Best Indie Games Like Hyper Light Drifter

The best indie games like Hyper Light Drifter are Death's Door, Tunic and Hollow Knight. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to indie costs you.

Why Indie Is a Good Answer for Hyper Light Drifter

Filtering to indie means you want the answer a small team would give. It is usually the most interesting filter on this site, because small studios take the risks large ones cannot.

What you get: One strong idea, explored completely, at a price that makes trying it easy. Indies have no production to hide behind, so the design is exposed.

What made Hyper Light Drifter worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the indie part of that answer, and only the indie part.

8 Indie Games Like Hyper Light Drifter

  1. 1. Death's Door

    Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.

  2. 2. Tunic

    Wordless adventuring where the in-game manual is itself the puzzle.

  3. 3. Hollow Knight

    The same refusal to explain, at four times the size.

  4. 4. Titan Souls

    One arrow, one hit, sixteen bosses in a quiet overworld.

  5. 5. Blasphemous 2

    Gorgeous pixel art and heavy, deliberate combat.

  6. 6. Katana ZERO

    Fast, lethal 2D action with a striking hand-drawn style.

  7. 7. Ender Lilies

    Melancholy, beautiful, and mechanically sharp.

  8. 8. Eastward

    Pixel art of the same quality in a much warmer game.

What This Filter Leaves Out

Polish and scale, sometimes. A few of these are rough at the edges, and a big-budget pick will always look better doing the same thing.

Specifically, these are strong answers for Hyper Light Drifter that are not indie games, so they are not on this page:

The full list is on games like Hyper Light Drifter — 9 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best indie game like Hyper Light Drifter?

Death's Door. Compact top-down adventure paced almost identically, and kinder.

Are all of these on the PlayStation 4?

No. Hyper Light Drifter released on the PlayStation 4, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.

What actually counts as an indie game?

Self-published, or published without a large publisher's money. It says nothing about the size of the game, which is why a forty-hour metroidvania and a two-hour art piece sit under the same label.

Why are indie games often better designed?

Constraint. Without a budget to hide behind, one idea has to carry the whole thing — and a small team can commit to something risky that a large one would sand down.

How are these chosen?

By hand. Each pick was written for the full Hyper Light Drifter list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is indie — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.

Other Angles on Hyper Light Drifter

More Indie Games Recommendations

Or read the indie guide for where to start in the genre generally.