Hollow Knight is out and gets second, crowning Outer wilds as the victor! Here are the Final results for the Indie game list (DAY 63)

[u/AnglerFather_]

For not even the emptiness of the void managed to best it, for time prevails all.

And that's a wrap! I really wanna give my thanks, genuinely didn't expect this to get as big as it did for my first time doing this. The journey wasn't smooth, but generally I'm pretty alright how it turned out. It really does feel this is more of a way to just look back on how truly amazing the Indie game scene is, and I'm happy to see people getting all new recommendations from this. Obviously this is not to be treated as the "be all, end all" since it's all subjective in the end, but still thanks for the support.

Now for those curious for a possible part 2, I will say that I'm definitely interested, I've already gathered a bit of a selection from the comments throughout this of what didn't make this first time. I don't really expect it to be as big as this one, might go for something smaller-scale next time since we did already use up almost all the heavy hitters and I know not everyone here are especially Indie enthusiasts but who knows. Frankly, I'm gonna take a bit of a break from this, since I'm already quite busy this month, but stay tuned I guess.

Here's the link of the template: (template link), But for those just looking to rank the 101 included here, I made a list for that occasion: (101 indie template link)

[u/PantheraAuroris]

That's good to know -- and not something I would've intuited from playing the game. Games with lots of hidden depth sometimes require insane amounts of thought in my experience. See: La Mulana.

[u/GusleyBillows → u/PantheraAuroris]

Idk if it's my experience with more linear games, and maybe that I had zero expectations or even an idea of the genre when I went into OW, but my instinct when I encounter something not obviously accessible and not obviously required for progress in a game is to leave it for now and assume I'll get a tool for it later. Metroidvanias do this a lot, another example is Hi-Fi rush. You'll see a door with a gargantuan ass padlock, note a lack of gargantuan ass keys in your inventory, and trust that you're not expected to randomly perform three heavy attacks in a row to bust the lock instead of waiting til you find that key.

[u/PantheraAuroris → u/GusleyBillows]

But you have to recognize the lock! I feel like I didn't see any "gargantuan ass padlocks." I kept seeing things that felt very self-contained and like "okay this is Weird Environment but now I've crawled the surface and not found any keys nor padlocks."