Xbox Game Pass is a subscription service that gives you access to hundreds of games on Xbox consoles and PC. While a big part of the pitch for Xbox Game Pass is the day one releases of Xbox first-party games, the subscription includes a ton of indie games, including some of the biggest indie games of the past decade. It does include one of the biggest and most innovative indie games released in 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I'm mentioning here since it's popular and recent enough that it doesn't need to be in this list, but absolutely deserves a mention. For this list, I went with a combination of some of the heaviest hitters to come from the indie scene, along with a few hidden gems you haven't played.

10 Another Crab's Treasure

A Souls-like adventure with a fantastic story and fresh ideas

Another Crab's Treasure is a Souls-like action RPG, but this game has both a unique setting, and some original ideas about how combat should work. You play as a small crab, whose shell was taken as payment for back taxes. You are forced to go on a massive journey across the ocean to get it back, but in the meantime you can use miscellaneous items found throughout the world as a shell. These shells all have limited durability, but also have different defense stats and special abilities. The durability forces you to work with what you got, so each boss fight has an element of chaos, since you'll never know what shell you will have when you reach a fight. The story is a compelling narrative about ocean pollution, one that really has some grand ideas that make for a compelling journey across the ocean.

9 Balatro

The incredible deck-building roguelite

Balatro is one of the best games released in 2024, making a deck-builder roguelite using the bones of Poker. You start with a deck of cards and need to create Poker hands to earn chips and advance through rounds. The number of chips needed increases every round, but that's where the deck building comes in. You can upgrade specific hands, like two pairs or a full house, add new cards or remove cards, and most importantly, get Jokers. Jokers serve as relics, with wild powers. Some multiply your final score, award bonuses for certain hands or cards being played, or even boosting your chip total based on how much money you have. There are tons of Jokers, and even more to unlock, and there are some fun synergies to discover. You don't need to understand Poker, and Balatro does not feature any actual gambling, making it worth checking out even if you are skeptical.

8 Blue Prince

Another 2025 indie darling

Blue Prince is another deck builder roguelite, but it's wildly different from Balatro. Blue Prince is a puzzle game where you need to solve different issues in the mansion as you try and create a path that leads to a mysterious Room 46, at which point you will get your inheritance. While it has its own distinct style of puzzles, if you like The Witness or other big sprawling puzzle games filled with both small and large puzzles to solve. It's the kind of game that almost requires you to take notes while playing, which should appeal to the most hardcore of puzzle gamers. If you have any affinity for puzzles, check out Blue Prince, and if you hate puzzles in games, maybe skip this one.

7 Celeste

An incredible, and difficult, 2D platformer

If you have somehow made it this long without playing Celeste, congrats, you can check out one of the best 2D platformers of the last decade. Celeste follows Madeline as she attempts to climb to the top of Celeste mountain, on a journey to help battle her inner demons. What follows is a great journey about mental health and a realistic portrayal of living with those issues, while also being deeply empathetic towards people suffering from those issues. In-between those story beats, you must complete single-screen 2D platforming challenges, with quick resets and difficult challenges. It has accessibility options if you can't handle the tough platforming challenges, because it's worth seeing all the incredible art and the great story.

6 Citizen Sleeper 2

A brutal CRPG with a great story and tough choices

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a brutal CRPG about an escaped android who has to put together a crew and complete jobs in order to survive in space as a wanted android. You have to make tough choices, using dice rolls to determine the outcome. Instead of throwing a die at every check, you instead roll all of your dice at the start of a day, and have to use whatever numbers they landed on to perform different tasks, creating a different kind of risk and reward. It's a deep sci-fi universe and there are tons of potential crew members to meet and interact with. It can be brutal at times, asking you to make the best of a bad situation at every turn, but the story and moments of triumph make it all worth it.

5 Donut County

A goofy narrative-driven game about a giant hole

Donut County is a goofy little narrative game about controlling a giant hole, and stealing everything you can from the hole. The gameplay is a physics-based puzzle game, where you have to think about the order you are going to collect items in, since the hole gets bigger every time you let an item drop. The story is about the impact this has on the small town, along with how all the characters in town react to your character, BK, for dropping the whole town into a hole. It's silly, goes unexpected places, and is fairly short, giving you a wonderful evening of physics-based puzzle solving. It was made by Ben Esposito, designer on What Remains of Edith Finch and The Unfinished Swan, if that gives you a better idea of the quality of the narrative in Donut County.

4 Hollow Knight

There's still time to prepare for Silksong

Hollow Knight is one of the most popular and beloved indie Metroidvanias of all time, but if you somehow haven't given it a chance, you can play it on Xbox Game Pass before Hollow Knight: Silksong arrives on the service when it actually releases. Hollow Knight has a gorgeous hand-drawn 2D art-style, following a small knight through a kingdom of insects. What makes Hollow Knight special is that it is not only an incredible Metroidvania, with tons of areas to explore and discover, but it also has incredible combat. The combat asks for near perfection and is extremely tough, but it makes overcoming that challenge so much more exciting. Don't be intimidated by the challenge though, as it's one of the most rewarding combat systems in gaming.

3 Monster Train 2

The sequel to the incredibly deep deck builder

Monster Train 2 is another major 2025 release, the follow-up to the smash indie hit Monster Train. The sequel plays quite similarly to the original, but adds in more clans to choose from, and more powerful relics and cards, creating tons of strategic options. The way it works is that you select a primary and secondary clan, which determines the cards in your starting deck, hero card, and the cards you can get from winning battles. You ride a train, which is where enemies attack. They start on the bottom floor and work upwards to your engine, which you need to protect, giving you three floors for strategic planning. Monster Train 2 also includes the clans and cards from the original game, offering even more clan combinations for you to experiment with. Monster Train 2 is on Xbox Game Pass and a must-play for anyone who likes deck builders.

2 Spiritfarer

A management sim with a heartbreaking story about death

Spiritfarer is a 2D management sim and exploration game about helping shepard spirits into the afterlife. You play as Stella, the ferry master to the dead, who has to find spirits to take to the afterlife. You need to have a boat filled with food sources and entertainment, in order to encourage spirits to voyage with you and to complete their tasks. Each spirit has some type of unfinished business you need to help with before they can move on. It's emotional and devastating at moments, but is ultimately positive about death and moving on from grief. There are tons of small activities you would expect, like farming, mining, fishing, and cooking, but everything is in service of the story.

1 Vampire Survivors

*Vampires not included

Vampire Survivors is the twin-stick shooter that sort of plays itself. The weapons fire automatically, but you control movements and upgrades, which can lead to special combination weapons and more secrets. While it's hard to describe everything that makes Vampire Survivors special, the gameplay is deeply satisfying, even if most of it happens automatically, but finding new weapon combinations and completing different tasks to unlock more characters and items creates an incredibly rewarding gameplay loop. There are also multiple DLCs you can pick up for a few dollars each, including the Among Us and Contra cross-over DLCs, which add weapons, maps, and characters from those games. I've put over 80 hours into Vampire Survivors on both my Xbox and Steam Deck, and I'm always thinking about playing more of it.

Tons of incredible indie games on Xbox Game Pass

These 10 games only scratch the surface of the hundreds of games on Xbox Game Pass, with more being added to the service every month. Some of these indies are from over eight years ago, while others were just released earlier in 2025. If you like playing new releases or discovering something new, Xbox Game Pass is a solid way to save yourself some money. If you are the kind of person who only plays a handful of games each year, it probably isn't for you, but any game that has made it's way into the catalog is usually worth at least checking out, even if it isn't totally for you.