Best Indie Games Like Super Metroid

The best indie games like Super Metroid are Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to indie costs you.

Why Indie Is a Good Answer for Super Metroid

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 Super Metroid 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.

5 Indie Games Like Super Metroid

  1. 1. Hollow Knight

    The genre's high point since, and enormous.

  2. 2. Axiom Verge

    Made explicitly to be Super Metroid again, down to the glitch mechanics.

  3. 3. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

    The best-animated metroidvania, and much kinder.

  4. 4. Environmental Station Alpha

    A small game with secrets that go far deeper than they look.

  5. 5. Blasphemous 2

    Gorgeous pixel art and deliberate, heavy combat.

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 Super Metroid that are not indie games, so they are not on this page:

The full list is on games like Super Metroid — 9 picks, no genre filter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best indie game like Super Metroid?

Hollow Knight. The genre's high point since, and enormous.

Are all of these on the Super Nintendo?

No. Super Metroid released on the Super Nintendo, 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 Super Metroid 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 Super Metroid

More Indie Games Recommendations

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