I spent seventy dollars on a AAA game earlier this year. It had a thousand people in the credits. It had a marketing budget bigger than some countries’ GDP. It had ray tracing and photorealistic pores and a season pass before it even launched.
I played it for about six hours before I got bored and uninstalled it.
Then I bought a game made by four people for twenty-five dollars and couldn’t stop thinking about it for a month.
This isn’t a “AAA is dead” take. It’s an observation about where interesting things are actually happening in games right now. The most celebrated releases of 2025 and 2026 came from teams of a dozen people or fewer. The games that stuck with me — the ones I still bring up in conversations, the ones I’ve recommended to friends who don’t even play games — were almost all independent.
Here are seven that outperformed their AAA competition. Not in sales. In something that matters more.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — The Game That Broke Every Record
A debut studio called Sandfall Interactive released a turn-based RPG set in Belle Époque France in April 2025. By December, it had won more Game of the Year awards than Elden Ring.
Let that land. Elden Ring held the previous record at 429 GOTY awards. A first-time developer, making a tactical RPG — a genre that’s been considered niche for decades — beat it.
The combat combines real-time action with turn-based tactics. You control three characters in battles where positioning matters as much as ability selection. The art direction draws from 19th-century French painting, and the result looks unlike anything else in modern gaming. It’s ambitious. It’s strange. It’s the kind of creative swing that a committee-driven AAA studio would never greenlight.
That a game this bold won over titles with ten times its budget says something important about where innovation lives in 2026.
Blue Prince — The Puzzle Game Nobody Marketed
Blue Prince arrived quietly. Almost no marketing. No massive influencer campaign. Just a puzzle game about exploring a mysterious mansion where you place rooms to discover secrets.
By the end of 2025, it was the highest-rated game of the year and won Best Design and Innovation at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
The hook: every run changes the mansion based on your previous runs. It’s not random. It’s responsive. The game remembers what you’ve done and reshapes itself accordingly. It feels like having a conversation with the design itself across multiple playthroughs.
I finished it in about fifteen hours and spent the next week thinking about rooms I might have missed, paths I didn’t take, connections I hadn’t noticed. That’s the mark of something genuinely new — not just polished, not just well-executed, but actually novel in a medium that often feels exhausted.
Hades II — The Sequel That Could Have Coasted
Supergiant Games could have released Hades again with a new coat of paint and people would have bought it. The original was one of the most acclaimed indie games ever. The safe play would have been a modest expansion.
Instead, they built something bigger. Deeper. More replayable.
Hades II moves the action from the underworld to the surface. You play as a witch navigating a mythological landscape that’s stranger and more complex than the first game’s relatively familiar Greek pantheon. The magical abilities are wilder. The character relationships are richer. The narrative still rewards death — you learn more about the world every time you fail.
The defining feature of both Hades games is that they make losing feel like progress. You die, and the story advances. You die, and you come back stronger. That’s bold design that a AAA studio would never approve, because it sounds terrible in a pitch meeting. In practice, it’s brilliant.
Hollow Knight: Silksong — Seven Years of Waiting, Somehow Worth It
Team Cherry announced Silksong in 2019. It released in 2026. Seven years is an eternity in games. Expectations don’t just rise over seven years — they calcify into something impossible to meet.
Silksong met them anyway.
You play as Hornet, the guardian from the original, exploring a kingdom even more intricate than Hallownest. The movement — the parkour, the combat, the sense of flowing through space — remains unmatched in precision. It’s bigger than the original. Whether it’s better depends on what you valued about Hollow Knight, but it’s a worthy successor to one of the most beloved games ever made.
The wait was absurd. Team Cherry went silent for years. Fans cycled through phases of hope, frustration, and conspiracy theories. But the final product honors what came before while pushing forward, and in an industry where long-awaited sequels often disappoint, that’s remarkable.
Balatro — The Poker Roguelike That Shouldn’t Work
Balatro sounds like something a random idea generator would spit out. Poker-themed deck-building roguelike. You build hands to score points, upgrade jokers to multiply your score, and chase the kind of combos that make you lean forward in your chair.
It sounds niche. It looks unassuming. It consumed my life for three weeks.
The depth is what gets you. What starts as “play a good hand, do damage” spirals into a system of multipliers, synergies, and risk-reward decisions that keep you clicking “one more run” at 1 AM. No two runs feel the same because the joker combinations fundamentally reshape what strategies are viable.
A solo developer — literally one person — created one of the most replayable games of the last two years. It earned Game of the Year nominations everywhere. A sequel is in development. The ESRB rating controversy at launch feels like ancient history now, because the game itself is undeniable.
Sol Cesto — 2026’s Most Hypnotic Game
Sol Cesto launched in early access and hit full release in 2026 with an art style that stops you mid-scroll. Hand-drawn by comic book artist CharioSpirale, it looks like nothing else on this list.
The premise: a world where the sun has vanished. You select heroes and take them on roguelike runs through procedurally generated floors. Standard structure. Not standard execution.
Every floor reveals the game’s underlying systems in ways that make you appreciate the craft behind roguelike design. The risk-reward system frames every decision as a gamble, but the strategic depth underneath is real. It’s hard to describe without showing you screenshots, but imagine watching game design documents come to life, each floor a transparent demonstration of how the mechanics interconnect.
Monster Train 2 — The Deck-Builder That Keeps Evolving
The original Monster Train was already one of the best deck-builders around. The sequel doesn’t reinvent the formula. It expands it.
More cards. More factions. More synergies to discover. More reasons to experiment with combinations that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Every run presents dozens of meaningful choices about which cards to keep, which upgrades to prioritize, and which risks to take.
The card-battler genre has exploded since the first Monster Train. Slay the Spire opened the door. A dozen imitators rushed through. Monster Train 2 remains the gold standard because it understands that depth comes from meaningful choices, not just more content.
Why Indie Games Are Leading Right Now
The pattern isn’t hard to spot. Independent developers take risks that AAA studios structurally cannot.
Small teams follow a creative vision instead of a committee’s consensus. There’s less time wasted on internal politics and more time spent on craft. The games sometimes fail — plenty of indie games are bad, let’s not pretend otherwise — but when they work, they work because someone believed in an idea that a publisher would have rejected as too weird or too risky.
The pricing matters too. Most of these games cost between twenty and forty dollars. Half the price of a AAA release. Often double the playtime. Almost always more memorable.
How to Find Games Like These
The best indie games don’t always surface through mainstream channels. Here’s what actually works.
Follow the Independent Games Festival awards. The nominations highlight innovation that major outlets miss. Check Steam’s “New and Trending” tab regularly — not just the front page, the actual new releases. Join communities like r/roguelikes or genre-specific Discords where buried treasures surface naturally. Try demos when they’re available. And watch speedruns of games you’re curious about — you’ll see the depth in minutes.
The games worth playing aren’t always the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. Sometimes they’re the ones a friend tells you about, or a forum thread recommends, or a festival nomination highlights. The seven games above all earned their reputations through word of mouth, not advertising. That’s how it should work.
Independent tech publisher and AI enthusiast exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, productivity, and online entrepreneurship.
