Best Indie Games of 2024

Indie games have had a pretty great 2024. From games that rival massive industry titans to smaller experiences that’ll leave you feeling emotionally unwell, there’s some great variety.

It’s been especially good to be an indie fan, with most triple-A titles this year pulling their punches, and most award shows choosing to nominate an indie or two for Game of the Year.

We’ve polled the DualShockers team for their ten best indie games released this year, and this list is a result of that poll, with all our tastes being combined into some sort of opinion soup.

That said, I’m pretty confident that this is a great representation of the best indie games to release this year, and I’m more than happy to go over what made each game shine.

While I’ll be writing about these choices, I don’t have any say in the final ranking, as it was all voted on by the DualShockers team. Additionally, only games from January through November will be eligible for this list.

10 Pacific Drive

Supernatural Survival

Pacific Drive is an incredible merging of a sci-fi paranormal survival game and a campy driving adventure where you get to customize and kit out your car, and it’s great.

It has an incredibly cool 90s aesthetic, with everything always warping and changing around you in a New Weird setting that keeps you on your toes, making the survival aspect a little scarier and making the overall vibe incredibly engaging.

You’re constantly looting stuff, filling up your pockets, then driving past massive surreal and otherworldly anomalies, hoping your car doesn’t get wrecked, and if your car does get damaged, you’d better have supplies to fix it.

It even has a tinge of horror to it, with those anomalies taking form as weird, paranormal events and creatures. It’s unpredictable, difficult as hell, and incredibly creative.

9 Nine Sols

A Mixed Drink of Madness

Nine Sols is a beautiful hand-drawn Metroidvania, with a parry and combat system taken right out of Sekiro, and it’s one of the best Metroidvanias if you like intense combat.

It’ll have you trudging through metallic hallways, running up walls, grappling up to an enemy, watching them carefully, parrying them, and making them explode.

It feels incredibly satisfying, rewarding great timing, platforming skill, and mastery of your unique abilities that makes you feel like an incredibly nimble executioner.

It’s incredibly moody, with a beautiful cyberpunk vibe mixed with Tao culture, making for a beautifully made yet incredibly grotesque experience, and it deserves its spot here.

8 Thank Goodness You’re Here

A Hilarious Misadventure

Thank Goodness You’re Here is a delightfully comedic adventure where you go around and cause chaos, solve problems, and explore the most British pocket-sized world ever.

It’s only a few hours long, but it’s filled to the brim with pure comedy gold and very accessible gameplay consisting of hitting whatever you can find and exploring down the pretty linear path the game sets out for you.

That means if the comedy doesn’t land for you, there’s nothing here besides the charming style, but it’s such an appealing, hilarious game that it’s captured everyone’s hearts. At least here at Dualshockers.

You’ve got some daft commercials, cheeky dialogue, and incredibly strange blokes that’ll leave you feeling chuffed to bits. That’s what they say over there, right?

In short, it’s laugh-a-minute comedy, and considering how few games actually nail comedy, it makes this one a must-play for anyone in desperate need of a belly laugh.

7 Rivals of Aether II

The Ultimate Brawl

The Super Smash Bros. series has had it too good for too long, with most other platform fighters releasing and losing their players within a week, but such is not the case with Rivals of Aether II.

Rivals feels like a proper challenger to Smash’s formula, bringing that same level of polish and incredibly designed fighters to a game that’s faster, and actually listens to the player base for once.

It’s got a bunch of awesome characters that all have extremely unique play-styles, with none of them feeling super underpowered, and it’s hard to state just how big of an accomplishment that is.

Most fighting games have several characters filling the lower tiers, but every Rivals character is A tier at worst, and they’re all really fun to play, making this a fighting game absolutely worth trying.

6 Another Crab’s Treasure

Colorful Crustacean Souls

If you’ve ever wanted a Soulslike that isn’t a dark and moody experience, then Another Crab’s Treasure is a silly game where you play as a hermit crab that has to scavenge trash for new shells.

It’s just about the easiest Soulslike to get into, with the charming underwater sea life aesthetic, really fun scavenging mechanics that have you scrambling for garbage in the middle of fights, and funny dialogue.

Instead of just going through the same structure that most Souls-likes go for, you’ve got fun platforming, colorful mob fights, and easy-to-understand systems that make this the perfect way to test if the souls genre is for you without being pummelled by the Asylum Demon.

It’s really nice to see this game get this much recognition, too, making its way onto this list and getting universal acclaim, since Going Under was such an underrated title by the same team.

5 Neva

Scarily Beautiful

Though its got a few flaws, Neva is a beautiful, artful experience that puts you in the shoes of a girl and a wolf cub that grows up with you in a dying world.

It’s got some beautiful platforming, and though the outstanding visuals can tend to override the gameplay a little too much, it’ll still wow you with the pure artistry on display.

Unlike most games that go full force in the artsy direction, Neva backs up the style with substance, offering refined platforming and puzzles, with the platforming segments even daring to get a little challenging at times.

It’s a strong recommendation to anyone looking for a beautiful, story-heavy platformer, and I’m glad to see people agree that it deserves recognition as one of the greatest indies this year.

4 Palworld

Don’t Look Now, Nintendo

What can I say? Palworld is Pokémon but with guns, and that concept has quite a bit of universal appeal to it, especially when they tend to evolve Pokémon’s ideas more than Game Freak would.

It’s a similar formula to what Legends Arceus had, but as more of an open-world survival affair, having you craft items, put your ‘mons to work, and be crafty to survive.

The grittier and more realistic parody of a usually family-friendly and cartoonish franchise isn’t anything new, but Palworld does that while also offering an incredible gameplay experience to support the satire.

It’s so good that it got Nintendo to try and sue them out of existence, which should be a pretty good indicator that it’s worth giving it a try in case it’s gone soon.

3 Animal Well

Delightfully Mysterious

Bigmode, the publishing company started by Dunkey, had quite a bit to prove with their first-ever release, and they knocked it out of the park and subsequently slam-dunked it with Animal Well.

It’s a Metroidbrainia that, unlike most games that get called a Metroidbrainia, actually feels like a Metroid game on top of using your knowledge as the major progression items.

On top of that, you’ve got genuine upgrades that feel like major game changers, enabling new, incredibly unique ways to solve puzzles or distract the weird dog-cat apparition.

It’s such a unique experience, with items that feel custom fit for speedrunners and skilled players that are still fun to mess around with just casually, which is something you won’t often see in this genre.

2 Hades II

Early Access, But Incredible

Hades was already one of the best roguelite experiences out there, practically redefining the genre since it dropped, so it’s pretty obvious as to why Hades II made this list.

It tells an entirely new story with a new protagonist, which makes sense, as the first game squeezed out every drop of charm from its characters, and this one does just the same with its incredible cast.

It’s still in early access, yet it’s still an even fuller experience than the first game, with the same intense isometric action hack and slash combat on top of some really awesome content.

This making it onto the list is a no-brainer, as it was a shoo-in from the merit of being a practically perfect sequel that gives a lot to love for people jumping into Hades for the first time or for returning fans.

1 Balatro

Better Than Gambling

Of course, the indie game nominated for Game of the Year was bound to top the list of best indies, and that darling poker roguelike happens to be Balatro.

This game has likely stolen a few hundred thousand hours for you as it has myself and has sold millions of copies, with that figure ever-rising with the game’s release on mobile.

It’s all the more charming as this single dev project was never meant to go anywhere, seen as a passion project, but has blossomed into a globally successful game.

It’s an incredibly addictive, meditative game where you’ve got to employ incredible strategy and mathematics to succeed or just pull a great legendary Joker out of nowhere and win without even trying.

I think it says a lot that no matter how much money the triple-A studios throw at a game, they’ll never match the charm a singular guy pours into his funny card game, and Balatro is the perfect example of why indies are awesome.