9 best indie games released in November – the best small gems from 2025's penultimate month

The month of November wasn’t short on smaller, wildly inventive indie games perfect for playing over the holiday period.

This year hasn’t been short on utterly excellent indie games to help fill the gaps between AAA releases, and November (wouldn’t you know it) wasn’t any different. In fact, despite not even being the official months of spooks, there were plenty of bite-sized horror titles primed to set in small amounts of terror. However, even if you didn’t want to send a chill down your spine, the good news is that the cosy games came out in full force too.

From shop management simulators that see you plundering for resources at night to painfully hard-to-put-down roguelites with a grotesque yet charming edge, here’s our picks of the 9 best indie games released in November 2025

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Flesh Made Fear

You needn’t look far these days to find some truly excellent indie throwbacks to retro-style survival horror. And though
released at the tail-end of October – Halloween, to be exact – Flesh Made Fear is another brilliant take on the concept. In classic Resident Evil fashion, you play as a member of a military unit (male or female) charged with investigating a mysterious disturbance in the woods where, if you can believe it, terror soon ensues.

This is a game that certainly leans into its inspirations almost
faithfully at times. However, Flesh Made Fear is well worth trying if you enjoy genre staples like inventory management and puzzle solving, and don’t mind occasionally battling the fixed camera and tank controls.

AILA

How scary would it be if the horror game you’re playing used its knowledge of you to, in a sense, fight back with fear? That’s the core question at the centre of AILA, a psychological first-person fright-fest that conjures up all kinds of terrifying scenarios through the prism of AI and virtual reality.

It’s a little janky on the visual side, sure, but the level of freedom, variety, and sheer creativity this premise allows for ensures there’s plenty here primed to scare you. From chilling stealth sections to claustrophobic scenarios that play with your mind, AILA feels pretty novel when placed against its recent peers.

Goodnight Universe

With Before You Eyes being one of my favourite games released during the pandemic era, I couldn’t wait to see what GoodbyeWorld Games was cooking up next. Turns out it was a similarly emotional journey through the eyes of a specific character, this time in the form of a 6-month-old baby able to move things with their mind.

Goodnight Universe might utilise another quirky camera-control method as its main hook, but what you’ll really be sucked into is another short-but-sweet story about the power of family and the importance of keeping them together. Nobody else makes indie games like this, and Goodnight Universe is another win from this heartfelt developer.

Terrifier: The Artcade game

Releasing just a week out from Dotemu’s awesome and excellent Marvel Cosmic Invasion would have been tough for any beat-em-up. That said, there’s plenty about Terrifier: The Artcade game regardless of whether you’re an existing fan of the B-movie slasher movies or not.

The ability to play with up to three others as Art the Clown and friends lends this gory brawler a solid level of variety, as does the ability to finish off bosses and underlings in some particularly bloody ways. Heads will be pulped and eyes will be popped, all in this 18+ pixelated beat-em-up any insane clown would be proud of.

Total Chaos

Originally starting out life as an award-winning mod for Doom 2 (that old chestnut) Total Chaos

launched as its own standalone title after years of effort from VFX artist turned game developer Sam Prebble. The result is an incredibly atmospheric and tense first-person survival horror where you must manage resources and craft new weapons in order to survive the terrors of Fort Oasis. T

he melee combat takes a little while to get used to, but these are made up for by labyrinthine locations and a truly unsettling sense of place. Total chaos? More like Total dread.

Morsels

Between the likes of Absolum, Ball X Pit, and a little game called Hades 2, 2025 has been crazily generous when it comes to indie roguelites that are hard to put down. November’s addition to this ever-growing pile is the delightfully odd and purposely garish Morsels, a top-down creature collect-em-up that sees you take on different grotesque monster forms and utilise one’s powers to rise up through the grungy levels.

With enemies just as painfully garish and gruesome as the controllable morsels themselves, trying to survive proves painfully addictive and always had me uttering, ‘just one more run’. It’ll eat up all your time.

Ayasa: Shadows of Silence

If you have an itch for an unabashedly dark (and sometimes disturbing) 2.5D platformer in the style of Limbo and Inside, you needn’t look further than the recent release of Ayasa: Shadows of Silence. Is it a concept that’s been done before? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that Aya Games’ descent into darkness still can’t spook or delight in equal measure.

Better yet, airtight platforming mechanics pairs with gorgeous visuals to always keep you engrossed, in what is a wonderfully surreal puzzle-adventure well worth dipping into.

Moonlighter 2

The jump from 2D to 3D is always hard, but you wouldn’t know it looking at November’s early access release of Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault. Casting you again as a humble shopkeep who sells products by day and then fights monsters to find resources by night, this beloved sequel to an indie classic doubles down on the painfully addictive gameplay loop.

Keeping things fresh, alongside the new at style, is the sheer variety of the dimensions you visit and all the different ways you can customise your merchant. The better you perform, the more prosperous the village up top will become. I can’t wait to see Moonlighter 2 further built upon.

Special mention: Indika on Nintendo Switch

Easily one of the most unique adventure games of 2024, Odd Meter’s exceptionally odd and off-kilter Indika launched on Nintendo Switch this month. Given its mixture of third-person and 2D pixelated sequences you’d think such wizardry would be a lot for Nintendo’s original hybrid device to handle.

However, if you’ve ever dreamt of playing as a 19-th century nun who communicates with the devil in an alternate version of Russia on the go, this is a perfectly good way to play. Providing you’re okay tackling tough subjects, Indika on Nintendo Switch is a treat.