Gamescom Indie Games We’d Pick Over the Blockbusters

Restoring a haunted hotel turns domestic renovation into a supernatural mystery, a strong mechanical premise with room for both comedy and dread.

Its brutalist puzzle world offers no map and little chatter, trusting spatial observation rather than instructions to carry the experience.

The painted Persian world, cooperative movement and architectural detail stood out immediately in a show crowded with more familiar fantasy settings.

Bug hunting moves with the bright speed of a Saturday-morning cartoon, making cooperative action readable without sanding away its chaos.

Nivalis Nights focuses on ordinary cyberpunk nightlife instead of another chosen-one plot, giving its neon city a more convincing social scale.

A tiny space dog carrying a very large gun gives the shooter an immediate comic identity, while the fast movement looks substantial enough to support it.

The platforming joke is that every tree wants the player dead, and the compact design appears disciplined enough to keep that hostility funny.

A permanently divided screen makes physical separation part of every puzzle, using presentation as a mechanic rather than a visual trick.

Cooperative ghost hunting becomes considerably warmer when both players are customizable dogs, but the investigation systems still look like a real game.

Golf, cassette tapes and a talking skull should feel randomly assembled, but the strong visual language makes this strange road trip unusually coherent.