Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion. Top 3 shmups of all-time and best shmup on Steam, IMO.

I play, almost exclusively, non-AAA games. Some gems, known and hidden:

• Autonauts and Autonauts Vs Piratebots - Cute automation games
• Spelunky - Elegantly simple and well executed platformer
• BPM: Bullets Per Minute - Rhythm FPS. Others have tried. None I have found have been as good.
• Immortal Redneck - FPS roguelite
• Ziggurat - FPS Roguelite
• Receiver II - Unique FPS roguelike. Every part of everything that moves is simulated. The hammer on your gun hits a firing pin which hits the primer on the cartridge. You can get stovepipes, misfires, double feeds, etc. You don't reload by hitting 'reload' but go through the full manual of arms in a shooter where the tolerances for failure are fairly slim.
• Valley - running game. The feeling of letting a hill propel your running to otherwise impossible speeds, bottled. Nice little story too.
• Dredge - Lovecraftian fishing game.
• Tunnet - lovecraftian network technician simulator. Build a network to allow communication between computers in an underground society with unspeakable horrors occasionally destroying your mind/body.
• Opus Magnum - Programming puzzles
• Vagante - roguelike with tight tolerances
• Ruiner - Cyberpunk slash n dash with a soundtrack half by Sidewalks and Skeletons. Very fun.
• Tails Noir - Detective story. Normally find the anthro thing a bit tiresome but this was pretty good. Well written.
• Elderborn - First person brawler
• Webbed - be a peacock spider. Rescue your lady spider. Help insects. Fight a bird. Dance.
• A Story About My Uncle - Movement game. Jump, dash, grapnel. Simple and elegant.
• Tormentor X Punisher - Top down twin stick shooter. Everything dies in one hit. All the enemies, and you.
• Tin Can - Survival game in which you try to keep up an escape pod long enough to be rescued, which is hard when it seems to have been made by the lowest bidder's lowest bidding subcontractor and maintained with all the loving care of a convenience store bathroom.

Exanima Unique physics-based isometric dungeon crawler also featuring an arena career mode.
Moddable.
Really slow development cycle, though.

Severed Steel Futuristic 3D shooter with maybe the best movement system I've tried, with wall running, full 360 air movement, sliding and more.
Weapons have only one magazine, so you're constantly sourcing them from your enemies while blasting holes into the fully destructible levels.
Very replayable.

Dave the diver! /s

But seriously I'm a real sucker for platformers, and so A Hat In Time is my most favorited one. It brought back this sort of charm I haven't felt since the n64 days and I love it!

Stray and Kena: Bridge of Spirits are pretty awesome too, would be my second and third favorites

Banished, you can't get more Indie than just one guy's passion project.

I don't know what it is about that game but it really struck a chord with me and I've come back to it over and over. It's my favorite game to play when I'm sick and can't do anything. It's relaxing and peaceful and cozy while also being complex and ruthlessly challenging at the same time, so it's like spinning plates. Seems easy when you get the hang of it but it can all come crashing down if you make a bad enough mistake. It's spawned some copy cats, and I've tried them, but the original just gets me somehow.

Top of my list right now is Vintage Story! It's like a serious version of Minecraft, with more focus on realism.

Check out Tunic. I would recommend going blind.

It's probably between stardew valley, rivals of aether, or cheaper world.

There's also a number that are almost perfect like wargroove, peglin, and kingdom rush.

Stardew Valley

Judging by the playtime, Rimworld. It is such an important part of my life at this point, it's not even funny. I've played thousands of hours, and don't regret it

Dungeons of Dredmor! Just a really solid, straightforward roguelike with a ton of stuff and a cheeky sense of humour.

Shadow Empire. Best 4X wargame ever. 400 page rulebook included. Realistic logistics and planet generation 6000 years in the future!

Monster sanctuary (turn based monster collector) and Roboquest (arena shooter) were a couple from recent years that stood out to me

For older games nethack and dwarf fortress are great if you can look past the graphics

Dyson sphere program is still one of my enduring favorites.

Absolute favorite is Outer Wilds. The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't experience it again. A true masterpiece of a game.

After that, probably Noita for sheer insanity. Deeply unfair, but getting a god-run going is that much sweeter. It took me ~100 hours to beat it the first time, now I can consistently win if I try but I'm addicted to doing stupid things to see what happens.

I remember playing an RPG back in the day called “Dink Smallwood” on my old Macintosh laptop, it was one of the few games that were Mac compatible. Really funny and self aware dialogue, pretty great! I found out there’s an app version of it for mobile

Crosscode for sure! They have a new game in the works as well, it looks like it will be just as good. Great time to get into it

Lethal Company. It was developed by one person, yet it outsold Call of Duty. It trended from 2023 to 2024, but I still play it at least weekly. A couple Lethal Company clones have since come out and some say one (R.E.P.O) is better, and graphically I would say yes, but nothing quite matches Lethal Company’s charm.

It’s a scrap-collecting + space horror survival + comedy game. The comedy feels very unintended and that’s why it’s so fucking funny. You encounter very horrifying creatures, then see your friends die the funniest death. Then you hope to collect enough scrap to survive another day.

• Skullgirls - Still the best damn fighting game ever made. I've been grinding for a full decade now, and I'll be entering Combo Breaker 2025 once again this year.

• Slay the Spire - The game that ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about StS is that it never lets you get complacent, never lets you lean on just one good synergy that will carry you the entire run. You always have to keep adapting, and you have to have a well-rounded deck to deal with enemies that are designed to counter players who try to rely on only one thing. And when I eventually got to the point where I'd had my fill of vanilla, there's so much fun stuff from the modding community to play around with. Packmaster is incredible.

• CrossCode - It's been years since I finished this RPG and its colorful cast still lives rent-free in my head. This is a game that is perfect in every way and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fantastic combat, tons of side content, endearing characters, emotionally powerful story, beautiful visuals, amazing soundtrack.

Live for Speed

I've been playing it on and off for over 20 years now with some definite highs and lows but I have nothing but respect for the devs (3 people) and community. It's not on any store fronts and they just do their own thing.

LINK

Slime Rancher, though most of my library is indie so I could list like ten others.

I won’t list out the “big” famous ones since those get covered anyway (Stardew, Undertale etc.)

There are plenty I love that have a little less polish but charm their way through, like Calico and Yonder. I also just played through Tunic and quite enjoyed it.

A solid indie publisher is Reddeer games - about half my switch titles are by them. Finji is another.

Pushing the definition but I started when it was still in beta... Minecraft has gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours put into it.

Terarria and Starbound are both really good and scratch that same itch as Minecraft. Core Keeper is another one that has some of that feel and I ended up really enjoying.

Surprised I haven't seen it mentioned but Cave Story was made by one guy doing everything... and everything in it is immaculate. It's still free for the original version as well.

Stardew Valley is awesome and restarted a genre.

Crypt of the Necrodancer is awesome, and well worth checking out... also goes on sale really cheap.

Pacific Drive is a fun one to check out. If you're from the PNW, it will hit even more.

Really enjoyed Stray. Worth grabbing on a sale.

OwlBoy was a delightful game with a lot of character.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was a really nice return to form if you like IgaVanias.

If you like roguelites then you owe it to yourself to check out Enter the Gungeon (isometric) as well as RoboQuest (fps).

If you want a game that's beautiful, with emergent story and is hard af... definitely check out Rain World.

Is Black Mesa still considered indie? It's how I would recommend anyone play Half-Life 1 these days.

Rusty's Retirement... isn't so much a game.. sorta.. but yeah.. check that out.

Most of what I play is indie and choosing a favorite is too hard, so instead I'll go with biggest playtime. Antimatter Dimensions, also on Steam, has quickly shot to having the highest playtime of my Steam library. It is an idle/incremental game. Bonus points: free! Most of the idle/!incremental_games@incremental.social I have played have been free in the browser without IAPs, and seem to have been made by one or a few people.

Not counting that, I'd probably have to go with Stardew Valley.

I guess either Shovel Knight or Hades

I am having a lot of fun with Timberborn and Big Ambitions.

Timberborn is a colony builder where you are in control of beavers. You have to survive between times of good water, bad water, and no water.

Big Ambitious is a business sum in new York make by the same person who made Startup Company.

Cave Story, the original 2004 version.

I played it a long time ago and I still think about that game from time to time.

Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Mind Over Magnet is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

Brotato

Inside

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Eternal Strands

Disco Elysium

All very different and unique. All fantastic!

First :

• Outer Wilds
• Disco Elysium

Then :

• Inscryption
• Carto
• Spiritfarer
• Pyre

Balatro

Obra Dinn

For me, FTL: Faster than Light still hasn't been topped. Hades II might get there, though. Disco Elysium, Ikaruga, and Papers, Please are also high on the list.