On Jul 02, 2025, the extremely devastating news broke that thebeloved indie game publisher Humble Games had been shuttered and all its staff laid off. It’s a shock to the whole community, asHumble Gameshas been an absolute powerhouse of a publisher for some of the most iconic and highly acclaimed indie games since 2017.
While the digital storefront of the company, Humble Bundle, will continue operations, indie games will now have to look toward other publishers than Humble. Still, over its near decade in the industry, Humble Games has amassed quite a library of games that are sure to become instant classics, and here are just some of those.
A common genre you’ll see under the Humble Games banner is Metroidvania, with Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus being one of the latest to launch just before the publishing layoffs hit. The game isdirectly inspired by Japanese culturein its art style and story, with the characters and gameplay also leaning into that familiar Hollow Knight design.
You play a celestial teal blossom fox yokai who wields a bo staff with various abilities. The areas are all impeccably hand-drawn to showcase the styles of paintings and papercraft. But don’t be fooled by its whimsical and majestic landscape, as Bo is one of the most challenging Metroidvanias you can play. Seriously,the bosses here are Shadow of the Erdtree and Dark Souls level.
This indie flight combat game turned out to be quite a contender against Ace Combat when it first launched in 2020, a pretty impressive feat considering the global Pandemic and the fact it was made by a team of three.In our review of Project Wingman (literally titled ‘Ace Combat Who?'), author Sean Murray wrote that “It even improves on the Ace Combat formula in some ways.”
The dogfighting is fun and immersive, as you’d expect, and even more thrilling if you can play Project Wingman in VRand with HOTAS controls. You have 21 story missions to clear by surviving in the skies, some outrageously abundant weapon variety for jets, and even a roguelike mode with Conquest.
What if the Greek Pantheon received its own Hamilton Broadway-style treatment mixed with themes from Only Murders in the Building season three? Exactly as the title states, Stray Gods is a choice-based roleplaying game with a musical aspect to it. It’s a highly original concept that hasn’t been done before quite like this in a video game, and it was also created by David Gaider, formerly the lead writer for the Dragon Age series.
In Stray Gods, you play a college dropout named Grace, who’s a newly selected Muse after the previous one was killed. You must solve the mystery surrounding her death while singing, romancing the Greek Gods, and making decisions that shape your ending. It’s Greek mythology with hand-drawn art, the songs are crafted by talented musicians, andthe cast has your favorite Hollywood and Triple-A gaming voice actors. What’s not to love?
If Project Wingman is the Humble Games answer to Ace Combat, Prodeus is certainly the indie answer to Bethesda and id Software’s Doom games. This game is, bar none, the best clone of the iconic series, giving you the perfect balance of the ’90s boomer shooter pixel art aesthetic with the more modern direction of Doom games like 2020’s Doom Eternal.
The weapons and enemy designs are heavy inspirations, especially the first-person view of the helmet UI on the suit your protagonist wears. It’s as gory and realistic as the limits of pixel art can be, and you can take part in the carnage across multiple multiplayer modes, a co-op campaign, and even custom community-shared levels.
Unsighted isone of the many overlooked indie ARPG Metroidvania titlespublished by Humble Games, and it might just become one of your new favorites to be up there with Hollow Knight and Dead Cells. The game takes place in a fictional sci-fi dystopia of Arcadia, where humans are at war with android Automatons.
It’s a sci-fi story you’ve heard too often, but Unsighted brings an original element with Anima, an essential resource for all Automatons where, without it, they will become corrupted and turn evil. This translates into the gameplay mechanics because the android protagonist Alma, along with her Automaton friends, have a timer before they themselves become Unsighted.
Do puzzle games get any cozier, more satisfying, and more meditative than being asked to unpack a bunch of boxes in different locations with no pressure on your speed? With Unpacking, developer Witch Beam takes such a mundane task and creates something truly special that solidifies it asa puzzle game you should definitely be playing right now.
Whether it be a bedroom, closet, kitchen, or home office, things have to be unpacked and put away in the room space provided, and the unpacking itself will also serve to tell a story. Adding to the cozy vibe is the soothing music that plays in the background to get you into the flow, which, ironically enough, is composed by the BAFTA-winning audio director of Alien: Isolation – Jeff van Dyck.
Another musical-themed game that Humble Games put its publishing powers into is Greg Lobanov’s Wandersong, a cute and sweet little adventure about a bard who uses a color wheel of various musical notes to solve puzzles and platform across the levels (and sometimes to unwittingly annoy NPCs).
If you’re a fan of the paper cutout art style, Wandersong has just that, and it makes the game feel simplistic yet elegant, like the musical aspect of its mechanics. There are lots of characters for the bard to meet and many performances to put on using their sound, with the ultimate goal being to learn the Earthsong and save the day.
Just another example of a stellar and unique Metroidvania game that Humble helped launch for home consoles is Supraland,one that we consider to be the best of all timein the genre. By the images alone, you might already make out that it’s not your standard Metroidvania fare, as it indeed does something quite different.
The game is played from a first-person perspective in an interconnected open world that has Portal-style puzzle gameplay and where you have a melee weapon to take on various hostiles. The protagonist of this Metroidvania is also a red plastic toy figure in a child’s puzzle-filled sandbox situated in a backyard.
Coral Island is a farming and life sim game from Stairway Games that really took the genre by storm from its Early access roots to its full-release launch, and one day might even reach the status of Stardew Valley. In a genre inundated with titles like Disney Dreamlight Valley, Palia, Fae Farm, and My Time at Sandrock, what sets Coral Island apart for many is its sea-themed adventure.
Not only do you have fishing like in most games of this genre, but Coral Island invites you to dive into the ocean to gather resources, as well asmeet and romance the Merfolk that live under the sea. And, as always, you get to create your own character, forge relationships with the people of Coral Island as you see fit, and create the island layout you desire.
Brilliantly inspired by retro survival horror greats like the original 1996 Resident Evil, and perhapslater sci-fi horror games like Dead Space, Signalis is modernized pixel art horror done right. The game’s handling of the puzzlesand inventory managementalone represents one of the clearest nods to Resident Evil.
This harrowing sci-fi survival journey puts you in the shoes of a Replika android named Elster on the planet Leng, which (if you’re familiar with Lovecraft mythos) is a location that could be a significant clue to some of the strange and confounding dreams Elster will experience.
Signalis is a masterpiece of a game with itsthematic inspirations tied to H.P. Lovecraft, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch, centering on a lone android looking for her partner in an outer space mining facility suddenly overrun with infected.
