The 25 Best Narrative Indie Games

By YPB TeamOct 23

Small teams, big feelings. Some of these rewired what a game story can be, while others are cult favourites that never left their devoted fanbases.

1
Disco Elysium
A dialogue-driven detective RPG about an amnesiac cop in a politically fractured city.
1000pts
2
Outer Wilds
A time-loop exploration mystery in a tiny solar system that resets every 22 minutes.
833pts
3
Undertale
A quirky RPG where every fight can be avoided and your choices reshape the story.
833pts
4
Inside
A wordless, darkly atmospheric puzzle platformer that tells its story through the environment.
642pts
5
Kentucky Route Zero
A magical-realist adventure about a secret highway beneath Kentucky, told in five acts.
577pts
6
What Remains of Edith Finch
An anthology of strange family deaths explored through a cursed house.
576pts
7
Oxenfree
A supernatural teen thriller built around branching, overlapping conversations.
500pts
8
SOMA
A sci-fi horror game from Frictional exploring consciousness on a deep-sea research base.
500pts
9
Citizen Sleeper
A tabletop-inspired RPG about a digital consciousness scraping by on a space station.
500pts
10
Coffee Talk
A relaxing barista sim where you listen to the late-night troubles of fantasy-city regulars.
500pts
11
Gone Home
A quiet first-person exploration game uncovering a family's story through objects in an empty house.
409pts
12
Night in the Woods
A small-town story about a college dropout coming home to a community in decline.
409pts
13
The Stanley Parable
A meta-commentary on choice, narrated by a dryly sarcastic voice in an empty office.
409pts
14
Return of the Obra Dinn
A deduction mystery where you piece together the fates of a ship's crew from frozen death scenes.
409pts
15
Transistor
Supergiant's cyberpunk action RPG narrated by a talking sword and a silenced singer.
409pts
16
VA-11 Hall-A
A cyberpunk bartending visual novel where the drinks you mix shape the conversations.
409pts
17
Spiritfarer
A cozy management game about ferrying spirits to the afterlife and saying goodbye.
409pts
18
Pyre
A party-based fantasy game where every ritual result, win or lose, changes the story.
409pts
19
Hades
A roguelike whose death-and-return loop drives a deeply character-led family drama.
409pts
20
Papers, Please
A border-checkpoint simulator that turns bureaucracy into a stream of moral dilemmas.
300pts
21
Her Story
A live-action police-interview database you search to uncover a woman's secret.
300pts
22
To the Moon
A pixel-art story about two doctors rewriting a dying man's memories to fulfil his last wish.
300pts
23
Bastion
An action RPG whose reactive narrator comments on every move as the world rebuilds.
300pts
24
Firewatch
A first-person mystery set in a Wyoming fire lookout, carried by a radio relationship.
0pts
25
Celeste
A precision platformer about climbing a mountain that doubles as a story about anxiety.
0pts