What are the best Indie/Low budget games to ever be released?

Gonna throw it down for Fez, Limbo, Undertale, and Bastion this round

I'm amazed that nobody's mentioned them yet but: Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld. All indie, all playable on low-end hardware, all extremely great.

Y'all seem to have most of the bases covered already, so I'm just gonna throw out some of my faves I don't already see represented.

Oxenfree has the sharpest, most naturalistic conversation system of any game I've ever played. Like it's good enough to carry the whole game without much else mechanics wise.

Lucas Pope's Papers Please definitely deserves some props for making a deep and engaging story out of nothing but stuffing you in a box with a bunch of paperwork and threatening to kill you imaginary family.

Return of the Obra Din , also from Lucas Pope, is the best detective game I've ever played, and tells a gripping and effective story with less dev resources than get put into rendering Master Chef's shiny left bollock.

Braid even all these years later is still as sublimely beautiful and clever as it was when it came out.

Frog Fractions, Risk of Rain, I really want to say Magicka despite it being picked up by Paradox in the last ~year of its development

There's a zillion high-quality mods you could feasibly call "low-budget games" like OG Team Fortress, DotA, stuff like that.

The LISA series of RPGs, just for being... out there

Undertale

Would hades count

Hollow knight is absolutely wonderful

Gonna have to go with FTL since it may be my all time favorite game in general.

Hotline Miami

good post, man i love me some indie games, here are some favs.

OFF, bastion, hollow knight, RiME, celeste,

Note: the majority of video games released in recorded history have been indie and/or low budget.

Trying to avoid repeating recs, how about Shelter, a game where you're a momma badger trying to protect and feed your babies, and Glitchhikers about driving on the highway at night and listening to the radio.

Limbo, World of Goo

Magical Diary: Horse Hall and Magical Diary: Wolf Hall are cute visual novels that I have a soft spot for. The basic setting is that you go to a university for magic, the circumstances of how you got there depend on the game though. In Horse Hall the main character is a girl and in Wolf Hall the main character is a boy. There are multiple queer romance paths in each. While the romance portion is a big part of both games, there are magical puzzles which act as your tests and some mysteries to explore around the school. Definitely won't appeal to everyone but I really liked both. ::: spoiler Content warning from the Wolf Hall steam page (applies to both games): Very brief mention of alcohol laws. Some discussion of past sexual assault. Some depiction of unhealthy relationship dynamics and non-graphic violence which can be upsetting. ::: .

If you like political simulator/strategy type games, then pretty much anything from Kremlingames. Crisis in the Kremlin lets you play as the USSR in the mid 80's in which you can persue FALGSC, turn the whole world red, or fuck it all up like Gorby did. Most of my experience is with this one, so I can't really speak for the other ones too well but there are some guides to give you an understanding of what does what. It's a bit hard to learn at first and the translations can be rough at times. With the DLC you can play as the leader of the RSFSR, trying to maintain socialism while the union collapses. Their other games are China: Mao's Legacy which lets you play as the PRC from 1976, and Ostalgie: The Berlin Wall in which you can play as most or all of the other members of the Warsaw Pact plus Cuba and the DPRK. Some of those countries may require DLC. If you aren't pirating, these games usually go for only a few US dollars when they're on sale.

Cave story

Stardew Valley and Hollow Knight are both mind-bogglingly good, and they were made by ONE and THREE people respectively

Hyper Light Drifter is one of my favorites from the last five years. Insanely fun slasher with cool upgrades, a beautiful world/atmosphere, and a great soundtrack. It's just challenging enough that you have to develop some skill but it rewards practice.

Westerado is very cheap and not that long. Don't google anything and its tons of fun.

into the breach from the makers of ftl. very chill tactical puzzle combat with a ton of variety.

Skullgirls is still GOAT. Darkest Dungeon is amazing in both presentation and gameplay. Noita may be one of my favorite of the ubiquitous “indie roguelite” genre.

Have to agree with others here - LISA and Undertale are also excellent for very different reasons.

Not sure where the cutoff for indie is, but I'm gonna keep giving shout outs to just about the best-crafted game ever made, Invisible Inc. Turn-based stealth game with an incredibly well-tuned risk-reward curve that really emphasises getting into crazy shitshow situations and somehow getting your way out of them with ridiculous hail marys (though not always). The DLC for the extended campaign is well worth it too. Also the best character is a Cuban revolutionary called Internationale. Seriously, get this game, it is the absolute best. I'm gonna keep recommending this in every one of these threads where it vaguely fits, try and stop me.

Frostpunk is a city-builder focused on hanging onto survival by the skin of your teeth in a freezing wasteland where everything just keeps getting worse. It's pretty damn grim and it's not easy, so not a good one if you want to relax, but it's really well made. PS not all the DLC is very good, but the Last Autumn is super well-made, and you can build union power and abolish class distinctions and shit, it's pretty great.

All the Zachtronics games - I think this is pretty much just the one guy making all of these(?). Spacechem, Shenzhen I/O, Exapunks are probably the ones I would recommend most, but Infinifactory, TIS100, and Opus Magnum are all great too. They're fairly open-ended fake-chemistry/engineering/programming puzzle games that ramp up to be really tough and complex and they really fucking hurt your brain, but they're so satisfying when you finally solve them and watch the machine at work.

I'm kinda obsessed with Oxygen Not Included at the moment - it's kinda a halfway house between Dwarf Fortress and Factorio, and the cutesy graphics conceal that it's crazy complex once you start getting into it.

I realise that these are all hard as shit, so definitely also Stardew Valley for something substantially more relaxing.

The When They Cry series, Celeste, Superhot, Undertale, Long Live the Queen, Papers Please,

Spelunky is a perfect game imo, 2 only adds more to it. Simply amazing.

Umurangi Generation, my personal 2020 Goty.

Pretty lo-fi photography game set in dystopian future New Zealand occupied by UN security forces for [REDACTED] reasons. You play as a local newspaper photo punk (hanging out with their teen friends and penguin), taking shots of various things for contract. Gameplay is mostly about moving around the to find the best shot, and playing with all the various photo sliders you unlock as you progress.

Given the whole lockdown, protests and all the righteous anger at the system vibes we got worldwide last year, the whole thing feels very timely in a good way (and with the developer saying the vibe is very much inspired by his experience in 2020 Australian Bush Fire, shits intentional). Got a bunch or article written about it for the Maori perspective/representation and it deserves it honestly (even if it didn't get much traction outside of there)