I want to talk about something that genuinely winds me up. Every year, dozens of brilliant indie turn-based RPGs come out, get maybe a week of coverage, and then vanish into the Steam library void, never to be discussed again. While everyone is busy talking about whatever the big release of the month is, something genuinely special quietly releases, gets a handful of reviews, and then sits on sale for five quid three months later wondering where everyone went.
This is my attempt to fix that. Ten games. All of them brilliant. All of them criminally underplayed. Starting with the one I cannot stop thinking about.
1) Wander Stars (2025)
This is the one I need you to play right now. Wander Stars came out in September 2025, developed by Paper Castle Games and published by Fellow Traveller, and it is one of the most joyful and inventive RPGs I have encountered in years. You play as Ringo, a fourteen-year-old martial artist looking for her missing brother, who teams up with Wolfe, a wolf-person scoundrel running from his past, to collect pieces of the legendary Wanderstar Map across ten episodic story arcs. It sounds like a Saturday-morning anime, and it absolutely is one, in the best possible way. The 90s anime aesthetic is gorgeous, hand-drawn, and full of personality, and the found-family dynamic between the cast builds in exactly the way you want it to.
The combat is where it gets genuinely exciting. You build your own attacks by combining words. Literally words. You collect vocabulary across the game and combine it to create your own fighting techniques, discovering synergies and enemy weaknesses through experimentation. It sounds completely mad, and it is, but it works in a way that feels like nothing else. Outerhaven gave it 4.5 out of 5 and called it one of the best indie RPGs of 2025. Endless Mode gave it 9.1. It currently has a 50% discount on Steam. There is absolutely no excuse.
2) Chained Echoes (2022)
If you have any love for SNES-era JRPGs and you have not played Chained Echoes yet, then we need to have a serious conversation. Made almost entirely by one person, Matthias Linda, it is a love letter to Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Xenogears, and Suikoden 2 that somehow manages to be more than just nostalgia bait. The Overdrive Meter system keeps every single battle interesting by creating a risk-reward dynamic where staying in the optimal zone means more damage and cheaper abilities, but pushing too far into the red means your party takes a hammering. Late in the game, you get access to mechs. Actual mechs. In a fantasy RPG. It is brilliant, and it is sitting on Steam with a Very Positive rating from over six thousand reviews, and somehow it still feels like a secret.
3) Cassette Beasts (2023)
Everyone spent 2023 talking about Pokémon and completely ignored the fact that a two-person studio called Bytten Studio made a monster-collecting RPG that is honestly better than anything Game Freak has put out in years. Set on a mysterious island called New Wirral, where people from different worlds keep mysteriously appearing, Cassette Beasts has you recording monsters onto cassette tapes and transforming into them during battle. The fusion system, which lets you combine any two monster forms into unpredictable hybrids, is one of the most creative combat systems in the genre. The open world is genuinely open, the story is surprisingly deep, and the soundtrack is absolutely excellent. It is nine quid. Nine pounds. For one of the best monster RPGs ever made. Inexcusable that more people are not playing it.
4) Bloomtown: A Different Story (2024)
Bloomtown is what happens when you take the Social Link system from Persona, the monster-taming combat of old-school JRPGs, the 1960s Americana aesthetic of EarthBound, and throw them all together into something that feels completely like its own thing. By day, you are a child exploring a small American town in the summer holidays, making friends and building relationships with the locals. By night, you are diving into their subconscious, a place called the Gloom, to fight their inner demons in turn-based battles. The contrast between the sunny surface world and the dark psychological realm underneath it is handled with a lot more sensitivity than you might expect, and the writing is sharp throughout. It flew almost completely under the radar when it came out, and that is a genuine shame.
5) Knuckle Sandwich (2023)
Andrew Brophy spent years making this by himself, and the result is one of the most chaotically creative RPGs ever made. You play as a boy who moves to a new city, gets a job at a diner, and accidentally gets tangled up in a missing-persons mystery involving a bizarre gang and a fanatical cult. The combat mixes turn-based structure with WarioWare-style minigames for every single attack and ability, which sounds exhausting and is occasionally infuriating but mostly is just wildly entertaining. The art style is unlike anything else in the genre. The humour is pitch black. The story goes to places you will not see coming. Journalists kept comparing it to EarthBound, which is not wrong but also massively undersells how strange and original it actually is.
6) Sea of Stars (2023)
Alright, Sea of Stars did get a decent amount of coverage when it came out, so this one is slightly less underplayed than the others. But the number of people I speak to who still have not played it despite owning it is genuinely baffling, so it is going on the list. Sabotage Studio made something that takes the best parts of Chrono Trigger and Illusion of Gaia and wraps them in some of the most beautiful pixel art ever put in a video game. The Eclipse Magic system, where you time hits and blocks to gain momentum and break enemy locks, makes every single battle feel active rather than passive. It was on PlayStation Plus and Game Pass, and I still know people who downloaded it and never started it. Start it.
7) Star Renegades (2020)
This one has had the longest to gather dust and is probably the most criminally overlooked game on this list. Star Renegades is a roguelite tactical RPG where you fight an endless imperial army across procedurally generated planets, and the key mechanic is an interrupt system that lets you break enemy attack chains by hitting them at exactly the right moment. The relationship system, where your party members can fall in love and have children who carry on the fight in the next run if they die, is one of the cleverest progression mechanics in the genre. It looks like a beautifully animated Saturday-morning cartoon. It costs about four quid on sale. Please go and play it.
8) Wandering Sword (2023)
A wuxia martial-arts RPG set in ancient China with an HD-2D visual style that sits somewhere between Octopath Traveller and classic SNES games. You play as a young warrior seeking revenge in a world full of martial-arts sects, political intrigue, and legendary fighters. The combat can be toggled between turn-based and real-time, which immediately makes it accessible to people who might bounce off a traditional turn-based system. The world is enormous, the cast of recruitable characters is vast, and the attention to wuxia genre conventions is the work of people who clearly love this stuff deeply. It got almost no coverage in Western games media despite being one of the most genuinely impressive RPGs of that year.
9) Drova: Forsaken Kin (2023)
Technically an action RPG rather than pure turn-based, but it earns its place on this list by being so deeply rooted in old-school RPG philosophy that it fits perfectly alongside everything else here. You are an outsider in a Celtic world full of magic and monsters, dropped in with no map, no quest markers, and no patience for people who need everything explained to them. The world is genuinely hostile and beautiful in equal measure, every piece of progression feels hard-won, and the atmosphere is unlike almost anything else in indie gaming. If you have ever looked at the original Gothic games and wished someone would make something that captured that specific feeling of earned discovery, Drova is exactly that.
10) Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling (2019)
Saving the oldest one for last. Bug Fables came out in 2019, developed by Moonsprout Games, and it is the best Paper Mario game since Thousand-Year Door. I will not be arguing about this. You play as three bugs—Vi the bee, Kabbu the beetle, and Leif the moth—exploring a world of giant insects in search of an ancient treasure. The turn-based combat uses a timing system almost identical to the original Paper Mario games, the writing is charming and genuinely funny, and the world building is surprisingly deep for a game about bugs. If the Paper Mario series stopped doing what you loved about it years ago, Bug Fables is the game that kept going. It is criminal that it does not have ten times the player base it has.
