Some of the best-reviewed indie games of the last three years are on sale right now, and most of them were cheap to begin with. The GOG Autumn Sale knocks 20 to 50% off every game on this list, and GOG hands you the installer with no DRM on top. If a few of these have been sitting on your wishlist, this is a good week to stop waiting. The sale runs until October 6 at 11:59pm Pacific (the morning of October 7 in Europe).
The trouble is the size of it. GOG has 1,544 discounted games tagged Indie right now, and the sale page sorts them by what is trending, which mostly means what is already famous. So this list skips the front page and asks the players instead.
The rules are simple. Every game had to be tagged Indie on GOG, be made by an independent studio, and come out in 2023 or later. GOG’s own rating counts are small (the most-rated indie game in the sale has about 4,000), so the ranking uses each game’s Steam reviews, where the crowds are far bigger, and nothing with fewer than 1,000 reviews made the cut. Prices are GOG’s, in US dollars, as of September 25.
The result leans hard toward puzzles and horror. Which, with October a week away, is not the worst problem to have.
Creature Kitchen feeds the forest at the witching hour
99.6% positive from 9,869 reviews. No other indie game in the sale comes close to that, old or new.
The Rat Zone calls it a “creepy-cozy cooking simulator”, and both halves of that are doing work. There is a strange house to search, a forest outside, and local wildlife to cook for, and slowly figure out that the wildlife is not entirely normal. There are over 40 recipes to chop, mix and fry, a house and forest to search for ingredients, and a photo album to fill with pictures of the creatures you befriend. It all runs on deliberate early 2000s graphics with the radio on.
It is a short game, and the studio says so openly (“snack-sized” is their word). That is probably why the reviews are this clean: nobody bought it expecting fifty hours. At $6.39 it is 20% off, and the best-reviewed thing in the whole sale costs less than a pizza.
Monster Prom 4: Monster Con wants you and three friends
The fourth Monster Prom goes back to what made the first one a hit: a dating sim you play competitively, with up to three friends on the same couch or online, all trying to land a date before time runs out. This time it happens at a nerd convention full of streamers, washed-up actors and networking game developers, with four new love interests plus returning favorites Zoe and Liam.
The joke-to-sentence ratio in this series is very high. The screenshot below has a line about amateur brain surgery in it, and that is a normal one.
99.1% from 2,139 reviews is the highest score any Monster Prom game has posted. You can play it alone, but it was clearly built for a group chat that says “we should play something tonight”. $11.25, 25% off.
Chants of Sennaar makes the language itself the puzzle
Most puzzle games hand you a lock. Chants of Sennaar hands you a language you cannot read and a tower full of people who cannot understand each other either.
Rundisc’s game is inspired by the myth of Babel. Five peoples live on different levels of one huge tower, each with its own written language, and you learn those languages by watching, listening and matching symbols to what people are doing, until you can finally carry a message from one floor to the next. It won Best Indie Game at the 2024 New York Game Awards and was nominated at The Game Awards and the BAFTAs.
34,899 reviews at 98.2% is the biggest crowd in this top ten, by a long way. At $9.99 it is half price, and this is the one I would put in front of anyone who says they are bored of puzzle games.
Look Outside is the rule you will want to break
One apartment building. One rule: do not look out of the window. Everyone who did has turned into something with too many teeth.
Look Outside is a survival horror RPG credited to a single developer, Francis Coulombe, and published by Devolver Digital. You leave your apartment to scavenge the building for food, weapons and supplies, fight over 150 hand-made creatures in turn-based combat that cares about the space between you and them, and come back home to cook, rest and recruit neighbors who are still (mostly) human. The body horror is the selling point, and it is not subtle about it.
$5.99, 40% off, 98.3% from 14,822 reviews. Of everything on this list, this is the one built for a dark room in late October.
Underground Blossom and the rest of Rusty Lake’s catalog
Rusty Lake is a small Dutch studio that has spent the last decade making one kind of game: short point-and-click puzzle boxes with a calm hand-drawn look and a story that gets very, very weird. Six of them are in this sale. Underground Blossom is the newest of the six, and the best reviewed.
You ride the metro through seven stations, each one a piece of a woman named Laura Vanderboom’s life, past and possible future. Solve the puzzles at a stop, find the right train, move on. The studio puts the travel time at about two hours. 98.2% from 7,070 reviews, and $3.29.
The rest of the catalog is just as cheap. Cube Escape Collection bundles the nine chapters of their first series for $3.29 (98.0% of 8,013). Rusty Lake Hotel is $1.29, Rusty Lake: Roots $0.99, Rusty Lake Paradise $2.65, and The Past Within, a puzzle game built for two players, is $3.95. All six together come to $15.46, and they all tell pieces of the same strange world’s story.
Crow Country is a 1990 theme park with the lights off
SFB Games built a survival horror game that looks like it fell out of a PlayStation 1. Low-poly characters, chunky textures, an inventory screen with a heart monitor on it.
The year is 1990. Edward Crow’s theme park closed two years ago and he disappeared along with it. You are Mara Forest, and you walk into the empty park to find out why. From there it is puzzles, riddles, locked doors and backtracking, in the style of the games it is clearly in love with. There is also an Exploration Mode with no monsters, which is a nice touch if you want the park without the panic.
Half price at $9.99, 98.0% from 8,350 reviews.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is the priciest game here, and still half off
At $19.99 it costs more than anything else in the top ten. It is also 50% off, sits at 97.9% from 15,709 reviews, and is the only game on this list with a BMX in it.
Team Reptile’s game is about graffiti crews in the city of New Amsterdam. You play Red, who lost his head and got a cyber one instead, and you work your way through five boroughs on skates, a board or a BMX, chaining tricks, tagging walls, and taking on rival crews and the police for territory. Anyone who grew up with Jet Set Radio will know exactly what this is the moment they see it.
IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator came out in August and already has 14,000 reviews
That is the number worth staring at. IRON NEST launched on August 6, and in seven weeks it has collected 14,232 Steam reviews at 97.8%. For a game credited to one developer, Nick Nieuwoudt, that is a huge debut.
It is a dieselpunk artillery sim run entirely from inside the turret. Orders arrive on a teleprinter, you plot coordinates on a paper map, work out the elevation and powder charges, turn the hand wheels, and fire. Then aerial photos show you what you actually hit. Every lever and dial in the cabin is yours to operate, which is the whole appeal.
$14.99, 25% off. Not bad for a game that is not even two months old.
The Artisan of Glimmith is stained glass with rules
You are a stained glass artisan hired to restore a kingdom above the clouds, and the only condition is that you can use any colors you like as long as you follow the rules. Each window is a logic puzzle: split the glass into regions so every rule on the card holds.
Lunarch Studios makes a point of saying the puzzles are “curated, not generated”, built by human designers rather than an algorithm, and there are over 20 rule types by the end, plus optional finale puzzles meant for experts and a level editor for making your own. It came out in March, sits at 97.7% from 2,617 reviews, and is $10.39.
If Chants of Sennaar is the story-first puzzle game on this list, this is the pure one.
Is This Seat Taken? turns seating plans into a puzzle game
Anyone who has organized a wedding table knows this game already. The person with the sensitive nose cannot sit next to the one wearing too much cologne. The sleepy passenger cannot sit next to the loud music. Somebody’s big hat is blocking somebody’s view.
Poti Poti Studio built a whole logic puzzle game around that, across buses, cinemas, taxis, diners and wedding receptions, with a small story about an aspiring actor named Nat stitched through the levels. It is published under the Wholesome Games label, which tells you the tone.
97.2% from 9,667 reviews, and $6.99 at 30% off.
Small studios with smaller crowds
A 1,000-review minimum keeps the ranking honest, but it also shuts out the games that simply have not been found yet. These ones came out in 2023 or later, are made by tiny teams, and score as high as anything above. They just have fewer people vouching for them.
Tukoni: Forest Keepers is the one to start with, and it could not be better timed for an autumn sale. It came out on August 17 and sits at 99.4% from 826 reviews, a higher score than anything in the top ten except Creature Kitchen. Dream Operator made it with Oksana Bula, the Ukrainian author and illustrator of the Tukoni picture books, and the whole thing looks like those books come to life. You play a forest spirit helping the woods get ready for winter: hand-drawn puzzles, herbs to collect, tea recipes, tiny homes inside trees. $7.49.
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo is 99.2% positive from 242 reviews. You are a snake who wakes up dead in a Latin American-flavored afterlife where everyone is stuck repeating the same day, and you are the only one who remembers. $9.99, half price.
Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a party RPG where your party is a three-piece band of idiots, you fight with music, and the store page promises you can kick down every door. 98.8% from 738 reviews, and 60% off at $7.99, the deepest discount in this section.
Two more for under five dollars: A Tiny Sticker Tale, a small adventure about changing the world with stickers ($4.99, 97.2% of 679), and CHAIRS ($3.99, 98.2% of 226), an hour-long action platformer about being a chair. It is by The Rat Zone, the same studio behind Creature Kitchen, and judging by both games they are having a very good time.
RimWorld, and the older games that would have won
The 2023 cutoff kept some very big names out of the top ten, and it would be strange to pretend they are not on sale.
RimWorld is the obvious one. 246,785 reviews at 97.8% is a number very few games on Steam ever reach, indie or not, and the colony sim came out in 2018 and is still the game other colony sims get compared to. The catch is the discount. It is only 20% off at $27.99, by far the smallest saving on this page. If you have never owned it, it is worth it at any price. If you have been waiting for a real sale, this is not it.
And four more that would have ranked in the top ten without the date rule. A Short Hike is $4.79 (99.1% of 22,735). Slime Rancher is 75% off at $4.99 (98.0% of 157,554). Katana ZERO is $8.99 (97.9% of 76,171). Milo and the Magpies, a tiny hidden-object game about a lost cat, is $1.49 (98.4% of 3,439), which might be the best price per happy review in the entire sale.
What to buy before October 6
The shape of this list is small games at small prices. Three of the short ones in the top ten cost $16.67 together, and the two horror picks cost less than one full-price copy of Crow Country.
If you want one recommendation, it is Chants of Sennaar at $9.99. If you want the surprise, it is that a $6.39 game about feeding raccoons in a creepy kitchen is the best-reviewed indie game GOG is selling.
The sale ends October 6 at 11:59pm Pacific.
Three games, under seventeen dollars
- Underground Blossom
- Creature Kitchen
- Is This Seat Taken?
The cheapest way into the top ten. Short, strange, and rated about as high as anything on GOG right now. $3.29 + $6.39 + $6.99, all out now.
Save these for Halloween
- Look Outside
- Crow Country
Two horror games at their sale price, bought now, played at the end of October. Together they cost less than one full-price Crow Country. $5.99 + $9.99.
The half-price big ones
- Chants of Sennaar
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
The two most-reviewed games in the top ten, both at 50% off. If you only buy one thing this autumn, it should be one of these. $9.99 and $19.99.
