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Here's 842 Indie Games You Should Check Out - Or, Press Play Gaming's GOTY Coverage of 2025

2025 has been… a lot.

First up, some personal preamble. If you haven’t already read it, my piece on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and more goes into a fair bit of detail about the first half of this year for this solo blog writer. The second half has then continued to be a roller coaster.

Going back to my impossibly full on job without time to process effectively broke me. This resulted in close to 3 months off work, time I spent working through my own thoughts and feelings, disconnecting from most daily internet usage and reconfiguring the way I approach the idea of play. Now that the person I have spent my whole adult life caring for - with the past few years in particular marching through the grueling, horrific time that is a terminal cancer diagnosis - is gone, I’ve had to figure out who I even am anymore. Then, the last 2 months have been yet another roller coaster of vet and specialist appointments, long travel, scans, surgery and recovery for my baby cat who I love dearly, who was diagnosed with her own cancer. As is pretty clear by the sporadic posting here throughout 2025, writing about this hobby has taken a pretty considerable backseat.

That said, one thing that grounds me is pulling together a collection of all the cool indie games I come across throughout the year, here, on this site I call my own. There’s something about finding and sharing these incredible feats of digital artisanship that, for me, is worth putting in a stupid amount of time and effort at the end of each year, in the hopes that someone out there finds something that really speaks to them that they might not otherwise.

This year’s collection spans a ridiculous 842 games, from the worldwide most anticipated multi million seller made by a handful of Aussies, right down to the neat little experiences made by one person with not even a single review to their name. Dubious definitions of “indie” aside, these games all deserve attention and interest, with all of them having the potential to become someone’s favourite.

Though it isn’t the huge, exciting blowout that was last year’s coverage, I still want to equally highlight every one of these games. This list is presented with links and Steam page descriptions of all titles, broken down into categories for you to dig through. Categorization is quite loose, and as always games only fall into one even if they fit many. The list includes games from 1 December 2024 (as this was the end of last years coverage) up to 25 December 2025.

Feel free to bookmark this page to return to when you are ready, take some time to check out anything that sounds appealing to you, add some games to your wishlist, or even pick up a couple for the holidays. There are so many thoughtful, action packed, emotional, strategic, horrific, wonderful experiences just waiting to be discovered. I hope you enjoy.

If you’ve checked out any of the above categories and made it this far down - thank you. Thank you for sticking with me through what has undoubtedly been the hardest year of my life. In a lot of ways I wish I could have done more, but I do need to acknowledge that I just… couldn’t. I know this isn’t the greatest of lists, but I hope it’s still been fun to dig through nonetheless.

The future is always uncertain. Find that which brings you true joy and hold it tight. Happy holidays. See you in 2026.