One of the best things about the indie gaming scene is how novel and interesting ideas are constantly hitting the market. This sparks new trends, which spark more games, endlessly repeating.
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The downside to this is that sometimes games will fall in and out of the spotlight with alarming speed. And by the time you realize it’s a game worth checking out, everyone has already moved on to something else. These were the most egregious examples of this I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing.
This is especially rough with inherently multiplayer games, since you can’t really play them solo, but all your friends have already uninstalled it for another game.
1 Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy
- Released
- December 6, 2017
Bennett Foddy has become a somewhat infamous name in gaming culture, and this game was the reason why. You controlled a man in a cauldron, holding a sledgehammer. Using just the hammer, you had to scale up an insurmountable height, all while the titular creator waxed poetic to you about game design.
Intentionally difficult controls and a brutal and unforgiving landscape made this an extremely difficult game. This sparked a wave of YouTubers and Twitch streamers playing it, rocketing it to the public eye and causing every curious masochist to give it a try. Then Super Mario Odyssey came out a month later, and everyone forgot about Foddy’s platformer while I was still in the second area.
2 That’s Not My Neighbor
That’s Not My Neighbor is a small project by a solo developer. You are tasked with checking people at the door to an apartment, reporting anyone who is secretly a doppelganger. It was the talk of the town for a moment. And yet, its daily player count dropped massively before I had time to figure out why everyone is so caught up about the Milkman.
The short life of this one’s spotlight makes sense once you play it. A charming game with a unique premise and art style, it IS admittedly short in terms of content. A couple runs through, and you’ve seen just about everything there is to offer.
3 Supermarket Simulator
Supermarket Simulator
- Released
- February 20, 2024
I’m going to be honest. I’m still not super sure why this game popped off as hard as it did. It seemed like every single PC gamer alive was playing it at one point. As the name implies, you have to stock, price, and checkout the sale of various goods at your own customizable supermarket. With a simple gameplay loop and middle-of-the-road graphics, it’s the poster boy for “random indie simulator.”
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I did finally get around to trying it, and it IS fun, but it’s not so groundbreaking that its rise to popularity was expected. Maybe me missing out on the initial hype made me miss something. But this one felt like just another game.
4 Schedule 1
Often described as “Breaking Bad: The Video Game,” Schedule 1 is an open-world business management game about producing and selling illegal drugs. It’s praised for its automation system and creative method of adding special effects to the products. And despite the advertiser-unfriendly topic matter, it rocketed to fame not long after its release.
It’s hard to explain what makes this game stand out from all the other drug empire games out there. Perhaps it’s the fact that it doesn’t actually lean into drug culture, but treats the production and business side of it as a more mechanical experience. Maybe it’s because of the surprisingly engaging manufacturing processes and the surprisingly deep sales system. Either way, this is a great game, and I get the hype. Of course, since I’m late to the party, I’m making single-effect strains while other folks have already automated septuple effect bricks of pure party powder.
5 Lethal Company
Lethal Company is an interesting one. To many folks, this game kickstarted the era of “friendslop” games (multiplayer co-op games that are quickly produced for the novelty). You play as an employee for a nameless company, tasked with navigating dangerous dungeons to collect scrap.
It’s one of my favorite multiplayer games, blending horror, roguelike, and multiplayer mechanics together flawlessly. It’s scary, but can become outrageously fun with the right friends. Too bad that I didn’t get the game until a few months after the hype died down, and none of my friends are playing it anymore.
6 Content Warning
You’ll notice a theme for these next few entries. They’re all continuations of the more popular friendslop games of this recent generation. Content Warning came out a few months after Lethal Company, riding the societal high of the genre. In it, you and your friends have to dive into abandoned facilities to record footage of monsters, traps, and more, all to try and make a video for “SpookTube” and get a lot of subscribers.
Stylish and fun to try, I get why this one faded fast. It captured the goofy vibes of hanging out with friends, but with very repetitive gameplay and little variation, the luster of this one fades quickly. Playing it solo (cause all my friends moved on already) is actually dull, even.
7 REPO
Another highly regarded co-op roguelike game about collecting loot, Repo has you scour through various settings to ‘repossess’ items of value, all while avoiding the dangerous residents.
This one is a work of genius. It follows up on the Lethal Company formula, while also adding in a handful of small adjustments that make it an even more engaging experience with friends. The biggest example is the way the player characters move. The mouth motions and eye tracking make them feel very alive, adding to the atmosphere.
8 The Headliners
So short-lived, I’d wager most folks don’t know about this one. The Headliners is like Content Warning, but with photography. You’re a reporter tasked with entering a city while a monster invasion takes place. Using a rating system similar to Dead Rising, you’re graded on the quality of your photos.
Also like Content Warning, the game is a bit repetitive in its main gameplay loop, making it grow dull quickly if you don’t have the humors and hyucks of playing with friends to extend longevity.
9 Chained Together
Rising on the “climb up without falling” fad of indie games, Chained Together has you and two friends connected at the hip by a chain. You’re then given the chance to escape hell by climbing a towering cacophony of objects and obstacles.
As you can imagine, this one is essentially pointless to play solo. You can, but with being chained together literally in the name, it’s a big against the game’s intended design. But, like Getting Over It, the difficulty means that folks either go hard for a week and beat it, or give up and move on. Either way, both mean that all my friends stopped playing it super quickly.
10 Liar’s Bar
Clever, well-designed, and accessible, Liar’s Bar is a simple dice/card game platform. You can either play Liar’s Dice (the one popularized by Pirates of the Caribbean) and Liar’s Deck (the card game also known as “cheat” or “bullshit”)
Simple and refined, the game’s short lifespan is not of any fault of its own. Traditional table games like these are intended to be easy to start and complete in a sitting. The lack of depth or variety can be good for socializing, but most folks will grow bored and move on to more stimulating alternatives.
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