The Best Indie Games You Can Play on the PS5

Highlights

• Indie games bring unbridled creativity and innovation that larger studios often lack, providing a unique and captivating experience.
• The best indie games on the PS5 may lack the polish of AAA titles but make up for it with character, charm, and the freedom to try new ideas.
• From stunning visuals to immersive gameplay, indie games like Stray and Hades offer experiences that are able to rival their big-budget counterparts.

Thanks to their gargantuan marketing budgets and bleeding-edge graphics, AAA titles tend to enjoy the lion’s share of the limelight. However, every once in a while, an indie game comes out of nowhere and captivates its players in ways that their big-budget equivalents never could. The unbridled creativity that they bring is vital for the industry, particularly with so many of the larger studios having seemingly given up the ghost when it comes to innovation.

The best indie games on the PlayStation 5 find ways to make their budgets count, subsidizing any shortfalls with pure passion, endless determination, and sheer power of will. They may not boast quite as much polish as games like God of War and The Last of Us, but they do have an abundance of character and charm, not to mention the freedom to try out new ideas and the boldness to go against the grain when it contradicts their creators’ vision.

12 Spirit of the North: Enhanced Edition

Metacritic Rating: 64 (PS5)

Spirit of the North is a pretty unusual game. There’s no dialogue and very little in the way of narrative, yet the experience is still an incredibly enjoyable one, even with the sometimes frustrating controls. This is mostly down to the visuals and audio, which are at times able to envelop players in a genuine sense of wonder, providing a stunning and immersive experience that few other indie games could ever hope to match.

Players take control of a fox who is joined by the spirit of another fox following a rather nasty fall, and, together, they embark upon a journey to uncover the origin of a strange red cloud. It’s fairly linear and the chapters are pretty short, but the game more than makes up for this with its beautiful visuals and thought-provoking puzzles. It’s similar to Stray in a lot of ways, just with a more spiritual and introspective focus.

11 Outer Wilds

Metacritic Rating: 82 (PS4)

There have been plenty of great games that revolve around time loops over the years, but few make use of this concept quite as effectively as Outer Wilds. The BAFTA-winning title sees players exploring the 22 minutes leading up to a star going supernova over and over again in the hopes of uncovering the cause of this solar system-ending explosion.

Outer Wilds is a visually stunning game with some really cool ideas and mechanics and treats its players to an interesting and lore-rich narrative. It’s a fairly substantial one too, with most players needing around 27 hours to complete the main story and the Echoes of the Eye expansion. It’s easily one of the best PS5 indie games and a must-play for any serious sci-fi fan.

10 Among Us

Metacritic Rating: 85 (PC)

For a while, Among Us pretty much took over Twitch. All the big names seemed to be playing it, as too did hundreds of thousands of regular people all over the world. Its premise is an incredibly simple one, yet this imposter game managed to captivate countless people and kept them playing for far longer than a game of this scope had any right to, largely due to its fantastic social aspect.

Trying to figure out whether somebody is telling the truth can be surprisingly enjoyable, as too can attempting to shift the blame onto somebody else when playing as an imposter. The game took a little longer than some would have liked to arrive on next-gen consoles, with a lot of people moving on to other titles before it finally arrived. There are still plenty of people playing it though, and just as many reasons to check it out.

9 Sifu

Metacritic Rating: 81 (PS5)

Sifu can take a little bit of getting used to, but once things finally start to click, the experience on offer really is top-notch. It’s a highly stylized beat ’em up with roguelike mechanics: a combination that ends up working surprisingly well despite how challenging the game can be in certain places.

Every time they die, players come back just like they would in most other beat ’em-up games. However, upon doing so, they’ll find that the playable character has gotten a little older, granting access to stronger attacks but also decreasing their total health. If they grow too old, they’ll die for real and have to restart the level, making it important to master the game’s combat system rather than just diving in headfirst.

8 Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Metacritic Rating: 81 (PS5)

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a beautiful game. It’s so visually impressive, in fact, that one might be forgiven for thinking that this came out of an experienced AA studio or maybe even one of the smaller AAAs. Ember Lab is neither of these things, though the team is arguably just as talented when it comes to creating a vibrant world and bringing it to life with a likable protagonist and a solid mix of platforming and puzzle-solving fun.

The game has players controlling the titular character Kena: a young spirit guide with the power to help the spirits of the dead pass over to the other side. As players get to know her better, they’ll experience both sad and uplifting moments, which are both beautifully presented and incredibly well thought out. Kena‘s soundtrack deserves a special mention too, as it fits the setting perfectly in most places.

7 Moss

Metacritic Rating: 86 (PS5)

There’s something refreshing about Polyarc’s Moss games, as although they are technically first-person titles like most other VR games, the character that players will spend most of their time controlling is one who is observed from a third-person perspective. She’s also an incredibly cute one with wisdom and courage far greater than her small stature would suggest.

Guiding Quill through the many puzzles that stand in her way is an absolute joy and the games’ combat system is well-realized too. They’re not particularly challenging titles, but the quality of the storytelling more than makes up for this. It really can feel like playing through a fairytale at times, which is why so many remain hopeful that there’ll one day be a third installment in the series.

6 Cult of the Lamb

Metacritic Rating: 86 (PS5)

AAA studios have a habit of playing it safe; whether that means remaking or remastering older games instead of trying to come up with new ones or releasing the same game every year with minor cosmetic tweaks. The likes of Activision and Ubisoft would almost certainly never develop something like Cult of the Lamb: a game in which players must set up their own cult and sacrifice their followers to appease an ominous deity.

It sounds a little bizarre on paper, but in execution, it’s certifiably insane. Yet, despite how strange the whole thing ends up being, it turns out that the video game industry had been crying out for a cult simulator like Cult of the Lamb. The game also incorporates roguelike elements, which is the main way that players obtain new followers, but it’s the simulation aspects that are on offer that will draw most players in.

5 Disco Elysium: The Final Cut

Metacritic Rating: 89 (PS5)

Harrier Du Bois isn’t a very nice person, nor, on the surface, at least, does he come across as being a particularly competent detective. However, despite his many flaws, players will likely come away from Disco Elysium: The Final Cut with something of a soft spot for Harry, whose off-color sense of humor does a wonderful job of masking some of his less desirable qualities.

The care and attention that went into making this game is really quite astounding and is most evident through the writing. Not only is it all of a ridiculously high quality, but there’s also an astounding amount of it, with over a million words and around fifty-five thousand unique lines of dialog making up its mammoth script. It plays just like a digital tabletop RPG, which, for fans of the genre, really does make it a must-play game.

4 Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Metacritic Rating: 87 (PS5)

A lot of modern AAA video games seem to favor muted color palettes and desaturated visuals, which can often lead to a very dry and serious tone. As its name might suggest, Chicory: A Colorful Tale flips the script in this regard, allowing players to add their own splashes of color to a world that was once devoid of color. The vivid visuals that result from this can be stunning to behold and would feel no less at home in a coloring book or affixed to a fridge door.

The graphics are a little reminiscent of Earthbound and Undertale in places, though the story is a lot more tame. This bodes well, as Chicory boasts local co-op support, and, thanks to how intuitive the controls are, is the perfect title for parents who are looking for something fun to play with their kids. That’s not to say that adults can’t enjoy the game too though, nor is it a game that requires more than one player to have fun.

3 Sea of Stars

Metacritic Rating: 87 (PS5)

Sea of Stars was reportedly inspired by classic role-playing games like Breath of Fire and Chrono Trigger, and this really shines through in both its presentation and its gameplay. It serves as a heartfelt love letter to the genre’s golden age, with its pixel art and storytelling being on par with the very best RPGs on the Super Nintendo.

The fact that Sea of Stars was made available on both Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus at launch really worked in its favor, helping to introduce it to a much wider audience. That said, it still deserves an awful lot of credit for managing to hold onto players’ attention after they downloaded it, particularly with Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 both being released around the same time.

2 Hades

Metacritic Rating: 93 (PS5)

Whether or not Supergiant Games still counts as an indie dev is perhaps a matter for debate. The studio has grown quite a bit since its humble beginnings, both in terms of the size of its workforce and its impressive back catalog of games. However, as Hades won several “Best Indie” awards in the year surrounding its release, it has to be classed as such. With this in mind, it must also go down as one of the best indie games on the PS5.

Set down in the Underworld, Hades borrows heavily from Greek mythology, with the playable character being Zagreus, who is the son of the titular god, Hades. It’s a roguelike action RPG with hack-and-slash combat and one of the best gameplay loops in recent memory. Though PS5 owners had to wait a little longer than their PC and Switch-playing counterparts to get their hands on it, it was well worth the delay, as the PS5 port is arguably the best way to experience this incredible game.

1 Stray

Metacritic Rating: 83 (PS5)

There are plenty of great indie games in which players control an animal, with Spirit of the North and Endling – Extinction is Forever being two of the more notable examples. None captured the imagination of gamers quite like Stray did though, with the feline-themed adventure breaking numerous records and going on to be crowned best indie game at the 2022 Video Game Awards.

The game sees players guide a cat through a futuristic version of Hong Kong in which all of humanity has mysteriously disappeared. Despite the depressing tone that lingers heavy in the air and the fact that many of the buildings have fallen into disrepair, the neon-soaked city is an absolute joy to explore. It’s one of several games set in or inspired by the walled city of Kowloon and a must for anyone looking for the very best PS5 indie games.