I make games for a living and I spend probably more time playing them than I should. 2023 was the year that broke me. I kept putting my own projects down to finish "just one more run" of something a three-person studio made in a converted garage.
The most popular indie games 2023 produced weren’t just good games, they were embarrassingly good games. The kind that make you feel personally attacked as a developer because you know how hard it is to ship anything, let alone something that outsells AAA titles on Steam. If you’re curious about how developers actually stay motivated long enough to finish these things, I wrote about that too.
Here is my list of the most popular indie games in 2023
- 1. Sea of Stars
- 2. Cocoon
- 3. Blasphemous 2
- 4. Jusant
- 5. Dave the Diver
- 6. Cassette Beasts
- 7. Humanity
1. Sea of Stars
Sabotage Studio — the same Montreal indie studio behind The Messenger — dropped Sea of Stars in August 2023 and it immediately made me feel old in the best way. It’s a 16-bit JRPG that doesn’t waste your time. No random encounters that go nowhere, no grinding for twenty minutes so you can progress the story. Instead you get timed strikes, live mana, a parry mechanic, and a cast of characters I actually cared about by chapter two.
The thing I respect most is that Thierry Boulanger and his team understood exactly what made the classic Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG formula work, then stripped out everything that was just habit. The result is a game that feels familiar and completely modern at the same time. My only criticism is that I finished it and immediately had nothing to fill the hole it left.
Available on Windows, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
2. Cocoon
Jeppe Carlsen is the lead designer from Limbo and Inside, and Cocoon is his solo project under the Geometric Interactive banner. That pedigree alone put it on my radar, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this clever.
The conceit is that you carry worlds inside orbs, and those orbs can be nested inside each other. It sounds like a maths problem and somehow plays like poetry. There’s no dialogue, no tutorial text, just you and a beautifully alien environment that teaches you its rules through letting you fail at them. I got about halfway through before I had to put it down and walk around my flat for five minutes just to process what was happening.
Available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PS5.
3. Blasphemous 2
The Game Kitchen are a Seville-based studio and they make some of the most brutal, beautiful games in the Metroidvania space. Blasphemous 2 came out August 2023 and I'd argue it's the point where the sequel actually overtook the original.
The Penitent One now has three distinct weapons with their own traversal mechanics, which opens up exploration in a way the first game never managed. The world design is nastier, the boss fights are more precise, and somehow they've made the Catholic guilt aesthetic even more oppressive. That's an achievement in itself.
If you like Soulslike Metroidvanias and you haven't played this, I don't know what you're doing. Available on PC, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S.
4. Jusant
Don’t Nod are mostly known for Life is Strange, so Jusant was a genuinely surprising pivot. It’s a climbing game — that’s pretty much the whole pitch. You scale an impossibly tall tower, manage rope tension with both triggers, and piece together the story of the civilisation that lived there from environmental details and scattered letters.
It came out October 31, 2023, and it’s one of those games where the mechanics and the narrative reinforce each other so well that it almost feels accidental. The act of slowly climbing, reading, resting, climbing again — it’s meditative in a way that very few games manage to be without just being boring.
Available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
5. Dave the Diver
Mintrocket is a sub-studio of Nexon, which technically makes Dave the Diver a complicated conversation when people debate what counts as indie. I don’t care. It plays like an indie game, it’s priced like an indie game, and it has the kind of weird specific energy that only comes from a small team with a genuinely strange idea.
The loop is this: you dive in the morning, collect fish and manage a sushi restaurant at night. That’s it. Somehow that’s hundreds of hours of content. There’s a conspiracy plot buried in there too involving an underwater civilisation, and Mintrocket delivers it with the same chaotic confidence as everything else. The game hit a million copies in its first week, which tells you everything about how word of mouth works for a game that has its own personality. I’ve personally been burned by dodgy indie game purchases before, but Dave the Diver is one of those rare cases where the hype is completely deserved.
Available on PC and Nintendo Switch.
6. Cassette Beasts
Bytten Studio is a two-person team and Cassette Beasts is their answer to the question "what if the monster-taming genre actually tried something new." Released in April 2023, it arrived in a genre absolutely clogged with Pokémon knockoffs, and somehow managed to feel completely original.
The fusion mechanic is what does it. You can fuse any two monsters together mid-battle to create combinations the game's artist apparently had to design on the fly. The results range from genuinely useful to absolutely cursed. The soundtrack by Joel Baylis is also excellent, which almost no one mentions but absolutely should.
Available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One.
7. Humanity
Humanity is the one on this list that I find hardest to explain to people. Enhance and THA Limited released it on May 16, 2023, and it’s a puzzle game where you play as a glowing Shiba Inu directing swarms of humans. That sentence doesn’t make it sound like a philosophical statement on consciousness and collective behaviour, but that’s what it is.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi produced it, which should tell you something about the kind of experience you’re in for. It’s the kind of game that indie developers point to when they want to argue that the medium can do things nothing else can. I think they’re right.
Available on PC, PS4, and PS5. If you’re an indie dev yourself and this kind of creative ambition is what gets you out of bed, I write about that occasionally too — check out why I think indie devs should focus on their game first, marketing second.
Conclusion
The most popular indie games 2023 produced had one thing in common: a clear point of view. Sabotage Studio knew exactly what kind of JRPG they wanted to make. Geometric Interactive knew exactly what kind of puzzle experience Jeppe Carlsen had in his head. Dave the Diver knew it was a game about diving and sushi and somehow made that feel like the most natural thing in the world.
As someone building their own games, that specificity is the only lesson worth taking from 2023’s best releases.
