Indie Games, Ranked

Built by the tiny Adelaide studio Team Cherry, its sprawling hand-drawn Hollownest and precise combat set the modern Metroidvania standard, selling over 15 million copies.

Toby Fox wrote, composed, and coded nearly all of it solo (with art help from Temmie Chang); its pacifist route and meta-narrative made it a 2015 cultural phenomenon.

Maddy Makes Games paired razor-tight platforming with a story about anxiety and self-doubt, plus Lena Raine's award-winning score, one of the most acclaimed indie soundtracks ever written.

Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone built the entire farming sim alone over four-plus years; it has now sold more than 50 million copies and still gets free updates.

Supergiant fused a roguelike loop with genuinely reactive Greek-myth storytelling and became the first video game to win a Hugo Award.

Jonathan Blow's 2008 time-manipulation puzzler was a breakout that helped prove indies could be commercially and critically serious art.

Team Meat's brutally precise 2010 platformer became a face of the indie movement and starred in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie.

Yacht Club Games' Kickstarter hit nailed NES-era design while modernizing the feel, spawning a full lineup of standalone campaigns.

Re-Logic's 2D sandbox packs a staggering amount of crafting and boss content and has sold well over 58 million copies across a decade of updates.

Moon Studios delivered a hand-painted Metroidvania whose visuals and emotional opening set a high bar for the genre in 2015.

Motion Twin's fluid roguevania nailed responsive combat and a permanent-progression loop that kept players hooked through years of updates.

Studio MDHR hand-drew every frame in a 1930s rubber-hose style, delivering a boss-rush shooter as punishing as it is beautiful.

Markus 'Notch' Persson's block sandbox started as a one-man indie project before its Microsoft sale; it remains the best-selling game of all time, though it long outgrew the label.

Edmund McMillen's twin-stick roguelike offers absurd replayability and item synergies, if you can stomach its bleak, gross-out theming.

Phil Fish's dimension-rotating puzzler was a clever gem, but its troubled development and cancelled sequel became as famous as the game.

Playdead's stark black-and-white puzzle-platformer nailed atmosphere and became a defining mood piece of the early-2010s indie scene.

Luca Galante's minimalist bullet-heaven launched a whole subgenre in 2022 and proved a cheap, ugly-on-paper idea could be wildly addictive.

Thatgamecompany's wordless online co-op became a landmark for games-as-art and earned the first Grammy nomination for a video game score.

Dong Nguyen's punishing one-tap mobile hit briefly dominated app stores in early 2014 before he pulled it, citing guilt over its addictiveness.

Fntastic's hyped MMO shipped in a broken, bare state in 2023 and the studio shut down within four days, becoming a byword for indie vaporware.