The Very Best Indie Games To Play This Summer

If you know someone who likes to complain that there isn’t anything original in video games, show them 1000xRESIST: a choice-based, time-shifting narrative RPG about time travel, survivor’s guilt, personal identity, and the moment in your life when you suddenly perceive your parents as people. It’s close to what I’d imagine would have happened if Yoko Taro had gotten really into Disco Elysium.

1000xRESIST has a shelf full of awards from the indie games circuit, received rave reviews, and we’ve talked about it before here on Kotaku. Even after all that, it’s still got a low enough profile to qualify as a cult favorite. When we start doing end-of-year wrap-ups, 1000xRESIST is a solid lock to be your favorite nerd’s favorite game.

The simple explanation of Arranger (available now on Steam, Epic, Switch, PlayStation, and Netflix) is that it’s a single big multi-stage sliding block puzzle. You don’t move your character; you move the world along one directional axis at a time. The challenge is to rearrange the map so you can move forward, whether that means moving obstacles, triggering switches, or rescuing a particularly troublesome cat.

As Jemma, an orphaned girl who’s finally been allowed to leave her isolated and isolationist village, you’re on the hunt for a place you can finally call your own. Jemma is a literal puzzle piece, and naturally, she wants to know where she fits. It’s all part of a story that’s occasionally a little too on the nose about the problems that arise when you’re afraid to change.

Arranger is a relatively short ride, but it’s clever, and there are a few optional challenges that’ll keep you busy for a while. If you’re strictly in it for the story, you can turn on a couple of different assisted modes, including one that disables most of the puzzles.

It’s easy to draw a straight line between last year’s Amnesia: The Bunker and Conscript (available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Steam, GOG, and EGS). Both are horror games, and both are set on the Western Front in France during World War I. The difference is that in Conscript, just being a soldier on the ground during World War I is considered horrific enough.

You play as a young French draftee in 1915 Verdun who only wants to get himself and his brother home in one piece. Unfortunately, you’re caught between the Germans and the maniacs in your own command element, who think nothing of ordering you into certain death. After a lost battle, you end up alone behind what’s now the German lines, and must find your way back through the trenches.

Conscript uses a lot of the mechanics and touchstones of classic survival horror, including some truly awkward combat, but doesn’t have any of the science fiction or horror elements that usually characterize the genre. You aren’t up against zombies or mutants in Conscript. It’s just other people, who are all a lot like you. That’s most of what makes it a horror story.

On the other end of a spectrum from Conscript, maybe you just want to shoot some fools without an attached moral dilemma. Exophobia (now available digitally for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, with physical versions coming later in August) is a pixel-art throwback shooter where you pop aliens like they’re bags of jam.

You’re the lone survivor after your starship crashes on an uncharted planet. What’s left of the ship is a maze of wrecked machines, lethal traps, hostile aliens, and mutated experiments, while all you’ve got is a salvaged plasma gun.

Exophobia bills itself as a Metroidvania, but has more in common with boomer shooters and immersive sims, as well as roguelikes’ cheerful acceptance of your imminent death. Imagine a Doom game with an open map like System Shock 2’s, without any signposts or hints to speak of and the difficulty turned all the way up, and you’re close to the Exophobia experience. It’s a quick burst of frustrated adrenaline for anyone who wants a challenging shoot-’em-up.

Somewhere along the line, somebody coined the phrase “cozy Soulslike,” which I would have called an oxymoron. Nobody actually asked me, though, so people have been running with it.

The Sacred Acorn is one of a handful of recent games (see also Whitethorn’s Slime Heroes, and arguably Another Crab’s Treasure) that mix the trademark Soulslike difficulty curve with slightly less relentlessly depressing themes. Granted, I’ve been to funerals that are more upbeat than the stereotypical Soulslike’s lore, but work with me here.

In The Sacred Acorn, a village of squirrels comes under attack when one of its guardian spirits suddenly goes berserk. At the same time, you’re endowed with a suite of new powers that you barely understand. That makes it your job to fight the corruption that’s spreading through the wilderness, in an adventure that comes off like a Legend of Zelda game as drawn by Maurice Sendak. It’s colorful, charming, and undeniably difficult, with bosses that give you no room for error.

In the world of SCHiM (available now for PC/console), everyone and everything has a weird little guy who lives in their shadow. You’re one of those “schims,” who’s been attached to your person since he was a kid. On what’s got to be the worst day of your person’s adult life, he accidentally severs his connection with you. Now you’ve got to find your way back to your person by traveling through every scrap of shade you can find.

SCHiM is a puzzle-platformer from a two-person team out of the Netherlands, with rotoscoped monochrome graphics and a simple central hook. If you can’t simply hop from one shadow to another, you can hop into an object’s shadow and take control of it to create your own opportunities.

All you’re really ever trying to do is get from point A to B, but there’s real charm and inventiveness to SCHiM that makes it an easy pick for a weekend’s entertainment.

It’s easy to compare this to Untitled Goose Game. Both share a publisher, the Portland-based Playdate manufacturer Panic, and both are about going into a cheerful country village and absolutely wrecking the place. In Thank Goodness You’re Here! (out Aug. 1 for Steam; Switch TBA), however, you’re actually trying to solve these villagers’ problems. Somehow invading the homes to break all their dishware is what they secretly needed all along.

As an inexplicably tiny office worker, you’ve been sent to the scenic village of Barnsworth for a sales meeting with its mayor. When he leaves you hanging in the meeting room, you wander outside and immediately get dragged into the villagers’ everyday problems.

TGYH is designed to look like one of the cheerfully gross comic strips from magazines like Viz or Mad. You play it by simply wandering around and punching the environment, which dents things, makes a mess, and often gets you in trouble. The graphics are pure Cartoon Network, but the humor is aimed at adults, and TGYH is never afraid to go for the gross-out.

Silver Lining Studio, the Taiwanese team behind The Star Named EOS, bills it as a “story-rich puzzle adventure,” which is accurate but vague. I’d describe it as a series of escape rooms, all of which are so comfortable that you won’t want to leave.

EOS puts you in the role of Dei, an aspiring photographer who’s following in his mother’s footsteps. As he retraces her travels across the world, he visits the places where she’s been and tries to recreate some of the photos she sent him over the years. To find everything you need to stage each scene, you’ll need to explore, solve puzzles, and figure out a few things Dei didn’t know about his mom.

EOS is cozy and leisurely paced, with every location created through the use of careful hand-drawn artwork. Everywhere Dei visits feels warm and inhabited, with a sense like you’re vicariously experiencing someone else’s nostalgia. If you’re looking for something to play with a cup of coffee in the morning, this would be perfect.

As Phoenix Wright is to murder mysteries and Pro Philosopher is to poking holes in moral frameworks, Vampire Therapist (out now for Steam) is to cognitive therapy.

Sam, an American vampire, has been looking for answers about the meaning of his existence since the old West. In 2024, Sam’s search brings him to Berlin to meet Andromachos, who’s been asking some of the same questions for 2,000 years. Between the two of them, they build a framework for applying modern psychiatric practices to the problems of their fellow vampires.

It’s both more and less silly than it sounds. Vampire Therapist is a visual novel with occasional minigames, but the core of its gameplay is in spotting and calling out the flaws in an argument. Your goal is to diagnose the issues of Sam’s vampire patients, like black-and-white thinking or buying into your own hype. It’s a dark comedy that’s equal parts horror, parody, and psychological detective story.

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