In the past decade, indie games have managed to break down the barrier between them and triple-A games. While games like Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed have the gloss and budget behind them, they don't have the massive leg up on indie games that they used to. Development software is far easier to get a hold of now, making it so indie games aren't stuck in 8-bit any longer.
That's helped more than a few classics get pushed out, some of which are more acclaimed than their big-budget counterparts. One in particular even dwarves them in sales.
10 Cuphead Felt Like A Blast From The Past
Cuphead looks and feels like a series from the past, and that's part of its charm. The gameplay is centered around its boss fights, something the game excels at. None of the boss fights feel similar, with all of them bringing something new or unique to the table. They all bring with them varying degrees of difficulty that take a bit of trial and error to get past. That difficulty is a big draw for the game, making the player feel accomplished when they finally overcome a hard boss.
9 Minecraft Is The Most Successful Indie Game Of All Time
While indie games are becoming more popular among gamers, none of them are ever going to be capable of achieving the status that Minecraft has. The game sold 200 million copies, and the property was sold to Microsoft for a whopping 2.5 billion dollars. Triple-A games can't even begin to sniff that level of profit. It's an amazing achievement by a staff that built a game centered around the creativity of its players.
8 Five Nights At Freddy's Is A Nightmarish Take On Chuck E. Cheese
Anyone who says they weren't a little creeped out by the animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese is lying to themselves. They were always a little creepy, and that's the basis for Five Night's At Freddy's, a series where they come alive and try to kill you.
The gameplay of the series isn't anything special. However, the jump scares employed can be jarring. It's those jump scares that helped the game gain popularity thanks to popular YouTubers like Markiplier.
7 Undertale Allows The Choices Of The Player To Matter
Few games truly make choice matter as much as Undertale does, and that's part of why it's so beloved. There's an option to pacify monsters rather than killing them, giving the player direct control of the game's narrative. Normally, games like to employ the illusion of choice, most notably shown in the ending of Mass Effect 3. Undertale doesn't do that. The player's morality plays a huge role in the game's plot. It all plays into the fact the gameplay is more centered around dialogue and character development than action.
6 Doki Doki Literature Club Took The Most Shocking Left Turn Imaginable
On the surface, Doki Doki Literature Club seems like a typical dating sim game. The player is a new member of the literature club that's filled with four girls that you slowly get to know. The game even plays like a dating sim for the first third of it, but that's all misdirection for what the game's really about. Once the glitches start to happen, things start to take a sharp turn into surrealist horror, and the game becomes difficult to stop playing.
5 Among Us Was A Phenomenon Born From Twitch
When it first came out, it didn't seem like Among Us would amount to much of anything. The game came out in 2018 to little fanfare and it wasn't until 2020 that it picked up steam thanks to popular Twitch streamers playing it as well as Covid leaving people stuck at home.
The combination of the two led to the game's explosion in popularity, making it a modern-day classic. Given the gameplay revolving around crewmates trying to find imposters, it's a perfect game to play with friends.
4 Rocket League Became An E-Sport That Swept The Nation
Aside from Minecraft, no indie title has ever received as much attention as Rocket League has. It even managed to do one thing Minecraft couldn't, and that's become a part of e-sports. While Rocket League won't ever hit the heights of Dota or Counterstrike, it has a large following in the e-sports industry. It's not hard to see why, as the game takes a great amount of skill to play well. Using cars to play soccer isn't nearly as easy as it seems at first glance.
3 Binding Of Isaac Influenced Many Indie Games Of The Past Decade
Few indie games have been as influential on their genre as Binding Of Isaac is. Very few roguelikes manage to pull off the execution and ambiance that Binding of Isaac does. It's not only well-executed, but it's suitably weird. A game about a damned boy using his tears like bullets to fight off aberrations and other creatures may not sound like a hit game in the making, but the odd nature of the gameplay is part of the charm.
2 Limbo Reminded The World Of Their Dread Of Spiders
Limbo makes the most of its black and white tone, creating an eerie ambiance better than most actual horror games do. It truly makes it feel as if the player is wandering around the dark forest, forcing them to be on edge at all times. A big reason for that is the presence of the giant spider that's always looming in the background, ready to drive one of its legs through the poor helpless boy. Death is very much a part of the game and is used to help push players to the correct answers to the puzzles.
1 Hollow Knight Is Metroidvania Perfection
Of all the recent indie hits that have come out, Hollow Knight may very well be the best. As a nameless knight, the player is forced to traverse through Hallownest, fighting various insects and bosses along the way. The combat system is simple to grasp but leaves plenty of room for skill to come into play. Skill and patience will be necessary to get through the game as its difficulty can be harsh and frustrating, much like Dark Souls. If the difficulty isn't a stopping point, the atmosphere, music, and visuals create a stunning world to keep the player motivated.