The best indie games like Pentiment are Disco Elysium, Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol. Below are 10, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to indie costs you.
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 Pentiment 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.
The other great game where the mechanics are conversation, memory and the shape of your own head.
Deduction with no hand-holding and a visual style just as committed.
Pure deduction, stripped of everything else, and very good at it.
Southern gothic point-and-click with the same literary weight.
Limited days, hard choices, and a narrative that moves whether you are ready or not.
If the art direction and the writing were the point rather than the mystery.
An open murder investigation where you decide when you have enough to accuse.
A crime reconstructed from fragments, with the same refusal to confirm you got it right.
A small town, a slow year, and writing carrying the entire game.
Short, hand-crafted, and every chapter changes how it is played.
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.
The full list is on games like Pentiment — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Disco Elysium. The other great game where the mechanics are conversation, memory and the shape of your own head.
No. Pentiment released on the Xbox Series X|S, 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.
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.
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.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Pentiment 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.
Or read the indie guide for where to start in the genre generally.