Welcome to the Indie Appreciation Thread!

If there's something indie-related that you consider worth mentioning, but not relevant enough to warrant its own thread, feel free to discuss it here.

Otherwise, if you want to know what this is about, or what the text format (in the Platforms section) and the abbreviations (in the Genre section) mean, just take a look at the introduction thread.

And that's all. Have fun!

2021 Indie Highlights

Previous Months

July

August

Disco Elysium, Little Nightmares II, Subnautica: Below Zero,.... games that dont feel like they came from indie teams lol.

Disco Elysium is 100% worth a play.

Thanks for pointing that out! I have a quite relaxed criteria (so to speak) when I'm deciding if I should include a game or not, so there are games that are not exactly indies and I include them because either they or the companies making them are small enough or not known enough (which is not the case with the ones you mentioned lol).

But I'm open to suggestions and have no problems taking games off the list. Why do you think those you mentioned don't fit here?

Maybe they do fit :)  (have no idea about studios behinde them, or costs of developement or team sizes) (cba to go look things up)

I just think those games stand out, from the others.
Ei. their better, and have done better (I assume, in terms of sales), simply because their quality is very high.

Disco Elysium is fantastic.

Interesting thread. I find a lot of indie gems slip through the cracks. One of the reasons is some of them have a niche appeal.

I do a quick search when I have doubts about it, but sometimes there's not much information or I'm in the fence about including a certain game or not, so I can't guarantee that all the games are 100% good fits here, and that's why I appreciate feedback.

And it's very true that those games stand out over the rest. I have kind of a non-written rule regarding that: if a game has become a saga or a franchise, I only include up to the second installment, but no more than that, because I assume that by that point they're too well-known. So if there's ever a Little Nightmares III or one more follow-up to Subnautica, I'll more than probably leave those out.

Oh, and I just wishlisted Disco Elysium.

Thanks! That's exactly the purpose of this: giving visibility both to very good indie games that deserve its own spotlight and to potential gems that could go easily under the radar because of the lack of marketing, or being too niche or any other reason. There are lots of games that simply go unnoticed.

Thanks for starting these posts. I love indies so this is right up my alley. I noticed that you've been doing these since March but somehow I've missed the previous ones. I might recommend bumping the threads at the end of each month, since the data is pretty sparse at the beginning when you first create it.

As for the indies, I noticed that you didn't have The House in Fata Morgana listed for April, which surprises me because it has a whopping 98 metacritic score on Switch (it's only platform so far), and I'm pretty sure it's an indie developer. I've never played it and it's a very niche genre (visual novel) but that score is pretty eye-popping!

Actually, I was thinking on keeping this thread as the only one from now on and just keep updating it each month until the end of the year, and then do a new one for the whole 2022. The idea is to update the OP with just the highlights of the month, instead of making a full table with all the announced games from the get go like I used to do in the other threads (that's why there are so few games right now in this one). Then, the final day of each month I could post the complete table with all the games released that month (bumping the thread in the process, as you say) and make a shortcut to that post, so that it's easily accesible.

My full raw list (without fancy tables) of games scheduled for July as of now is this, by the way:

Didn't know about The House in Fata Morgana, that score is indeed impressive! I'll make sure I check it out tomorrow and add it to the list. Thanks for sharing that info, it's pretty nice.

OP updated with the first highlights of this month, which will be sharing the spotlight with the highlights of July until September. The full list of July releases is included in this post, and I will short-cut it for quick access, so that this information can be checked even when it's no longer in the OP. Also, since I actually changed the format of this thread from a series of them to a long-running one, I'm going to include in this post a link to the previous ones, so that those games don't get totally lost and are as easily accessible as all the others.

But before that, a quick overview: there's been a total of 277 releases as of July 31, of which 68 have a minimum score of 75 in Metacritic. As for August, indies seem to like this month, because it starts with a lot of releases (41); more than any other previous month at the same point, more than the whole months of January, April and July, and almost the same amount than the whole months of February and June. The full raw list is the following:

January-March releases

April releases

May releases

June releases

July highlights

Other July releases

Currently playing Blaster Master Zero 3. Great game so far! Previous two were awesome too!