From Death’s Door to Inscryption, here are the top indie games that you shouldn’t miss from 2021.
The most intriguing games in any given year are rarely the ones with the biggest advertising budgets. While big-budget titles like Deathloop and Halo Infinite have dominated gaming discourse this year, they aren’t necessarily the games that will push the industry forward. Innovation largely comes from indie developers, who have more space to take risks that you won’t find in a bankable series like Ratchet & Clank. This year, developers once again proved why the independent scene can’t be ignored. If you only played the hits this year, you missed out on some truly groundbreaking titles that reimagined what gaming can accomplish as a medium. From soon-to-be cult hits like Inscryption to industry-moving accessibility efforts like The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, here are the best indie games we played in 2021. The less you know about Inscryption, the better. On its surface, it’s a roguelike card game where players need to sacrifice woodland creatures to play bigger, stronger cards. But that barely begins to describe one of the most subversive games I’ve ever played in my life. Inscryption is full of mechanical twists and turns that continually change the way players use their cards. Its narrative is best kept secret, but it’s a sincere love letter to the lineage of digital card games and the culture around them. When it comes to surprises, Inscryption is an unforgettable experience on par with the original Portal. Before Your Eyes is a game you don’t play with a controller. Instead, it hooks up to a webcam and is solely controlled through your blinks. It isn’t just a random control scheme for the sake of doing something different. The game follows a character at the end of their life, watching their memories play back. When the player blinks, it skips through a memory. That makes the entire game a clever adaptation of the phrase “blink and you miss it.” It’s a short tearjerker that throws the established rules of gaming out the window to tell a story that only works with this level of interactivity. Developers are getting better about adding accessibility features to games, but The Vale: Shadow of the Crown goes one step further. Its an audio game with no graphics at all, making it fully playable for blind gamers.
