Seven of the best games you’ve never heard of

Remember the cultural monomedia days? When someone at work or school asked if you watched that thing on TV last night, and there was a one in five chance that you actually had? 

Well those days are over. We’re in the algorithmic long tail era now, sequestered away in our own very private entertainment media bubbles, being served an endless feed of esoteric material only we would find interesting. Pro: that means you don’t have to sit and watch Songs of Praise anymore. Con: you miss out on vast swathes of things you’d actually like. Things like these indie games. 

There’s every chance that one of these fine interactive experiences flew under your radar so far in 2025, so it’s time to make that right. Please welcome them to the stage, and ready yourself for outlandish concepts, punishing colour schemes and a re-awakened fascination with Micro Machines. 

A game about driving, in which you don’t really do any driving despite its title instructing you to do nothing but driving. Instead, YCJY’s wistfully retro and atmospheric RPG is about living life on the open road and all the decisions you make along the way. Picking up hitchhikers. Taking on odd jobs to earn a bit of cash. Stopping for coffee breaks and changing tyres.

It might sound prosaic, but that’s really the point. Set in the early 2000s, the last days of the analogue world, it’s a game that embodies the old adage about the journey being the destination. Ultimately you’re trying to make your way across the country to a festival, but really it’s about taking your time and appreciating the little details, like just how well a Volvo 240 has been captured in pixel art.

Really, this game should be called Don’t Look Outside Or You’ll Turn Into a Grotesque Mutant, since that better describes the central premise and negates what’s currently quite irresponsible advice from the present title.

Francis Coulombe’s survival horror RPG sets you as a survivor of a mysterious event that’s apparently turned everyone outside your apartment block into monsters. It’s a dark, claustrophobic affair where you’re scrabbling around through the corridors for supplies, fighting off beasties and absolutely not looking out of the windows.

Feel a bit fatigued by the 7,000 extraction shooters and half-baked Early Access survival sims on your Steam homepage? The antidote is this, a game that describes itself as an ‘open-world narrative adventure mascot management simulator’, and which is also an ode to bureaucracy, a discourse on societal dysfunction, and a driving sim with an upgradeable pickup truck full of sentient mascots.

You cruise around the town, deploying mascots to take on jobs, earning money and very gradually building a business empire while interacting with local officials and businesspeople, and above all, wondering why there aren’t more open-world narrative adventure mascot management simulators out there, since this one’s such a joy.

That’s Woden with one ‘o’, so don’t worry, this is not the videogame version of the wooden race track your nan got off the market for you that Christmas when you asked for Scalextric. Instead, SWGP2 has the feeling of a visiting game from a parallel universe in which the Codemasters Micro Machines games for Megadrive never fell away.

It’s isometric, arcade-style racing with shocking, engrossing depth. There are over 200 vehicles here, all fictional, but all very recognisable in their influences. A Gran Turismo-style map screen of dealerships, events and even a car wash. Local and online multiplayer. Rally, classic tourer, prototype, road car and truck racing, on tarmac or off-road. It’s an entire world of racing, rendered all diddy, and fantastically compelling in its simple but demanding handling.

A first-person shooter with immersive sim trappings from the makers of Cruelty Squad. Award yourself 50 hipster points if you nodded along in excitement to that last sentence, and proceed directly to the nearest independent bottle shop.

While the fundamental mechanics of shooting, traversal and level exploration are all quietly brilliant, elsewhere there’s an outsider art feel to Psycho Patrol R, a sense that developer Consumer Softproducts might consciously be trying to break as many design rules as possible. The end result is a quasi-retro shooter that you might conceivably have discovered on an old demo disc glued to the cover of Obscure Games Monthly’s July 1999 issue.

Speaking of 1999… here's a big data sim set that very same year, replete with old-school, 16-bit colour, Windows desktop visuals that pose some uncomfortable questions about our personal information. What if the social media data harvesting scandals of the 2010s actually took place right at the pre-millenium ground zero of the internet age? How might society have been disrupted, and how much fun could one have building up a business empire around doing exactly that?

It’s a strange and heady mix of nostalgic, disquieting and relaxing, this one. There are no arena fight boss battles, just doing pretend data mining work and reading pretend emails on a pretend Windows desktop. But within those constraints, developer Wristwork tells a remarkably involving story.

Why is REPO right at the end of this list? Why is it on this list at all? Well, that’s a tricky one. Because this co-op haunted house salvage sim is simultaneously one of the most popular PC releases of the last few months, and one of the most obscure. It’s the brainchild of indie studio semiwork, who didn’t have half a squillion quid to spend on a marketing campaign, so there’s every chance that despite it trending through March and April, you might still have missed it.

Then there’s the inherent strangeness of it all. You and your co-op robot friends go scavenging around spooky houses for valuables, putting them into a big cart while trying not to damage them and thus depreciating their value, before the various eldritch terrors lurking in the shadows find and kill you.

You do this to appease a mysterious Taxman, who communicates only in emojis, and who also created you. Any questions? No, thought not, let’s crack on then. If you got a kick out of Phasmaphobia’s procedural ghost-hunting or Deep Rock Galactic’s mega-detailed space-mining, REPO’s a worthy candidate for the next game you drop into your gaming group chat.