9 Weirdest Indie Games You Can Actually Play Right Now

Every so often a game arrives with no marketing department behind it, no focus group, and no adult in the room asking whether the idea is sensible. Those are the ones we collect. The nine below are all real, all still purchasable, and all made by teams small enough to fit in a lift.

We have sorted them roughly by how difficult they are to explain to a relative. Let’s kick things off with the easy end.

1. Untitled Goose Game

You are a horrible goose. There is a village. You have a to-do list, and every item on it involves ruining someone’s morning. That is the entire pitch, and House House, a tiny Melbourne studio, turned it into one of 2019’s biggest surprises by understanding something the rest of the industry missed. Everybody wants to be the goose. Nobody wants to fight the goose. The honking is mapped to its own button, which is the single best design decision of the decade.

2. Goat Simulator

Coffee Stain built this as a game-jam joke in 2014 and then shipped it more or less unrepaired, because the bugs were the best part. Your goat has a prehensile tongue, ragdoll physics with strong opinions, and the ability to launch itself through a petrol station. The studio explicitly asked players not to expect a functioning product. Then it sold in the millions and funded a company that later made Satisfactory, which is the most Swedish success story we know.

3. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

A man sits in a cauldron. He has a sledgehammer. You must climb a mountain of garbage using only the hammer, and one slip returns you to the bottom, erasing an hour of progress in four seconds. Foddy narrates your failures personally with philosophy quotes, which lands somewhere between comforting and cruel. Released in 2017, it invented an entire genre of streamers quietly losing their composure on camera. It costs about eight dollars and will cost you considerably more in dignity.

4. Baba Is You

Here the rules of the level are physical blocks sitting inside the level, and you can push them around. Shove the word WIN next to the word ROCK and now touching a rock wins. Break the sentence BABA IS YOU and you stop existing, which is a puzzle mechanic and also a small existential crisis. Finnish developer Arvi Teikari built the prototype for a game jam in 2017 and released the full version in 2019. It is the smartest puzzle game of its generation and it will make you feel like a golden retriever.

5. Everything

David OReilly’s 2017 release lets you be anything in the universe. A deer, a shipping container, a continent, a hydrogen atom, a thought. Animals rotate rigidly as they walk instead of using proper animation, which OReilly kept deliberately, and it is somehow the funniest thing in the game. Alan Watts lectures play over the top. It also qualified for an Academy Award after screening as a short film, making it one of very few video games ever eligible for an Oscar.

6. Placid Plastic Duck Simulator

Ducks float in a pool. New ducks arrive occasionally. There are no goals, no failure state and no reason for this to have worked. It sold extremely well anyway, spawned a small merchandise industry, and gets recommended in earnest by people who play difficult games for a living. Sometimes the market simply wants ducks.

7. Frog Fractions

The 2012 browser original presents itself as a dismal educational game about a frog eating insects, and then, if you swim downward far enough, it stops being that. What it becomes is best discovered without warning, so we will say only that the transformation involves a courtroom, and that a sequel was later hidden inside an entirely different game sold on Steam as a real product. It remains free to play in a browser. Go in blind.

8. Viscera Cleanup Detail

You are the janitor who arrives after the science-fiction massacre. Everyone else got the shooting sequences. You get a mop, a bucket, and a laser scanner for logging biological debris, and you must file a report at the end that grades your thoroughness. The genius is that cleaning is genuinely satisfying and the mop sloshes everywhere, which means most players make the mess considerably worse before they make it better.

9. Cruelty Squad

The hardest sell on this list. It is a first-person shooter whose visual style has been described by its own community as an assault, all clashing textures and colours that appear to have been chosen by a random number generator with a grudge. Underneath the deliberate ugliness sits a genuinely sharp immersive sim about corporate assassination. Play it for twenty minutes and you will either bounce off it entirely or think about it for a year.

Where to Start

If you want one, take the goose. If you want the one that stays with you, take Baba Is You. And if you have a friend who claims games are all the same now, sit them in front of the man in the cauldron and leave the room. Most of these sit under twenty dollars, several go on sale regularly, and the freeware end of the spectrum lives on itch.io, where the truly strange things are kept.