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When it comes to indie categories, GOTY season starts getting complicated

Image: Pengonauts/Joystick Ventures

Pop quiz: What’s an indie game? This isn’t meant to be a trick question. As GOTY season starts ramping up, award considerations require wading into semantics as critics try their best to categorize games in the right place. And while it would be easy to point to the obvious answer, which lies in the name — independent games — the designation has never been more confusing.

On paper, games like Hades 2 and Megabonk are both indie games. But practically, these games aren’t even in the same stratosphere. Forget the early access of it all. One title hails from a critically acclaimed studio that is making a sequel to a genre-defining game. The other comes from a lone developer handling most aspects of the game, from promo to design. One of these games was assured funding, coverage, and visible placement on storefronts from the moment of its conception. The other gained visibility through the sheer strength of word of mouth.

Neither Supergiant Games nor Vedinad is owned by a publisher, but are these games truly on the same footing?

The Game Awards attempt to address this conundrum by offering two separate categories, Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game. Per its own description, TGA considers any game indie if it has a “higher degree of risk tolerance by its creators, produced outside the traditional publisher system.”

In a perfect world, the first part of that description would solve the issue at heart here. But by its nature, an award based on voting requires consensus. Many judges will likely realize this and vote accordingly. The question then becomes whether it is worth nominating an indie game if there’s no chance it will place. Inevitably, some people will make concessions and suggest nominees that other judges are likely to have played. But if everyone has heard of the game, how indie is it, really?

Below, you’ll find some of 2025’s most offbeat games, made by creators who push boundaries or break through despite a lack of conventional resources. Maybe a few of these will end up somewhere on the TGA ballot, corralled into specific genres despite being good enough for wider GOTY consideration. Some of these indies might have a tough time finding recognition in any category. You’ll find them on personal GOTY lists, lovingly placed after someone decided it wasn’t worth trying to convince anyone else that this game, right here, helped define their entire year.

And Roger

Here’s a game that does a lot in a single hour, but it’s that very quality that might prevent it from serious consideration in major categories. And Roger is a narrative adventure game about an older couple, one of whom has dementia. It’s inherently a tough topic, but the brilliance of how the game handles dementia lies in And Roger’s marriage of form and message.

The things you need to do in this game are simple. But the buttons you need to press to perform those tasks are a mystery to the player, unless they memorize the actions in the right sequence. And Roger is a frustrating experience, but that’s the point. A gut-punch of a game that might remind people a bit of 2020’s Florence.

Nubby’s Number Factory

Will an ugly game ever be capable of winning GOTY? Based on previous nominees, I’m skeptical. But many of the true indie games waiting to be played out there don’t have the resources to waste production on some vague notion of “polish.” Nubby’s Number Factory looks like a school project from the ’90s that was put together by a UI terrorist. We’re talking Comic Sans plastered on images put together in MS Paint.

But behind that intentional aesthetic is a crunchy game that’s one part pachinko and two parts make number BIG. You’re going to pop some pegs, and you’re going to love it. Nubby’s is an idealized embodiment of the internet many of us mourn, before it got murdered by uniformity and enshittification.

Eclipsium

How experimental can a GOTY contender truly be? Has an indie game that defied categorization ever managed to win the hearts of TGA judges? Eclipsium is an artsy horror game — already a genre widely treated as niche — where most of what you do is walk and observe. Meaning, half the discussion about Eclipsium will be annoying discourse about whether it truly qualifies as a game at all, and if that game is worth paying for. But Eclipsium and its surreal imagery are worth experiencing, if only to get a taste of what it might feel like to explore the depths of the dark web.

Öoo

Here is a game that looks like it came out of Newgrounds, which sounds like a put-down until you consider that Newgrounds is a cultural institution that absolutely ripped. Öoo is one of those games with a simple premise pushed to its absolute limit, designed in a way that will make the player feel like a genius. Your goal is to blow things up. To that end, the game wastes no time using any words or offering direction to the player. But this simple concept reaches incredible heights when you throw in hidden paths and hundreds of different ways to interact with your explosives.

Arguably this is a more conventional pick than others on this list, yet there’s a humble competency here that leaves players feeling satisfied in a way that an 80-hour content-driven RPG never can. That same lack of splashiness, though, might prevent Öoo from getting the recognition it deserves.

Kaizen: A Factory Story

The pedigree of a studio like Zacktronics should arguably knock Kaizen from “true” indie considerations, but then again, we’re dealing with puzzle games. Not the most mainstream of video game genres, is it? The now-defunct developer had, at best, a cult following. They also broke up partially to avoid trapping themselves into repeatedly making a specific type of game. Kaizen: A Factory Story, then, is the result of that swerve.

The idea that Kaizen feels like the equivalent of forming a brain wrinkle in real time likely won’t surprise anyone familiar with the people who made the game. What truly sets Kaizen apart, though, is its subject: mass production, and what’s lost when many of the objects in our lives are born on conveyor belts. Most games wouldn’t touch a serious subject like this; even fewer would do so with Kaizen’s deft elegance.

StarVaders

There’s a word salad of buzzwords I could throw at you here that would immediately make StarVaders sound like a calculated game that arose from a vat: “A deckbuilding roguelike that’s like Into The Breach meets Space Invaders.” I could also tell you that this mech-driven game has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam, where its page is full of raving reviews. Yet I also feel compelled to point out that developers, Joystick Ventures, have a whopping 70 followers on YouTube, and StarVaders is their first game.

The announcement trailer for StarVaders has only been viewed 11,000 times, and the game surely has not gotten its roses in 2025. Making a roguelike in 2025 and managing to stand out amid such intense competition is no small thing. In a different timeline, there would be an annoyingly persistent contingent of fans online asking when this game is coming to Switch 2.

Kabuto Park

How small can a game be in order to be seriously considered for an award? I’m not even sure what genre you’d place Kabuto Park in. Steam unhelpfully labels the beetle-collecting experience a “casual game,” which makes it sound like Candy Crush or something. The best way I can describe this is: Take the feeling that summer had when you were a kid, when life always felt like it was full of possibility, and pepper it with a more grounded take on Pokémon. Like any good summer, *Kabuto Park *is over before you know it — which unfortunately also means few people will give it the accolades it deserves.

Look Outside

Will a horror game ever win GOTY? What about a game made in RPG Maker? It’s not impossible, but I’ll believe it when I see it. The premise: an eldritch survival horror game that takes place entirely in one apartment building. It’s got the offbeat heart of a game like Undertale, the unsettling tone of *Silent Hill 2, *and body-horror imagery worthy of John Carpenter.

Being published by Devolver Digital immediately makes Look Outside’s status as a *true *indie suspect, yes. It’s a game that’s undoubtedly caught eyes on places like YouTube, where playthroughs have been watched millions of times. But I’m willing to bet that Look Outside will be a rare sight on GOTY lists of any kind, at least where institutions are involved. It’s also worth knowing that Look Outside began as a game jam title and is primarily the product of a single guy. If that’s not indie, I don’t know what is.