What is your favorite indie game?
What is your favorite indie game?
Given the big swathe of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
Stardew Valley
Anything of Soldak - https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/soldak/ : 2 series - space shooters Drox and hack n slash Dins - Super coarse graphics, action, fighting, but their living worlds, like nowhere else. No other game where worlds freely grow based on player actions. Did You ever left main quest for exploration, lvling up or side games, oh well, here, world will not allow You to, as enemies won't stay idle or wait for You, they do their business.
Orb of Creation - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1910680/Orb_of_Creation/ Semi-clicker (intense clicker, not much of idle) and immersive mage simulator, where You don't make Your mage-avatar, but are the mage. Still beta, but already big.
Sticking only to ones I haven't seen mentioned:
- Tandis : geometry puzzler
- Gateways : a 2d portal-style puzzler
- Elliot Quest : pixel adventure
- Phoenotopia Awakening : also a pixel adventure, had trouble with the final boss but the rest is great
- Wuppo : flash-animation-style comedy adventure
- Alba : sweet game about a girl who loves wildlife
- Salt and Sanctuary : 2d soulslike
- Legend of Grimrock : tile-based first person dungeon crawler ("dungeon master" spiritual successor)
- A Short Hike (really short but amazing exploration game)
Ones I have seen mentioned but can't bear not to mention:
- TIS-100 : the finest of the Zachlikes; a programming puzzle game
- Crosscode : 2d adventure with incredibly fine-tuned combat and puzzles
- Outer Wilds : fantastic time-loop puzzle
- FTL : space adventure "one more run!" game
- Slay the Spire : deck-drafting "one more run!" game
I suppose I've plugged it recently, but Another Crab's Treasure.
It opens pretty plainly as an ocean-based Soulslike parody with a simple story premise and some self-subverting humor in the dialog with other crabs. As you go on though, every 20th conversation becomes really pointed and real-world-connecting, going beyond just "pollution bad". It's not quite Spec Ops: The Line, but it at least has something to say about society.
The combat is frustrating but addictive, much like Souls games - and it's okay with handing off a number of allowances like accessibility modes and tip systems. It's even helpful that, if I die to a glitch or something bogus, I can actually just choose to re-obtain my microplastics (souls) through a menu.
Rimworld
Swapper
Not my actual favorite, but it's very high on my list, and I didn't see it posted yet.
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.
Some I really appreciate that I'm not seeing on this list:
I'm currently enjoying Blue Prince which is a fairly new rogue-like puzzle/mystery game it's hard to explain without spoiling but it's worth looking up.
Portals of Phereon is one of my absolute favorites. It's a fairly deep tactical RPG thing with loads of replayability. It's kind of like a Pokemon x FF Tactics but with monstergirls and it's also currently free while it's in development. Be aware it's extremely NSFW and horny, which I suspect is the main reason it's not as popular as some of the others listed (IE rimworld, stardew valley, etc.) however the horny is such a key point to it's original gameplay and world-building that it wouldn't be the same without it.
Thea: the awakening is a decent tactical RPG. I love it for it's original battle mini game, crafting system and world-building. It unfortunately has some balance issues and jankiness that prevents it from being an all time favorite, but it's definitely one I would encourage at least trying.
Thought of a few others:
- Reus (2nd one's alright, first one's excellent)
- Library of Runia
- Book of Hours
- Kenshi (saw it listed one other time, but it deserves a lot more love)
Just looking though some of my higher playtime games, here's a few I haven't seen mentioned: (I think they're all indie or small studio)
Gunfire Reborn - Roguelike fps with infinite replay.
Troubleshooter Abandoned Children - XCOM style battle system with a really really fun way to customize how your character fight. Story is pretty lame though (I ended up skipping it) and it's pretty grindy.
Thronefall - Pretty challenging base defence.
The last spell - Turn based base defence with lots of different ways to build your characters.
Ratropolis - Roguelike real-time card strategy base defence. Pretty good, although not well balanced at highest difficulties.
Celeste is one of my favorite games period, and it qualifies. The gameplay parallels the story better than any other game I've ever played or seen played, and the soundtrack, art, and characters are amazing. Top tier gameplay and a great story to go with it.
Alternatively, if you're looking for absolutely unhinged strange gameplay made by a programmer rather than a game designer, check out Fractal Block World. It's pretty fascinating!
Factorio, hands down
600 hours and counting. The space age expansion basically quadrupled the content, and is the first time I've played the game 100% vanilla with no mods in probably 10 years. Great times.
Super Daryl Deluxe
That game has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game.
Magicraft.
Can't really add much to all of the great games already mentioned. But I'll add one, because it was one of the best games I played in recent memory. Chants of Sennaar. Where to even start? Point-and-click adventure/puzzle game that is all about language puzzles. With great visuals and music. Really dig the eurocomics inspired style. I don't know why, but this game really touched me - maybe it's because the game is about uniting people in an age of discord.
Dyson sphere program is still one of my enduring favorites.
Synthetik is my top steam game with, like, 900 hours.
Minecraft (the old one)
I really liked What Remains of Edith Finch.
It was more of an experience and really struck some emotional chords, leaving me write emotional at the end.
Really beautiful and melancholy experience.
Monster Sanctuary. A superbly polished, extremely fun, and decently challenging metroidvania and monster collecting/battling game. If you played the first few Pokemon generations on gameboy and don't find the newer games capture that same magic, check out Monster Sanctuary!
Pacific Drive. A station wagon building amd exploration game set in a STALKER-esque Pacific Northwest in the Olympic mountain range. Extremely original and unique game, and with an excellent soundtrack.
Hardspace Shipbreaker: spaceship salvage, with increasing hazards and challenges and complexity of ship systems to expertly disassemble. With a pretty cool workers' solidarity and union struggle type of plot.
Rimworld. Hundreds of hours lost.
Stardew Valley. A literally perfect game.
Terraria. Also a literally perfect game.
Caves of Qud. Like if Dwarf Fortress adventure mode was actually polished, and also if distant future scifi with mutants and cybernetics and sentient plants and sapient gun turrets.
Dwarf Fortress. It's Dwarf Fortress.
WolfQuest. Wolf simulator set in Yellowstone, with a focus on real world accuracy. So cool to raise a pack and manage territory and hunt and explore and howl a lot
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. A brilliantly executed spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio Future.
Descenders. Crazy fun downhill bicycling game.
The vast majority of my favourite games have been listed, many multiple times, so I'm gonna go with some I didn't see, though I didn't look exhaustively, here we go:
Quite a hidden gem in my opinion, almost no one I mention it to has heard of it. 2D platformer with an amazing story and some interesting gimmicks. One of the most surprising and unforgettable indie games I've played.
Ninja action-platformer that is way more than it first appears if you stick with it. Hilarious writing, great controls, and amazing music. Genuinely one of my favourite games.
Almost entirely unique in it's idea. It's a pinball-metroidvania where you're a postman dung beetle, and it really works. Gorgeous world, super chill vibes, clever puzzles... What metroid prime pinball should have been.
Used to play battlefield 2, BC2 and 3 alot. Then I stopped playing online games and recently started playing "Ravenfield". It's succesfully filling the void, there are even battlefield maps and some vehicle/heli/jet/tank mods and ignoring the fact that it looks like battlefield heroes (very indie-style graphics), the physics/handling feels pretty close, especially when flying heli and shooting rockets
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.
I have a personal soft spot for Doki Doki Literature Club because it got me into programming when i was young, but that's far more sentimental and to be honest i wouldn't play it again as an adult really. If i had to pick something functionally though I'd say Project Zomboid. there's a fuck ton of fun to be made in that, especially with Multiplayer. Even in singleplayer i like to turn on a NPC mod and assemble my own makeshift Walking Dead cast
Dota.
Ok, I know what you're saying, "But Valve makes Dota2" which, yes, this is true. But the OG game came about from gamers just loving games and making a custom game. I think it's peak "indie" in it's origin. Which went off to spawn several clones (League of Legends, Heroes Of Newerth, Heroes Of The Storm, Smite, Pokemon Unite, Paladins, etc.). Dota2 by far has the most hours played of any game.
From the top of my head
- crawl stone soup. Classic traditional rogue like. Less fiddly than net hack, but very good.
- untitled story (an older game by the main person behind Celeste. Looks like Ms paint but is utterly charming)
- everything supergiant did. Hades, bastion, pyre
- binding of Isaac is a classic.
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.
Undertale
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kerbal space program (the first one) And The Long Dark
Can’t really decide which I like more, and they are vastly different
First :
- Outer Wilds
- Disco Elysium
Then :
- Inscryption
- Carto
- Spiritfarer
- Pyre
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
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.
Top of my list right now is Vintage Story! It's like a serious version of Minecraft, with more focus on realism.
I've not seen many RPG maker games mentioned here, so i'll do my part. These are a lot of my favourites through the years:
- To the moon
- Finding paradise
- Oneshot
- Celeste
- Omori
- End roll
There are also a lot of them that i've not played but i've watched full playtroughs of, like IB, Hello Charlotte, Lisa, ... and most recently The coffin of Andy and Leyley
One game i would also like to add is Rain World, which is a 2d survival platformer, a bit challenging, but i would argue it's also a "metroidbrania" if you know the genre, games that have knowledge as gates rather than keys or power-ups like metroidvanias. Some notable examples are Outer wilds or Return of obra dinn, who others have already mentioned
Stardew
hypnospace outlaw
Balatro. It's a great Maths game.
Can't believe none of these haven't been mentioned yet: Starsector Kenshi Graveyard keeper Battle brothers Ghost of a tale
Gotta go with Dwarf Fortress. Been playing on and off for the past 10 years at least, it's just endless !!FUN!!
Here are a few, hopefully they aren't mentioned yet:
- walking simulator/light puzzle game - Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch, INSIDE, A Juggler's Tale, Abzu, Nuts
- puzzle - Manifold Garden, The Case of the Golden Idol, GNOG, Gorogoa
- misc - Inscryption, Pony Island
- 3d platformer/adventure - Yooka Laylee
- metroidvania/platformer - Blue Fire
- programming - Human Resource Machine, TIS-100
- souls-like/boss rush - Furi, Titan Souls
Some of these might be AA, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. I have plenty more where that came from. :)
One of my all time favorites right now is Brok The Investigator.
It's a game by French company COWCAT Games that is describes as a point and click beat'em-up game. Has lots to do because there are multiple endings. It has a free visual novel made to essentially showcase a vn engine that can be used to make BTI fan games or your own creations and has an upcoming DLC (apparently only gonna be $9.99) that focuses more on the combat side of the game.
It's currently available on PS4/5 (vita planned but scrapped), xbox (don't know if they mean one and series x/s or just series), switch, steam, itch(dot)io, and even epic if you hate yourself.
Probably gotta be Starsector
Valheim. Bought it late January and already got almost 400 hours on it. Play it vanilla first then modded. I played it with friends, beat final boss on Day 997, we took our times, building and all along the way. Then I started over solo with x3 resources, no raid, and move metals through portal. I just wanted to see if I could solo all game and today I just finished basically everything. So right now, I'm just collecting resources for gears and buildings. Going to make few houses across the map.
I loved a tiny one called The Last Day of June.
It was on PlayStation Plus and it really had a great story.
For me it's Rimworld
I urge anyone who has not played CrossCode to give it a try. I randomly played it during the pandemic, and I've since not been able to enjoy gaming the way I did it before. For me, it was very close to being a 10/10.
- Vintage Story
- Project Zomboid
- Stonks 9800
- Zero Hour
- The COMA
- Phantom Brigade
- SCP 5K (still in Early Access, long way to go, rip lol)
Crumble A speedrunning platforming game, where you play as a blob with a tongue. Pleasant experience to play through while learning, while absolutely balls to the walls insane when actually speedrunning, actually 100% achieved this
Cyberpulse Twin-stick arcade neo style virus slamming game. Great control precision, challenging and colourful. The right thumbstick pressing might take a bit of getting used to.
Pseudoregalia Such a fun old school platformer. Big bunny girl MC for some reason but SUPER FUN and satisfying movement mechanics and the world is built well enough for the mechanics. A few hour long game, unless you look everything up.
Actually going to put some indie demos here I played this weekend, that I really enjoyed: Half-Sword Physics based medieval combat game. Reminds me of Exanima but instead of 2.5D, you can play Half-sword in 3rd or 1st person, which is really fun. Can have full gore or turn the gore completely off.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon First person (potentially later also 3rd person) RPG, very much in the vein of Elder Scrolls or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Really enjoyed the demo, it takes place on the tutorial island/dungeon. Going to buy the full version when it releases, because there seems to be a save wipe for 1.0.
Bloodthief Reminds me of Neon White and Ultrakill having an even more indie baby. Seemed to be pretty simple and good speedrunning platforming fun.
Shape of Dreams 2.5D action RPG roguelike. Very pretty and gameplay feels good. Didn't play it quite enough yet, only thing I kinda disliked was the amount of cooldowns on abilities.
9Kings Small town defense game with waves of enemies led by other kings attacking your kingdom. Really enjoyed this one. Demo isn't too difficult, even when I am really bad with these type of games.
RKGK (RAKUGAKI) 3rd person platforming game, where you bring some colour to the world with your graffiti. Very fun movement and popping colours. The dialogue isn't necessarily for me but the gameplay felt really fun.
Unbeatable Colourful rhythm adventure game, style is great and soundtrack slaps.
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. Magnetic By Nature 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.
EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.
N++
Undoubtedly the best, most complete 2D platformer I've ever played. Super tight controls and incredible level design, coupled with an episode-long timer mechanic that you can influence makes this one absolutely unmatched. Sure, games like Celeste are flashier, but nothing is a better game than N++. I think I put something like 120 hours into this to get the platinum on PS4. I would happily start over and play the whole thing from scratch again.
Vampire Survivors
It might just be because I was actually early aboard the hype train for this one; but this one just scratched that “one more go” itch until 2am like nothing else.
Enter the Gungeon
Randomly came across this via a YouTube short, and the art-style just meshed with me. Absolutely love the messy bullet-hell quick-play genre in general.. Hades being another great example of this.
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.
Inside
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Eternal Strands
Disco Elysium
All very different and unique. All fantastic!
Slay the Spire
Currently it’s Bellwright, among many other titles. what particularly tickles me about it is the shitty ai voices they used for the npcs. I am not pro ai by any means, but nothing makes me happier than hearing “all in a good days of work.” delivered constantly, in the most off-kilter reading imaginable.
I'll put Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead up there with FTL and Dwarf Fortress.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is a magical experience that can't be described honestly. On difficult stages, it engages all your senses and you're just 100% inside, enthralled by the visuals, music and rhythm. This is probably the most focused and most precise game ever, everything it has, works. It's not just my favorite indie game, it's one of my favorite games ever.
Also, Night in the Woods and Keep Driving. Both resonated with me emotionally in a lot of ways, touching the things I care about. Keep Driving also has a really fun gameplay loop and an incredible music selection (which works as a boost for that emotional factor).
Honorable mentions: What Remains of Edith Finch (it made me uncomfortable and scared at some moments) and Firewatch (nice way to tell a story, and the characters feel real).
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
Slice & Dice is the best dice-building roguelite ever and has a free demo that is only content-limited and allows you to already play an infinite amount of runs. I literally played the demo as much as a paid game for a month until I bit down—so hard that, once, when I had my phone in hand and intended to take a shower, I ended up crouching on the bathroom floor furthering a run for an hour before finally pausing to return to the real world.
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone offers awesome online co-op. Noita's world is just endless (people are still discovering new spell permutations years later). I will never turn down someone's offer or request to watch a run of FTL: Faster Than Light.
The AAA world is not impressive to me at all, and if anything gets deprioritized in my book; graphics or a third-person view do not a fantastic game make.
The Cat Lady and the other games from Harvester Games 👀
Cult of the Lamb.
The Binding of Isaac is already a famous title that has influenced so much of the roguelike/twin-stick-shooter genre. This game has permanently altered my taste in video games.
The game I’ve enjoyed as much as TBoI is Tiny Rogues. It’s much smaller, but still fantastic with rich build variety while never losing the need for skill and good reactions.
Stolen Realm is a turn-based tactical RPG that takes place in procedurally generated dungeons that play like little roguelike runs with overarching character progression. It’s multiplayer, but you can also just control up to six characters on your own too. It does eventually feel pretty repetitive and there are points that seem impossible to win, but it’s a unique game where you continually build that roguelike power fantasy and just progressively become more powerful to the point of it feeling game breaking.
Going Under is an adorable roguelite where you fight through various levels themed around a blend of corporate stereotypes and fantasy creatures like a crypto company run by skeletons or a delivery company run by goblins. The combat is a vaguely souls-like with an emphasis on weight and timing, but your weapons are office items found in each room that break down very quickly.
Webbed is a cute puzzle/platformer where you play as a little spider on a quest to save your spider boyfriend. The main gimmick is that you can shoot webs to create platforms, pull things, attach things to each other and more. It’s a short and sweet game that’s still decently challenging. It’s the only non-roguelike indie I recommend and it’s that good that I love it despite it being in a genre I rarely play and almost never finish.
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.
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.
super meat boy
Pyre is my all time favorite, it's the only game i've ever platinumed and still kept playing to see a few more permutations. But by terms of sheer hours put in? Rimworld.
I guess either Shovel Knight or Hades
ya know what, I'mma round it out as a Top 5, so let's throw in Bastion, Bloodstained, and Dust: An Elysian Tail as well.
Brotato
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.
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'll have to go with Selaco, it's not even finished (in fact it's approximately half done) but it feels more complete than any mainline Halo game after H:Reach. Looks better too.
Another Crab’s Treasure.
Oh, haha, a souls game but with crabs, funny parody haha!
Except, no, while it does seem like it would be compared to SpongeBob humor, and it does self censor “shit” to “ship”, the themes of the story go well beyond just “Crab must find his stolen shell!”
It takes time to ramp up but in some ways it feels like a better-written game than most Soulslikes (to me, that’s not a high bar given the way many of them wrap their lore in many layers of obfuscation that you don’t get to enjoy in the moment)
Watching speedruns and trying NG+ is also a lot of fun.
Dungeons of Dredmor! Just a really solid, straightforward roguelike with a ton of stuff and a cheeky sense of humour.
I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.
Most of my picks have been mentioned already, but I had a blast with Mullet Madjack. A tongue in cheek riff on 80s anime in a boomer shooter where you have 10 seconds to live, but each enemy kill gives you 2 more seconds of life.
Clonk Endevour is not my favorite game, but I played it a lot with friends when I was younger. You can play with 2 or even more people, with just a monitor and a keyboard! Also it's so old it should run on any potato.
edit: real answer is Slay The Spire
edit2: ah shit now all of a sudden all the good indie games I played pop up in my head. Project Kat I enjoyed. Synthetik was awesome. Caves of Qud hasn't been mentioned yet (didn't play it much though).
Gunpoint. Charming, atmospheric, doesn't outstay its welcome.