The 10 Best Indie Hidden Gems, Ranked

In a year packed with great games, one thing that stands out most about 2024 is its wealth of incredible indies. Even though this year, massive blockbuster RPGs kept us playing for dozens of hours and games like Astro Bot found nearly universal acclaim, indies like Balatro and UFO 50 still found their way onto game-of-the-year lists and were even honored at the Game Awards. Indies are getting more mainstream attention than ever before, and it’s about time.

But it’s also been a year full of excellent indie games that haven’t gotten their due, the so-called hidden gems. What defines a “hidden gem” is admittedly imprecise. A lack of critical attention, low sales, and getting snubbed for major awards certainly help make the case. However you slice it, this year we’re honoring a few of the best games that may have flown under your radar.

10. Judero

Judero could have been a one-trick pony — a top-down action game that’s mostly distinguished by its stop-motion art. But beneath its intentionally scrappy style, Judeo has plenty of substance, even if I’m not sure I understand it all. Judero is filled with poetic language and references to mythology right alongside classic rock songs and utter silliness. It’s intentionally messy and uneven, a welcome antidote to the overpolished products of the mainstream games industry. Its action is only fine, but everything else about this surprising, absurd game deserves to be seen.

9. Keylocker: Turn-Based Cyberpunk Action

Keylocker builds on rhythm-based RPGs like the Mario & Luigi series, adding complex button inputs to every attack. Starring a musician and set in a world where music is outlawed, it’s packed with interesting writing (despite an uneven story). But the real draw here is its active, extremely difficult combat and a wealth of fun rhythm minigames.

8. Dream Tactics

Don’t let its cutesy exterior fool you — Dream Tactics is a challenging tactical RPG with a brilliantly flexible skill system. Each character has their own deck of card-based attacks, with the ability to borrow from each other’s decks to craft powerful customized builds. All that plus vibrant, Game Boy Advance inspired art and a great soundtrack cement it as an underrated strategy gem.

7. Great God Grove

The delightful oddity that is Great God Grove almost defies description, but I’ll do my best. Armed with a combination megaphone/vacuum cleaner, your goal is to steal the words out of people’s mouths, delivering them to where they’re needed to solve puzzles. Sometimes, that means helping a cowardly character confess his love to his crush; other times, it means tricking a guard into taking a day off in their boss’s voice. Its tone is over-the-top wacky, so much so that I can’t believe it works, all while packing in grotesque puppet shows and surprisingly sweet themes centering on the power of words.

6. Dread Delusion

After two years in Steam Early Access, Dread Delusion launched in full this year, receiving its final content update a few months later. Inspired by Morrowind and King’s Field, Dread Delusion is a surreal first-person RPG where flying squids, god-slaying cultists, and things much stranger still live under a blood-red sky. The world they all inhabit is one of the most captivating in any game this year, and walking in practically any direction at any time will yield something surprising and gorgeous in a crunchy, old-school way.

5. Sudden Death

Subtitled “Romantic Sports Fiction,” Sudden Death is a linear visual novel you can finish in about an hour. Packed into that time is a sweet gut-punch of a story about an Australian football team trying to claw its way to the finals after years of being a laughingstock. Even if you’re as uninterested in sports as I am, the fantastic writing and dazzling visual style — complete with crunchy video footage and a great soundtrack — stand a good chance of winning you over.

4. Times & Galaxy

Despite having a cast of aliens and robots living aboard a spaceship, Times & Galaxy might be the most accurate journalism simulator ever made. Players take on the role of an unpaid intern at its titular newspaper, hunting for scoops in pursuit of that all-important resume padding. To succeed, you need to interview subjects on the scene of breaking stories, then assemble a story that gets the most readers interested while still being reasonably truthful. It’s a charming, funny game that hits close enough to home to be a little painful if you’re a journalist yourself.

3. Psychroma

Cyberpunk ghost story Psychroma takes place within the walls of one house, jumping from past to present to reveal the lives of its inhabitants. This point-and-click horror adventure puts an emphasis not on solving its puzzles but in piecing together the mystery of its disorienting, unsettling, and deeply moving story about memory and selfhood.

2. Witching Stone

I’ve written before about my obsession with Witching Stone, but at the end of the year, it’s the game I’ve returned to more than any other thanks to its captivating central mechanic. Witching Stone infuses the roguelike deck-building structure with Match-3-inspired gameplay, outfitting characters with spells that are cast by connecting colored gems in the right sequence. Add a lovely retro anime art style and a catchy soundtrack, and it’s one of 2024’s hardest-to-put-down games.

1. Lovely Lady RPG

Lovely Lady RPG may borrow heavily from Disco Elysium, but it’s really like nothing else out there. It stars a depressed transgender rat (me too, girl) who wakes up with an orb from outer space embedded in her chest and little to no memory of her pre-orb life, and her main motivation is just to figure out who she is while meandering through the next week. Lovely Lady RPG comes with a hefty stack of content warnings that you shouldn’t ignore, but it’s a hilarious game despite its darkness, and it’s proudly queer as hell.