Good Things in Small Packages: Tof Eklund's Indie Games of the Year

Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor

Welp, 2023's over, and looking back, I have to ask myself: what DID I play last year?

I certainly haven't played any of this year's lauded AAA games. No Armored Core, no Alan Wake, no Diablo, no Spider-Man, no Starfield, no Lies of P, not even Baldur's Gate, though I do applaud Larian's decision to include Illithid-kissing in the game. My fam played Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Pikmin 4, and they assure me that Nintendo's still got it, even if every goddamn controller made for the Switch drifts like it wants to be Keiichi Tsuchiya .

Black Salt Games' Dredge was definitely a highlight for me this past year. Roger and I considered it at length, and when I was recently at the New Zealand Maritime Museum with my kids, I couldn't help but see Dredge in the exhibits on the NZ fishing industry and the brief but devastating period of commercial whaling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dredge joins Failbetter Games' Sunless Sea on my short list of perfect "melancholy at sea" games.

I played a lot - and I mean a lot - of mobile merge/match games finity. and Teeny Tiny Town. I recommend both, if you're looking for something to take the Threes–shaped space in your life, but beyond that I don't have a damned thing to say about either one.

Save for the serendipitous appearance of Dredge in my life, all of the really great games I played in 2023 were played with, for, and because of my kids. I played Frog Detective 3, Chants of Sennaar, and Cobalt Core because they wanted to play them with me / watch me play them, and I'm eternally grateful.

Frog Detective 3, image from Future Friends Games.

If you've played any of Grace Bruxner and Thomas Bowker's Frog Detective games, you know that they're short, quirky, low-poly adventure games that rest on their gently-surreal sense of humor. They're perfect little gems if they're to your taste, and that taste is lot like the soothing and nutritious stains on Arthur Dent's towel, if only Douglas Adams had been raised with the benefit of Teen Vogue and Taylor Swift. Frog Detective 3 takes a running gag from the previous games and builds it into an unexpected Swiftian satire of the prison-industrial complex. It also lets you tool around a wild-west town and its environs on a razor scooter, and includes the cutest all-ages queer romance since And Tango Makes Three. Gift this game to the children of your right-wing friends and relatives to advance the pinko commie anarcho-queer agenda!

Chants of Sennaar, image from Focus Entertainment.

Chants of Sennaar is beautiful and evocative, starting with a setting intentionally reminiscent of the Tower of Babel and turning it to a story about communication. It's not the first game to make a central mechanic of translation (viz Inkle's Heaven's Vault), but it does a very good job of twinning story to game mechanics, as the player ascends a tower populated by five different cultures who have forgotten each other's languages and become estranged. At first, it seems your only goal is to climb, but the puzzles teach you each culture's ways, showing you why they are divided and why they ought to re-connect.

Low-poly in a much grander and more radiant way than Frog Detective, each culture in Sennaar has its own fashion and architectural style, and many of the tableaus presented in the game are breathtakingly beautiful in their color and composition. The stealth mechanics required in some scenes will bore stealth-action afficionados and annoy puzzle purists, but they do give a sense of peril where it is needed in an otherwise pacific experience. There's a late-game twist that some may find jarring, but I enjoyed it and felt it worked well as part of Sennaar's meditation on communication. I'm surprised this one hasn't attracted more awards and nominations.

Cobalt Core, image from Brace Yourself Games.

Cobalt Core can be described succinctly and dismissively as "FTL meets Slay the Spire." As FTL clearly influenced the development of Slay the Spire, and given the flood of Slay-alike deckbuilders, one could be forgiven for throwing Cobalt Core on the heap without a closer look. But Cobalt Core has something neither FTL nor Slay the Spire have: cute, "Warner Brothers goes punk" animal characters. Perhaps more importantly, these cats and frogs and rhinos are interesting, nuanced characters. Cobalt Core makes this work by tying character development to the roguelike loop: a Star Trek-worthy spacetime disaster has created a time loop, and scrambled your characters' memories. Every successful run, you get to unlock a bit more of someone's memories, filling in both details about who they are and what happened.

Riggs is my favorite character: she's an opossum with an earring (just one? I think?), mad skills as a pilot, and a sweet disposition… but "evil" Riggs is one of the game's bosses, and you'll have to fight her in every run. Why? Play the game and find out. If you've developed a deadly allergy to roguelike deckbuilders, I'll excuse you, but otherwise you really ought to give Cobalt Core a try - the mechanics are satisfying and the characters carry the story, something a lot of larger, longer, much more expensive games can't say.

So that's my year in gaming: I didn't play the games everyone said I should, or the games I thought I would, but I'm pretty happy with what I did play. Sennaar, Frog Detective, and Cobalt Core are all small, focused games: no open-world ARPG mechanics, no hundred-hour playtimes. Each has it’s own sense of style and creates an interesting, consistent world that I enjoyed visiting, and even though all three are single-player “offline” experiences, they’re very sharable in a chatty, back-seat driving kind of way. I find myself less and less interested in “big” games and increasingly disgusted with the business practices of big publishers. Good things come in small packages.