There were horror adventures through strange and spooky mansions, bright-eyed environmental parables, narrative adventure puzzlers, and so much more. Playing through the best indie video games of 2025, we constantly found new and delightful challenges to indulge in and worlds to explore.
In a year of major upheaval, independently-created video games made a major impact. Even faced with an array of challenges, from publisher pullbacks to a lack of funding, small-to-medium teams across the world produced some of the most innovation, exciting and experimental video games of this year.
As we head into the new year, the ScreenHub team is rounding up all the best and most interesting video games we played this year, celebrating their achievements and the impact they had on our lives.
Here are our favourite indie video games of the year, and why we loved them.
Best indie video games of 2025 – quick links
Spilled!
Spilled! is an indie video game with a very important message: our oceans are important and we all need to do our best to keep them clean, for the good of everyone. This concept is delivered effortlessly in a minimalist adventure where you are tiny tugboat cleaning the ocean, one oil spill at a time.
You must monitor your garbage intake and ensure you dump your load when it gets too much, and the more you clean, the more you can upgrade your boat for added impact.
In a short runtime, Spilled! makes a big impression thanks to light and moreish gameplay that invites you to roam freely, cleaning as much as you can. The more you clean, the better the ocean starts to look until each and every part of your world glimmers with light and life. This game is a lovely, wholesome video game experience for anyone looking for a relaxing but impactful adventure.
The Drifter
The Drifter is a phenomenal point-and-click adventure game that delivers a well-paced sci-fi story riddled with wild, well-controlled twists. It’s also very beautiful, buoyed by a clean pixelised art style and sleek animation that adds drama and flair to each story beat.
Read: The Drifter review: a noir video games adventure that takes you ’round the twist
The Drifter is a game that constantly keeps you guessing. The plot that advances at a steady pace – while holding its biggest reveals for exactly the right moment. This game really is a staggering achievement for Aussie-based development team Powerhoof.
Blue Prince
Blue Prince is just excellent. In a year of great puzzle video games, it was a cut above the rest thanks to its many, many layers and how it leads players down rabbit holes.
You begin in a seemingly normal manor, but quickly discover rooms that seem to shift and change around you, with each housing its own array of head-scratching secrets, some of which will disappear when you blink.
In its mix of mechanics and ever-shifting gameplay, Blue Prince is a fantastic, novel experience that feels so different from everything else. While it combines elements from many video games, including virtual escape rooms, there’s nothing expected or typical about how this adventure plays out.
Expelled!
Expelled! is a point-and-click mystery game where you slowly uncover the heart of a major conundrum. You play as Verity Amersham, a young girl who’s accused of pushing a fellow student out of a school window. But did she really do the deed? And if she didn’t, how do you prove her innocence?
What follows in this narrative puzzler is a sharply-paced quest to get justice, as various pieces of the story come to light. While you may end up expelled as you travel through the plot, time-looping mechanics allow you to try again and again to escape punishment, until the full picture becomes clear in wildly satisfying fashion. If you love puzzle video games, you’ll relish Expelled!.
The Horror at Highrook
The Horror at Highrook is a supernatural horror adventure that takes the ‘haunted mansion’ trope, and transforms it with unique card play mechanics. While there’s plenty of familiar tropes here, what’s so compelling about this game is how it allows you to explore and investigate them.
You’re corralling a team of detectives, entering a haunted mansion to solve its core mysteries, with the twist being that you control all of their actions, locations, and needs by placing cards onto a board game-like map. Placing certain cards and heroes together will unlock new clues to solving the central mystery, until you’re facing off against ghosts, ghoulies and other monsters in a bold endgame.
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping is a cosy detective adventure game that’s very short and sweet. You play as the titular Duck Detective, returning from his first adventure (The Secret Salami) to reluctantly solve a brand new case. What he really wants is a relaxing time on holiday but as The Ghost of Glamping opens, what The Duck Detective really gets is a light-hearted ghost mystery.
You roam this game looking for clues about the presence of a campsite ghost, uncovering all sorts of secrets along the way, including hidden relationships and crushes, and why one of the camp counsellors won’t stop sweating. With well-design deduction (‘deducktion’) and logic-based reason defining this adventure, it’s a quacking good time.
Promise Mascot Agency
Promise Mascot Agency is a collection of very cool, very bizarre ideas that all work together in seamless fashion. For one thing, this game is a narrative adventure about a mafia enforcer who’s exiled after being blamed for major financial mismanagement.
For another thing, it’s also a creature management game, where you must lead life-sized, sentient mascots through various trials and tribulations as they complete their jobs. It’s also an open world video game collect-a-thon where you must destroy garbage and exorcise spirits in a nature-filled overworld.
Read: My 3 best video games of 2025 – and 7 others that were amazing
Somehow, all of these parts work so well together, encouraging you to lock in and explore for hours and hours, romping through story, cleaning trash and looking after your menagerie of mascot creatures. Perhaps one of the weirdest video games on this list, Promise Mascot Agency is also one of the most endearing.
Is This Seat Taken?
Is This Seat Taken? is a game all about organisation. For those who rule themselves strictly, it’s an excellent smorgasbord of tiny challenges. From design to execution, the experience is very tight and precise. It’s the perfect length. The perfect level of challenge. And it doesn’t forget to be light-hearted and charming.
Read: Is This Seat Taken? video games review: a perfect puzzler for chronic organisers
This game succeeds on this simplicity, with a strong core idea that is well-realised in a minimalist art style, and siloed puzzles you can tackle at your own pace. It’s never too complex or meanly challenging, but provides an array of light-hearted and moreish challenges that are entirely endearing.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Hollow Knight: Silksong landed with aplomb this year, honouring its predecessor with bolder, more ambitious worlds and equally challenging, moreish gameplay. You’ll need a strong heart and quick hands to defeat every boss in this tale, but there’s nothing quite like the joy of victory in Silksong.
Like The Drifter, this is another brilliant Australian-made experience that made a significant impact on the world of video games in 2025.
It’s really got the works: it’s beautiful and well-designed, its combat is sharp and snappy, and its world is entirely enthralling. Hollow Knight: Silksong deserves all the praise it’s been given this year.
The Séance of Blake Manor
The Séance of Blake Manor, like Blue Prince, is all about entering a strange manor to uncover its mysteries. Here, you are a supernatural detective investigating the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Deane, who seems to have ties to the world of magic. You’re working against the clock to discover each and every clue to this sprawling mystery, and must make clever decisions about where to go, and which elements of the manor to explore in deeper fashion.
This exploration is wildly satisfying, particularly as you stumble across a clue that unravels more threads. All the while, you can enjoy the game’s lovely, dark atmosphere, complete with its cel-shaded, comic book-like art style and moody tunes.
