10 Best Indie Games That Barely Have a Plot

I’m among the people in my professional circle who most strongly endorse the idea that video games are art, but it’s also true that I’m not always in the mood to engage with complex works.

While I value the creative intent of video games that strive to offer in-depth critiques, present dense stories, and develop multidimensional contexts, I often like to turn off my brain and just enjoy pure entertainment.

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Despite their small size, these worlds have managed to reach thousands of people thanks to their creative and compelling adventures.

In those cases, there’s a plethora of experiences that have no greater pretension than to entertain you, offering superficial narratives whose objective is merely to serve as an excuse to give meaning to the adventure’s gameplay.

Therefore, if you’re also at a point where you feel like deactivating your neurons and having the most fun without thinking beyond playing, these are the ten best indie games that barely have a plot.

10 Wizard of Legend

The Name Says it All

There was a time in my country when we were without power for hours every day, and this period would have been much darker if it weren’t for Wizard of Legend.

My laptop could only last a couple of hours of play before shutting down, but this roguelike focused on mastering hundreds of spells was the most glorious way to have fun without hesitation.

As the name suggests, the goal is to become a legendary mage, and that’s all that matters. To achieve this, you must defeat a handful of bosses across multiple levels, during which you collect previously unlocked spells and create an arsenal of arcane devastation.

Wizard of Legend‘s difficulty ceiling is high, and the number of spell combinations is even higher. It excels at being fun, so you’re guaranteed to forget about the world for several hours smoothly.

9 SUPERHOT

The Pleasure of Being a Pawn

SUPERHOT presents an interesting narrative about hackers, executable files that represent the title itself in-game, and a greater force that seeks to create a collective consciousness, but none of this is imposed on the player.

Honestly, I only learned about the entire story after beating the game because I was too mesmerized by its glorious graphics and its addictive dichotomy between first-person action and puzzles.

I was so focused on solving each level and completing it perfectly that I practically never paid attention to the plot, and yet it was an absolutely masterful two and a half hours I remember fondly.

Sometimes I feel bad about how blatantly I ignored the events unfolding, but then I remember how cinematically cool it was to throw punches in slow motion, grab my enemies’ weapons, throw them in their faces, and watch their bodies shatter.

SUPERHOT is a unique title, capable of striking a balance between two opposing sensations: calm and adrenaline. For this reason alone, recommending it is a must, and in this context, it seems even more pertinent to do so.

8 Sludge Life

Just Vibing

Sludge Life is one of those titles that, rather than devoting its narrative attention to the main events, focuses entirely on the characters who inhabit its world and their circumstances.

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Instead of witnessing a grand central plot around which your presence revolves, the game introduces many incredible and hilarious NPCs whose situations and dialogue are incredibly engaging and memorable.

The experience is very fluid and entertaining because its first-person platforming system is very well executed, as are its progression, level design, and graffiti mechanics. Still, its biggest draw is connecting with its spaces and citizens.

At first, it’s all laughs, but progressively, Sludge Life reveals its dense layers, and you realize what a harsh analysis it is of our current reality. It’s a highly experimental title with no strong goals, but if it’s your kind of work, you’ll probably end up getting it tattooed like me.

7 Absolver

Another Fight Club

Before Sloclap became popular through Sifu and Rematch, the studio immediately made me a fan of their work thanks to what they did with Absolver.

After alluring me by pitching a martial arts game into a Souls-like gameplay context, I’ve played it a couple of times and never quite understood why I was doing what I was doing, but it’s more enjoyable than words can describe.

Unfortunately, the game has a deep online component, and there aren’t as many people playing it anymore. However, at one point, there were a lot of us members of a large fighting club where combat was masterful, even against the campaign’s NPCs.

Exploring its crumbling world, acquiring new moves, and configuring your own deck of attacks and stances is as complex as it is satisfying. Absolver isn’t for every player, though it’s by far one of the last decade’s most under-the-radar indie games.

6 Cocoon

Unexplained Cosmic Mysteries

It’s becoming more and more common for titles to use superficial, ambient narratives to tell their stories, and this is precisely Cocoon‘s case.

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You won’t see me for a week after Terraria updates.

To understand what’s happening in this wonderful and innovative puzzle game, you have to interpret and connect many details on your own, as the title doesn’t bother explaining anything at all.

However, it does an excellent job of putting you in context through thoughtful cinematography and design that hints at what’s happening. If you’re like me, you won’t understand a thing the first time, but that won’t stop you from enjoying it to the fullest.

Ultimately, Cocoon excels greatly thanks to its puzzles, aesthetics, and incredibly unexpected boss fights. The idea of creating cognitive challenges across dimensions within dimensions is as crazy as it sounds, yet it executes it flawlessly.

5 Slay the Spire

A Cycle Without Pretensions

Roguelikes have an unparalleled ability to convince you to play them for hundreds of hours without needing to be incentivized by the story, just as the glorious Slay the Spire does.

This masterpiece of the genre can absorb you for months without letting go due to its addictive gameplay loop and progression system, allowing you to find secrets, combinations, and difficulties that seem impossible at first.

Discovering its endless options, becoming familiar with each character’s builds, and executing completely insane runs in which you’ve created unstoppable synergy offers an absurd amount of dopamine I don’t think I’ve felt with any other game.

From then on, you know there’s a spire, and you must ascend, but it doesn’t matter at all. I don’t know the first person who played Slay the Spire for the story, as it’s practically nonexistent and never promises anything truly meaningful.

4 Tunic

Minimal Narrative, Maximum Exploration

Tunic takes the idea of a hidden narrative to a new level, with even the rules of its mechanics hidden behind the exploration.

Both the plot and gameplay are available in manual pages that you eventually understand through drawings, inference, and logic (as they’re written in an unintelligible language), prioritizing the sense of adventure on an extraordinary scale.

You continually learn more and more about your surroundings, comprehending how the tools you have at your disposal work and what you must do with the challenges you face, also bringing to light the reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing.

If you’re not engaged by its loop and ideas and are only concerned with enjoying its combination of Zelda-like exploration and Souls-like combat, you can do that too, as it never forces you into anything you’re not willing to seek out on your own.

However, even when you know the whole picture, Tunic keeps the plot simple and easily digestible, making it an excellent and truly spontaneous game with a perfect length.

3 Vampire Survivors

Survive Death and Have Fun

Like any good arcade game worth its salt, Vampire Survivors‘ only plot is avoiding death. While the entity in question is literally chasing you, and there’s lore behind the events, everything happens in the background, so you shouldn’t even worry.

Instead, the only thing you should genuinely care about is making it through the thirty minutes of each level, which can be an especially arduous task given the elevated difficulty and endless gameplay options at your disposal, even in its free version.

Although it may not seem like it, given it’s a passive bullet hell developed by one person where all attacks are automatic, surviving the stages is a complicated task, as is choosing the right synergies based on the characteristics of the dozens of characters you can unlock.

However, as someone who has played it and discovered practically everything, I can tell you there’s no game that barely has a plot as alluring as Vampire Survivors. This game’s feeling is inexplicable, and I only recommend it if you’re willing to lose every ounce of productivity in your body.

2 Cuphead

A Straightforward Deal with the Devil

While Cuphead presents an interesting premise early in its campaign, it’s really just a superficial excuse to give our protagonists a reason to mercilessly battle dozens of bosses.

Like most boss rush games, the main attraction lies in the challenge of overcoming each of the main confrontations, so the story is completely relegated to the background.

Of course, the game occasionally provides context, but it’s all rather superficial. You play Cuphead to revel in its glorious gun-n-run style, challenging platforming sequences, and incomparable aesthetics, not to ponder why you sold your soul to the devil.

I appreciate they cared enough about the narrative to offer two endings, but even so, its scale is kept to a minimum to focus on what we came here to do, and it’s the best decision Studio MDHR could have made.

1 Dead Cells

An Unbeatable Roguelike

As one of the best procedural video games, one of the best metroidvanias, one of the best indie games, and one of the best at everything it does, Dead Cells is a masterpiece that must top this list.

Although more and more content has been added over time, including elements dedicated to contextualizing the adventure and characterizing the most prominent figures, it all manifests itself in a rather subtle layer that never seeks to steal the show.

The most avid players like yours truly will dedicate hours of their lives to exploring every last room for those hidden pieces of lore scattered across the map, but there’s never a genuine reason to do so beyond personal interest.

Instead, Dead Cells focuses entirely on its gameplay, with its massive levels, endless weapons, powers and builds, and amazing bosses creating a gameplay loop where hundreds of hours seem to be insufficient to fully enjoy it.

Thus, Motion Twin‘s game is among the greatest indie titles in history and a benchmark for the entire industry, so every time the opportunity to glorify it arises, we should all take it.

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