A hand-picked directory of indie games from small studios. Every entry was played to the credits, or at least for ten honest hours, by one of our volunteer curators before it was listed.
50 games
Try: Under 5 hoursCouch co-opSteam DeckFree on itch
Ward Seven · Horror
Work the night shift on a hospital ward where the patients keep moving
You are a nurse on a night shift in an old hospital wing that was supposed to close years ago. You do your rounds, check charts and dispense medicine, but patients appear…
Brinewick Games · Roguelikes
Dive a flooded lighthouse where every breath of air is also your currency
Insomnia Hall · Narrative
Walk a city borough at 3 a.m. and talk to everyone still awake
You cannot sleep, so you go for a walk. The borough is quiet, but not empty: a night baker, a security guard, a woman feeding foxes, two teenagers on a bench. You talk,…
Spin Cycle Studio · Cozy
Run a 24-hour laundromat, fold clothes and listen to night-owl stories
Glasshouse Two · Puzzle
Bend light through hand-blown glass to fire a glassmaker's old kiln
Hearthshrine · Strategy
A card-driven god game where villagers decide whether you exist
You are a minor god of a small valley, and your power depends on how many villagers believe in you. Each turn you draw miracle cards: a good harvest, a sudden storm, a…
Tamsin & Hollow · Platformers
Ride the wind across a mountain range on a kite made of old letters
You play a small pilgrim carrying a kite stitched from letters written by people in your village. Hold a button to catch the wind, lean to steer and let go to drop onto…
Foghorn Friends · Horror
Keep the light burning till dawn with friends, while the fog closes in
Shoal Line Games · Strategy
Turn-based tactics on an archipelago where the tide redraws the map
Steam Lantern Co. · Cozy
Build and run a mountain hot spring for tired forest animals
Kasumi & Reed · Roguelikes
A bullet hell where ringing a temple bell rewinds the last three seconds
You carry a small bronze bell into a shrine full of spirits that fill the screen with patterns of paper lanterns. Ring the bell and time rewinds three seconds, but each…
Valve & Velvet · Narrative
Repair your grandmother's radio and tune into the stations she loved
Callsign Kilo · Puzzle
Tune an old radio and deduce who is broadcasting from where
Gutterball Interactive · Platformers
Parkour across a rain-soaked city's rooftops as a very determined rat
Ottilie Marsh · Cozy
Stitch, glue and bind books for a village of very particular readers
A village needs books, and you have a press, a needle and thread. Each order comes with a story: a child's first diary, a widower's recipe collection, a poet who wants a…
Vacancy Sign · Horror
Check in guests at a roadside motel and decide who gets a key
You work the night desk at a motel on an empty highway. Guests arrive one at a time. You check their IDs, ask a few questions and decide whether to give them a room. Some…
Late Fare Games · Narrative
Drive the last bus of the night and decide who you let on board
Damp Basement Games · Roguelikes
Play as a mold colony spreading through a different damp cellar each run
Elytra Works · Platformers
Roll, bounce and build momentum as a beetle in an overgrown greenhouse
You are a copper-shelled beetle who can curl into a ball. Rolling builds momentum, curving leaves become ramps, and flower stems act as springs. The fun is in finding the…
Small Print Games · Narrative
A text adventure job interview that gets stranger with every question
Walnut Hinge · Puzzle
Open a dead inventor's writing desk, one locked drawer after another
The whole game is a single antique writing desk with sixteen locked drawers. Each drawer holds a clue for another: a key, a cipher wheel, a tide table, a pressed flower…
Waggle Dance · Strategy
Steer a hive through a year of flowers, wasps and hard decisions
Lepidoptera Lane · Horror
Your flashlight is the only safe thing in the woods, and the moths know it
You are lost in a summer forest with a flashlight and dwindling batteries. The light keeps the dark at bay, but it also draws moths, and the moths attract something…
Firebreak Studio · Roguelikes
Harvest everything you can before the wildfire reaches the trees
Isobar Pictures · Narrative
A retiring TV forecaster has one week of broadcasts left
Small Orbit · Platformers
Deliver parcels across tiny moons where gravity pulls in odd directions
You deliver mail to people who live on small, hand-sized moons. Each moon has its own gravity, so jumping too hard sends you into orbit around the next one. Learning to…
Gull & Pier · Cozy
Captain a little ferry carrying vegetables, villagers and one stubborn goat
You captain a small ferry between five islands. Every morning you plan the day's crossings: crates of lettuce, a baker who needs flour, a goat that refuses to share the…
Little Auk Studio · Puzzle
Learn a language of birdsong by listening, guessing and being wrong
Ledger Rot · Horror
Count the jars in your late uncle's cellar. The numbers keep changing.
Coinslot Ghosts · Roguelikes
Fight your way through broken cabinets as the arcade's last repair tech
Sleeper Tie · Strategy
Lay track across a frontier valley before the money runs out
Spur Line hands you a valley, a station, a few towns and a budget. Lay track, place signals and schedule trains to haul ore and grain to market. Every curve and bridge…
Tallow Kids · Platformers
You are a candle, and every jump melts you a little shorter
Ridgeline Nine · Strategy
Nine soldiers, one mountain pass and forty nights of winter
Drystone Games · Cozy
Rebuild a stone cottage by hand, one carefully placed stone at a time
Reservoir Six · Narrative
Dig through a drowned village's riverbed and piece together its last summer
A reservoir has been drained for repairs, revealing a village flooded fifty years ago. You walk the exposed riverbed, dig out objects, clean them and place them in a…
Bowline Games · Puzzle
Tie, untie and untangle rope on your phone, one knot at a time
Each level hands you a length of rope and a sketch of a knot from an old sailing manual. Drag the rope over, under and through, and the game checks whether your knot…
Bean Row Studio · Cozy
A tiny vegetable garden on your phone that grows in real time
Origami Fleet · Strategy
Naval warfare with paper boats, fought across a garden pond
Paper Owl Collective · Roguelikes
Deliver letters across a city that rearranges its streets every night
Each run is one night of deliveries in a hex-grid city whose districts slide around after dark. Your route is built from a hand of street cards: a bridge, an alley, a…
Thicket Two · Platformers
Two hedgehogs tied together with one rope, climbing out of a thorny wood
Plum Table Games · Strategy
A two-player card game about rival orchards and very petty neighbors
Two families, one valley, endless squabbles. Each turn you plant fruit cards, play weather and sabotage cards on your rival, or trade at the market for points. The rules…
Marsh Lantern · Puzzle
Push books into place before the sinking library tilts again
Quarry Bell · Platformers
A one-hit precision platformer about a monk climbing a quarry
A silent monk climbs a quarry carved into a mountain, and every surface is out to kill him. One hit and you restart the screen, instantly, with no loading. The moveset is…
Hedgerow Pixel · Roguelikes
A one-thumb dungeon you can clear on a single bus ride
Vesper Dither · Horror
A low-poly church horror where the choir keeps singing after closing
Crumb Theory · Cozy
Seven snowy days, one bakery and a village that still needs bread
A blizzard cuts the village off for a week, and your bakery is the only one with flour. Each day you knead, proof and bake with what is left, deciding who gets the last…
Floe Studio · Horror
Fish through a hole in a frozen lake, alone, as something circles below
You spend a week in a small fishing hut on a frozen lake. Drill a hole, drop a line, wait. Fishing is calm and quietly satisfying. But some nights the line goes taut and…
Vellum & Compass · Roguelikes
A deckbuilder where the map is the deck and every tile costs money
Franking Machine · Puzzle
Sort the mail of a 1950s harbor town, and notice what doesn't add up
Postmark & Pine · Narrative
Write letters to a lighthouse keeper and read what she writes back
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