10 Wonderful Indie Games You Should Try

There are hundreds of indie games coming out each and every day on Steam, itch.io and other platforms alike, so it can be quite difficult to browse the oceans and parse the forests out there in search of your next favourite game.

As such, I hereby present you with a list of some of my recent discoveries, which are just waiting for you to add them to your Steam wishlists!

The Last Gas Station

In a world where electric cars have spread very fast, you step into the role of an old gas station owner out in the wilderness. You clean up and decorate the place, fuel cars, stock up shelves, and just vibe mostly, while absolutely nothing weird happens at night, at all. A very cosy experience overall.

Job Sims and management games aren’t exactly new as a concept, but I haven’t seen too many two-dimensional ones that put so much emphasis on the grind, customisation, and mystery! The anthropomorphic animals are adorable, the management feels rewarding, and the creepy undertones with the aliens add a ton of mystery to a game that might otherwise feel a bit low-stakes. Looking forward to this one!

Clerks and Quirks

Clerks and Quirks is a very chaotic co-op shop-sim with roguelike elements where you run a store in a fantasy world. Joined by up to three friends, you’ll man a store, craft a plethora of items from scratch and sell them to impatient customers.

As you progress through the game, you’ll put up with so-called “quirks”: Work stations that have come alive and haunt your stores. They’ll throw wrenches into your plans and sabotage your run, but if you manage to tame them, they’ll help you out in various ways. It’s a polished experience that is fun with friends but works solo, too! On top of that, you can truly feel that this is a passion project for the devs, thanks to the small details that add a lot of whimsy and freshness. Clerks and Quirks is just so easy to get hooked on!

Letter Lost

Welcome to your perfectly normal new job at the local post office! The weather is shit, so might as well perform your job to the best of your ability, not that you can leave anyway! Oh, and ignore all the creepiness and the various clues around here while you’re at it. There’s nothing amiss here. Not at all.

Letter Lost is part job simulator and part escape room. It reminds me of a first-person version of Strange Horticulture, a game I really adored, but with a lot more intrigue and many more clever puzzles involved. The voice acting is lovely, the writing is super nice, and honestly, the experience comes together nicely precisely because of how the puzzles bleed into the job sim aspects. If you’re into puzzling, snooping around, as well as the odd job sim or two, Letter Lost has a lot more to offer than just that, but I don’t wanna spoil too much.

WabiSabi SushiDerby

WabiSabi SushiDerby tells the tale of a young chef (you!) training up to create the best sushi possible… to compete in horse races but with sushi instead of horses… Sushi races? Sushi races!

WabiSabi scratches a similar itch to other training-heavy management games, but it also kind of reminds me of various incremental games out there. Train up sushi, compete in races, unlock more things, rinse and repeat. Being able to influence the races is a nice touch. It also just makes so much sense that the freshness of your sushi affects your stats. If you wanna see a pair of chopsticks ruin your day by kidnapping your well-trained bundle of rice and raw fish, give this a whirl!

Airframe Ultra

Airframe Ultra’s demo was my favourite at the Steam Next Fest in February. The Rain World developers created a fun and exciting racing game with brawling mechanics that left me craving for more. It’s an engaging game that made me want to sing its praises in a full deep-dive into why exactly it works as well as it does, which you can read in my full Airframe Ultra impressions.

That being the case, the short form of it is that Airframe Ultra presents you with fast-paced battles and octane-heavy races full of friction, speed and drama! Its PSX-style graphics lend themselves quite nicely to some beautiful shots as you engage in hardcore battles throughout oceanside maps, busy streets, and even an RE-style mansion! I vibe with it a ton!

Alabaster Dawn

As much as it pains me to say this, I actually have yet to play CrossCode, despite its long stay in my backlog, but after playing the same developers’ demo for their new upcoming game, I’m all the more excited to finally get into it. Alabaster Dawn is a top-down 2.5D Action RPG unlike any other!

Nyx’ curse plagues humanity, the Gods have fallen silent, and you – an outcast – are humanity’s last hope in saving the world. This is a classic adventure story, outfitted with fun and very powerful weapons, some Metroid-y elements in the exploration, and a vast and wonderful world to discover. The demo is such a blast and definitely deserves a spot in your wishlist!

Pandora’s Toybox

Pandora’s Toybox is a fast-paced Chinese God Sim with roguelike elements that has you raise humanity from scratch and develop and expand your religion without intervening too much. You can think of this as the love-child of “Black and White” and “World Box“, but it’s somehow way more than the sum of its parts!

Take the role of Epimetheus to guide human civilisation in a randomly generated pixel world. Watch your settlements grow, fulfil their requests, and punish those pesky heathens! Receive aid from up to three other Greek Gods as you face off against Aztec and Egyptian deities or even Jesus Christ himself. It’s not perfect by any means, especially with the translation being a bit rough, but I can’t wait to see how the game evolves over its dev time!

Denshattack

Flip, trick, and grind your way through a colourful Japanese-inspired dystopia! I like trains, and Undercoders really cooked with this very whacky and fast-paced train-based skating game. Yes, you heard that right – train-based skating. It’s as wild as it sounds. Denshattack just clicked with me much. I felt very reminded of Jet Set Radio, which I have very fond memories of. It plays differently, but the vibe is there, you know?

As you perform kick-flips, 360s, ollies, and many other tricks in mid-air, dodging buildings, baricades, fireballs and more, performing impossible jumps, and even grinding side-ways, you amass points and fulfil objectives to then crush your competition in all sorts of environments… again, AS A TRAIN. The demo is still up, the game is coming out soon, and I highly recommend just giving it a try for yourself!

GladiEATers

“Don’t play with your food” was yesterday! The future is now, and the future is GladiEATers! This is a narrative-driven creature battler with JRPG and roguelike mechanics where you cook up food under a time limit to create a powerful team to take on your opponents.

It sounds silly, I know. Also, there are a ton of food puns, obviously. GladiEATers essentially plays like the “Cooking Mama” games under pressure, but with JRPG and roguelike mechanics as well as seven chef stories and a whole lot of flair. Weird, but I love it. The story I got to see is heartwarming, and I can’t wait to check out the full release once it drops, especially given how much flair was already showcased in the snippet I had the chance to play! It’s an easy recommendation!

Snacktorio

Speaking of food, the world is getting threatened by ravenous beasts, and this game lets you cook, too… factory-style! From one half of the dev duo behind APICO and Mudborne comes Snacktorio, a factory-cooking automation game where you build up and scale food production lines to feed the very beasts threatening to wipe out your homeworld!

The creativity and attention to detail that went into their prior titles are still very much present in Snacktorio. This game is a departure from said games, yes, but while it is a factory game and much less about crafting individual components and manual work, it still retains that “smoothness” that the devs are known for, with slick animations, a simplistic style, a lot of charm, and gameplay that you can spend hours upon hours with. Highly recommend checking out!

Conclusion

Most of the games I talked about here still have demos available or are releasing pretty soon, so they’re easy to check out for yourself. If you’ve got thoughts on any of them, feel free to share! I’d also love to hear about any cool discoveries you think I should check out or maybe highlight in a future post.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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