Last week there was some annoying discourse on social media about how no one makes innovative or experimental indie games anymore, but there’s actually a lot of greats folks pointing you to those games so I made a list of some.

This is going to be a very flawed list. I’m probably forgetting a bunch, unaware of others, I can only read English, and this is focusing on places and not specific people at places like PC Gamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun who are doing great work and can be followed on social media, so I want to apologize to you all in advance since it’s incredibly frustrating to see people lament that “(type of game) isn’t being made anymore” when you’re yelling about them every week. I just needed to cut the list off at some point. Hopefully someone smarter sees this list and puts together an even better one on their own site. But I hope this will give you some cool things to add to your RSS feed reader of choice and maybe some new podcasts to listen to.

I’ll also add that since I am an adventure game nerd, this list is going to be leaning more on that genre. Some of these folks cover experimental games than others, but I think they’re all worth a look anyway. I also couldn’t be bothered to separate TTRPGs and video games but you know what, maybe consider giving something other than D&D a try. You deserve better.

Like I said earlier, I know I missed a ton. Please leave comments with links to who you follow!

Around this time every year every outlet starts talking about their games of the year, despite the year not even being over. People often get annoyed by The Game Awards since it’s the biggest and most obnoxious one, but I can ignore this one pretty easily since it’s big and dumb and never offered anything of value. The ones that get to me are from the outlets that talk about how much they love indie games but all the games seem to have a large-ish budget and are available on Steam. Places that offer really experimental, solo games like Itch.io and the interactive fiction competitions like IF Comp get ignored.

It just makes me wonder, where are all the indie game outlets run by perverts?

There’s probably a better way to word that, but why isn’t there more recognition of all the fucked up games people are making? Why aren’t they covering adult games and games with upsetting body horror? There’s smaller places like Weird Fucking Games and Adult Analysis Anthology that are doing good work, but nothing bigger seems like they can be bothered to look at that stuff. Why? Is it just a lack of curiosity? Surely an anonymous game collective like Domino Club dropping a free anthology of experimental games twice a year would be interesting to people who like indie games? Adult game Hardcoded (VERY NSFW Itchio link) just came out after years in development and was a big release in that community. It’s not just the fucked up games being ignored. There’s so many games coming out in every niche, even ones that have been declared dead like point-and-click adventures and text adventures that use parsers.

I don’t think this is the same thing as the tired discourse of “places are covering indie games” because they do. There’s a lot of great outlets that cover them and deserve the support. I just wish a lot of these places dug deeper and were more willing to cover experimental games that didn’t have the time or budget to be really polished. I love UFO 50 as much as the next person, but it’s not the only games anthology to come out this year, and they certainly didn’t invent the games anthology. I just feel like these game of the year awards from people who talk about how much they love indies turn someone even as dull as me into John Waters, and have me asking where are all the people talking about the indie games about people fucking and eating dog shit.