We all love our usual AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, FIFA, Call of Duty, and Assassin’s Creed franchise but sometimes all you want to play is something different from the everyday formulae that the big companies push you to buy each year.
These indie games are unique, run pretty much on any system and leave behind a memorable experience that you are bound to remember for a long long time. So here are few of the indie games I have played over the years which left their mark.
1. Papers Please
PC | MAC | PS4 | IOS
Gamespot Rating: 8/10
Paper Please puts you in the shoes of border patrol agent at an impoverished communist nation in the early 80s. Just like any visa embassy you get to take the duty of checking passports of people trying to cross the border, where your job is to try to find spies and terrorists with forged documents who wish to enter the country to cause mayhem. As the game goes on, country’s policies and rule change and you must always remember all them to try to process applicants quickly.
If you fail; line outside the checkpoint gets longer and people start to riot with events leading up to you having to shoot trespassers. To add spice to your job, a game often times throws emotional dilemmas your way where you may be deciding the fate of families that too keeping your work and processing time in mind. Make 2 mistakes and you get to answer to your supervisor along with the loss of your pay which you need to survive in this game. You have rent to pay and food to buy for you and your family to eat, all of which is only possible if you are processing applicants and avoiding any consequences of poor judgment. Earning less will often time force you to get bribes from people just so you and your family does not starve for a day.
Each decision you make changes the overall experience of the game as the game has 20 different endings all of which depends on how fast you were able to process applicants and which ones you let through and which ones you sent home.
Image Source – Game Grumps Wikia
2. Super Meat Boy
X360 | MAC | PC | PS4 | VITA | WIIU
Gamespot Rating: 9.5/10
Anyone who has played Mario or any other side scroller would jump right into this game but as a jump is the only thing you will be doing; this game will punish you at every ill-timed jump. Blades, spikes and buzz saws will always be ready to kill you in a blink.
This game is your dark souls of side-scrollers, as you will be dying more times than you can count and may end up with a broken controller or two before you finally manage to beat it. So, grab your friends and challenge them to do this insane test of nerves that can ever be put in a game.
Image Source – Gamer Assault Weekly
3. The Stanley Parable
PC | MAC
Gamespot Rating: 9/10
Imagine that right now a voice from behind you says, “The boy sits there reading a gaming article”. You look back to see who’s there and the voice says “he looks back in horror but finds nothing there” and then the voice goes on to narrate everything you do in your life to every step you take before you have taken it.
Do you continue to live a life as the voice narrates or do you fight back and do the exact opposite?
In the Stanley Parable, you are an everyday office worker working on a computer taking orders on a monitor till one day the monitor goes blank and you are left free to do anything you want. Everyone in the office has vanished and all you have is the terrible yet funny and intriguing voice to guide you to the way out. As you continue to disobey the narrative, the voice gets frustrated and also tries to trick you by saying the wrong things just to try to get you to go to the wrong way. If you stand at any place or look at anything for a while, the voice wastes no time in giving out a quirky remark which is bound to bring a smile on your face as you experience this one of a kind narrative-based gameplay.
How you choose to play this game is up to you. Throw yourself out of the window in the first 5 minutes or go for the longer 4-hour ending or try to find rest of the 10 possible endings you can to beat this game. No matter which path you take, you will always come back to the beginning for more and start everything all over again.
Image Source – YouTube
4. Limbo
MAC | X360 | PS3 | PC | VITA | XONE | PS4
Gamespot Rating: 8/10
Another instant classic side-scroller which will have you biting your nails and scratching your head as the game throws scary enemies at this helpless small boy. Limbo is a puzzle game where you must try to solve every obstacle before the game lets you advance further in the level or get past an enemy.
The first time you manage to beat the spider is when you will realize how much you love this game so you will pull up your sleeves and put on your thinking cap and get ready for whatever the game throws at you but to your surprise the game will change the rules so rapidly at every stage that you will almost always certainly get caught off guard and get stabbed, drowned, decapitated or trampled to death. Get all your smart friends and bet them to beat your completion time of this game.
5. Inside
XONE | PC | PS4 | MAC
Gamespot Rating: 8/10
Building on the critically acclaimed success of Limbo; Inside improves greatly upon the in-depth sound design and environment of the game. Leaving behind the black and white texture to adapt to more detailed levels where enemies now not only try to get you from the right or left but now will try to kill you from any edges of the screen. Dogs chasing you from afar while you hang on your life by the thread trying to break through the door or trying to save your life or the heart-pounding post-apocalyptic nuclear shockwave that tears everything in its path forcing you to run and cover. Puzzles in inside feel equally rewarding as you finally get past it after several minutes of thinking and dozens of deaths later. As you finally get to the end; the story will start to pull you in and the ending will leave you in awe as the thought and the idea of the game finally hits you.
6. This War of Mine
PC | MAC| IOS | PS4| XONE
Gamespot Rating: 8/10
If games could win Oscars, this game would be leading from the front as not does this game has you question your morals but by the end, it is sure to leave you depressed. This War of Mine is set in a city currently in a state of war where you are left doing anything and everything you can to stay alive for just 1 more day.
Every day you will have to worry about scavenging food to eat, ammo to gather and guns to find so you can protect yourself against invaders or to go raiding for first aid supplies; none of which will be coming easy. The game will present you with emotional dilemmas in which neither of the choices would be a win-win situation. Rob the old couple next door for their medicines to save your friend or try to raid a hospital?
As the game progresses and you start to do well for your house, you will have to worry about the broken walls where bandits will try to break into your house and steal your food, ammo, and medicine leaving your team members depressed. Rob and kill other people and your teammates may run away or kill themselves not being able to live with the fact that they had to murder someone to save themselves. This game will be an intense experience as you try to wait for the war to end and fight each day to save and ration your ever-dwindling supplies and mental state.
Have you played any of these games? How was your experience? Let’s talk about these, or any other indie games, below.
