Summary
- Indie games like Cult Of The Lamb and Caves Of Qud offer unique gameplay loops that switch up the feel of the experience.
- Wildfrost excels with diverse factions and fast-paced deck-building, providing generous rewards for players.
- Ravenswatch stands out with a grim fairy-tale setting, a broad range of playable characters, and multiple activities during runs.
While known for their typically experimental and innovative designs, indie games can sometimes fall prey to repetition. There's certainly room for repetitive gameplay within certain games, especially when paired with a satisfying loop. However, players who easily tire of repetitive loops may prefer these titles.
These games certainly aren't free of repetition, but each of them features an ebb and flow that frequently switches up the feel of the gameplay. These are games such as Cult Of The Lamb, with its dual-layered gameplay structure, and Caves Of Qud, with its immensely deep character creator and expansive world.
Best Indie Open-World RPGs, Ranked
Open-world games are often the domain of big-budget studios, but there are some indie gems out there too.
7 Wildfrost
A Deck-Builder With Diverse Factions
Wildfrost
- Released
- April 12, 2023
WHERE TO PLAY
Build your perfect deck unique to you!
Recruit cute card companions, elemental items and equip powerful charms to aid in your fight against the Wildfrost
Choose your Leader from a variety of tribes, each with different playstyles and stats
Master a dynamic ‘counter’ system to put your strategic skills to the test
Expand and develop the hub town of Snowdwell between runs
Unlock new cards, events, customisation options and more!
Endless replayability with daily runs and challenges!
- ESRB
- E10+ For Everyone 10+ // Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood
- Genre(s)
- Digital Card Game, Strategy, Roguelike
Wildfrost is a diverse roguelike deck-builder that excels with its charming graphics, tactical gameplay, and generous rewards system. In the game, players control a variety of companions and battle enemies with a wide range of cards.
Best Strategy Games With Complex Decision-Making
These great strategy games offer a wide variety of scenarios and require complex decision-making, creating fantastic environments for dynamic play.
The deck-building of Wildfrost is not only diverse, but fast-paced, offering players frequent bounties of cards and items that allow for great expression. Supporting this are three distinctive factions, each with their own viable strategies and unique twists.
6 Darkest Dungeon
Intense Dungeon-Crawling & Management
Darkest Dungeon
- Released
- January 19, 2016
WHERE TO PLAY
Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes through twisted forests, forgotten warrens, ruined crypts, and beyond. You'll battle not only unimaginable foes, but stress, famine, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Uncover strange mysteries, and pit your heroes against an array of fearsome monsters with an innovative strategic turn-based combat system. Can you stem the tide of eldritch horrors erupting across your family’s ancestral estate?
Remember: nothing can be gained without loss. Descend at your peril into this award-winning game.
- ESRB
- T For Teen due to Alcohol Reference, Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Partial Nudity, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Genre(s)
- RPG
Darkest Dungeon is a unique blend of strategy RPG and roguelike dungeon-crawler, offering players a dynamic but unforgiving loop that punishes mistakes and rewards caution. Darkest Dungeon also features two distinctive sides to its gameplay, balancing its challenging dungeon-crawls with a light management layer.
This diverse indie game also features a broad range of character classes, each with its own set of expressive abilities. This is further complemented by an array of items and elements of resource management that add further strategy to an already strategic experience.
5 Ravenswatch
An Action Roguelike With Diverse Encounters
Ravenswatch
- Released
- September 26, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
Ravenswatch is a top-down roguelike action game in which you play as heroes of tales and legends that must slay hordes of nightmarish creatures in nerve-racking fights. After the success of Curse of the Dead Gods©, Passtech Games returns with an improved formula and an addictive game experience with endless replay value. It can be played solo or with up to four players in co-op.
Play as 9 heroes, each with a unique twist and individual gameplay, including Little Red Riding Hood, who suffers from lycanthropy; Sun Wukong, the fallen monkey king; the Snow Queen with her evil powers; and many other familiar characters who have a darker side and are more violent than you might remember.
The Nightmare has invaded the world of dreams and is corrupting everything in its wake. Faced with this evil, the Ravenswatch is gathering heroes from tales and legends from all over the world to lead a crucial battle and restore the fragile balance. But the heroes themselves have been corrupted. How deep do the roots of this evil go?
Explore 3 open maps filled with activities and inspired by enchanted forests and marshes, One Thousand and One Nights, and Arthurian legends respectively.
Help the inhabitants of Reverie, such as the Three Little Pigs, Sinbad the Sailor and Morgan the fairy, and earn valuable rewards to help you in your future battles.
Reveal the story of each character and Reverie, run after run.
Ravenswatch is a meticulously crafted combination of a dark fantasy atmosphere with a comic book style.
Ravenswatch is a slick and action-packed roguelike with a stark and grim fairy-tale setting. It stands out for its unique structure and broad range of playable characters, each offering their own strengths and weaknesses. This diversity of possible play-styles and builds keeps Ravenswatch a dynamic experience, even when playing in co-op.
In addition, the wide variety of activities and quests to partake in during a run of Ravenswatch are manifold. This creates a dynamic puzzle of priorities to unpack between combat encounters, made exciting through the game's constant time pressure.
4 Caves of Qud
A Deeply Diverse Character Creator
Caves Of Qud
- Released
- July 15, 2015
WHERE TO PLAY
Caves of Qud is a science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants. Come inhabit a living, breathing world and chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations. Decide: is it a dying earth, or is it on the verge of rebirth?
Do anything and everything. Caves of Qud is a deeply simulated, biologically diverse, richly cultured world.
DEEP PHYSICAL SIMULATION — Don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
FULLY SIMULATED CREATURES — Every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
DYNAMIC FACTION SYSTEM — Pursue allegiances with over 70 factions: apes, crabs, trees, robots, and highly entropic beings, just to name a few.
RICHLY DETAILED SCIENCE FANTASY SETTING — Over fifteen years of worldbuilding have led to a rich, weird, labyrinthine, one-of-a-kind storyworld, layered on top of the simulation, all for you to explore. Live and drink, friend.
TACTICAL GAMEPLAY — Turn-based, sandbox exploration and combat offers as many solutions as you and your mutations, implants, artifacts, and skills are creative enough to invent.
- Genre(s)
- Roguelike, RPG
Caves of Qud is a traditional roguelike that stands out with its unique and dynamic science-fantasy world. The landscape of Qud is built from a clever combination of procedural and hand-crafted content that allows for diverse exploration, ensuring there's almost always something new and exciting to find around every corner.
Best Open-World Games That Reward Adaptive Players
These creative open-world games are great for adaptive players who crave dynamic challenges and rewarding creative solutions.
Not only is the world of Caves of Qud a deeply diverse place to be, but the people within it are also variegated. This includes the player themselves, who are afforded a great deal of expression thanks to the game's deep and granular character creator. The abundance of options encourages an incredible diversity of play-styles, offering frequent opportunities for role-playing and style.
3 Cult of the Lamb
A Colony-Sim Dungeon-Crawler
Cult of the Lamb
- Released
- August 11, 2022
WHERE TO PLAY
Cult of the Lamb casts players in the role of a possessed lamb saved from annihilation by an ominous stranger, and must repay their debt by building a loyal following in his name. Start your own cult in a land of false prophets, venturing out into diverse and mysterious regions to build a loyal community of woodland Followers and spread your Word to become the one true cult.
BUILD YOUR FLOCK
Collect and use resources to build new structures, perform dark rituals to appease the gods, and give sermons to reinforce the faith of your flock.
DESTROY THE NON-BELIEVERS
Explore a sprawling, randomly generated world, fight off hordes of enemies and defeat rival cult leaders in order to absorb their power and assert your cult's dominance.
SPREAD YOUR WORD
Train your flock and embark on a quest to explore and discover the secrets of four mysterious regions. Cleanse the non-believers, spread enlightenment, and perform mystical rituals on the journey to become the mighty lamb god.
- ESRB
- Teen / Blood, Violence.
- Genre(s)
- Roguelite, Indie Games, Simulation
Cult Of The Lamb is a unique roguelite that pairs its dungeon-crawler gameplay with lightweight colony-sim mechanics. In the game, players delve into gauntlets of hack-and-slash action, defeating bosses and collecting resources before returning to their colony - a burgeoning cult.
At the site of their cult, players can manage their followers, farm, and construct new buildings. In addition, players are able to give sermons and perform rituals to benefit their colony. This multi-faceted gameplay loop offers a diverse experience, supported further by small mini-games and a quest system.
2 Terraria
A Blend Of Combat & Creativity
Terraria
- Released
- May 16, 2011
WHERE TO PLAY
Dig, Fight, Explore, Build: The very world is at your fingertips as you fight for survival, fortune, and glory. Will you delve deep into cavernous expanses in search of treasure and raw materials with which to craft ever-evolving gear, machinery, and aesthetics? Perhaps you will choose instead to seek out ever-greater foes to test your mettle in combat? Maybe you will decide to construct your own city to house the host of mysterious allies you may encounter along your travels?
In the World of Terraria, the choice is yours!
Blending elements of classic action games with the freedom of sandbox-style creativity, Terraria is a unique gaming experience where both the journey and the destination are completely in the player’s control. The Terraria adventure is truly as unique as the players themselves!
Are you up for the monumental task of exploring, creating, and defending a world of your own?
Terraria is an open-world side-scroller that combines survival-craft gameplay with a diverse variety of memorable boss fights. This offers a unique balance between creative sandbox play and tense combat encounters, providing a diverse ebb and flow that prevents the game from becoming stale.
Terraria offers a diverse array of items to use and resources to craft with that make both combat and base-building an expressive experience. In addition, the game features plenty of often dangerous spelunking and light town management that makes the gameplay even more diverse.
1 Streets of Rogue
An Immersive-Sim Roguelite
Streets of Rogue
- Released
- March 10, 2017
- ESRB
- t
- Developer(s)
- Matt Dabrowski
Streets of Rogue is a rogue-lite about player choice, freedom, and anarchic fun. The game takes inspiration from fast-paced top-down rogue-lites like Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne, and adds free-form, experimentation-driven, emergent gameplay elements of RPGs like Deus Ex.
Rather than taking place in a dungeon, the game is set in a functioning, procedurally generated city, where complex AI informs denizens from all walks of life, who are just trying to get by in their daily activities. In order to progress, the player will need to accomplish specific mission goals in any way they see fit through use of their special character traits, items, and the environment.
Play as a soldier, a stealthy doctor, a genial bartender, hyper-intelligent gorilla, or one of more than 20 different characters. Explore random world generation and TOTALLY EXTREME gameplay variety means you can play for 600 hours and not get bored! Seriously though, go outside!!!
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG
Streets of Rogue deftly combines immersive-sim gameplay with a roguelike structure, offering players a diverse action sandbox that's as chaotic as it is expressive. The game is packed with opportunities for player expression, supported by deeply emergent gameplay facilitated by the myriad systems.
An abundance of unique items and a varied assortment of playable characters help to make Streets of Rogue a consistently diverse experience. As a result, a run of Streets of Rogue is rarely stale, and this is further supported by the addition of cooperative play.
Great Indie Games With Amazing Production Value
Some indie games are able to punch above their weight, delivering excellent production values to their players.