamy retro Soulslike about fighting bugs.
FlyKnight, which was released on Steam last week, is a mix of RPGs I’m not quite old enough to appreciate and Soulslike elements ripped right out of one of my favorite games of all time, Dark Souls. It has the lethargic, melee-based combat of King’s Field and the trials of a Dark Souls level full of enemies waiting to ambush you. And you play as a fly who can swing a sword, cast magic, and equip fish for the passive buffs.
Wikipedia rabbit holes trained me for this genealogical mystery game
Image: Robin Ward/Evil Trout
The hours I’ve spent searching Google or Wikipedia for obscure things finally paid off when I played The Roottrees Are Dead, a mystery game that might ruin future mystery games for me. It isn’t just that I had the right skills to know what names or terms to search for in its ’90s web browser interface, it’s how easy it was to flip between evidence and notes while filling out its massive family tree.
Everything in the game happens inside the UI of an old computer or on a corkboard covered with various pieces of evidence. The game’s clean visual design is crucial for sifting through all the clues you find, especially when they’re only tangentially related to the central case you’re trying to solve, which involves identifying all the people connected to a family-owned candy company that ballooned into an empire over several decades. Part of the fun is chasing down a particular person or event so as to, at the very least, fill in some context around what happened to all the people you’re trying to identify.
In Citizen Sleeper 2, your crew is your survival
Image: Jump Over the Age/Fellow Traveller
Two hundred and thirty cycles. Enough time to drift and wither away in an asteroid belt. To leave footprints, both big and small, in the places we visit and the people we meet. Amending past mistakes and carving a space for a better future at the cost of our own weariness, all for the sake of making a difference in the lives of the people around us.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector sparks constant reflection on the way we interact with others and the philosophies we choose as our driving force. Much like with its predecessor, the team at Jump Over the Age explores themes around precarity, capitalism, and solidarity, among others, as pillars for the sequel. The addition of a crew and far more punishing mechanics for the use of dice, however, emphasize the stronger need for communion. Even if the ambition behind these additions can sometimes result in the game stumbling upon itself, the protagonist’s constant need to rely on others, and vice versa, heightens the foundation of the first game.
These two games demand you type if you want to survive
Image: Paul Hart, Lee Williams, Akupara Games
The keyboard is a popular peripheral, but few games move beyond the common WASD controls and pursue typing and transcription as a major game mechanic. Some classic games did require typing to go north, and everyone knows the classic educational games of the typing genre (shout out to Mavis Bacon), but most games use different control schemes these days — apart from some recent examples that make typing a central mechanic.
In Dead Letter Dept., set to release on Jan. 30, the player character is a small town schmuck down on their luck and starting over in the big city. In order to pay the bills, they take a temp job doing data entry. As the character, you work for a mysterious agency that sends you to a strange, isolated industrial area to transcribe bits of mail from the postal service that the computer couldn’t properly scan.
Stimulation Clicker is pure internet hell mode
Image: Neal Agarwal via Polygon
Few games have accurately captured the experience of online brain overload like Stimulation Clicker, a new free browser game by Neal Agarwal (creator of Infinite Craft, The Password Game, and more). This is a clicker game in the style of Banana or Universal Paperclips, but it’s also a parody of clicker games and the whole concept of clicking as a dopamine release.
Stimulation Clicker starts off simply enough, with just a tantalizing button in the middle of your browser screen that says “Click Me.” Clicking on it earns you one Stimulation point; clicking it a second time earns you another Stimulation point. Once you’ve got 3 Stimulation points, you can unlock a DVD logo that will bounce around your browser screen. You may remember watching this screen as a mindless way to pass the time as a bored teenager. This is like that. But it’s also so much more.
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