Scampir

I know it doesn't count as indie, but hear me out, the recent South Park RPGs are legit good games.

Crystal Project

I've real liked games from Eral's series by Rad Codex- so Voidspire tactics, Alvora tactics and finally horizon's gate. The classes offered are real fun, I real like the races you can play as and it has very modifable difficulty settings. I think they are all well worth peoples time

Virgo Vs the Zodiac

Off the top of my head, Ib, LiEat, and, more well known, Undertale. They really got me thinking about how we present the player character and their motivations vs other characters or the world they inhabit.

A lot of the Role Playing aspect, for me at least, is how well the characters or player is integrated into the world and these three I think do a great job! While having classes and really nice skills while levelling up is cool I will never say no to a good narrative experience.

Crystal Project for sure (you got me to play it I think, lol). I thought Ikenfell was well produced, but ultimately wasn't super into it.

I suppose the Shadowrun Returns series no longer counts as indie, seeing as Harebrained is owned by Paradox now (and the Shadowrun IP is technically owned by... Microsoft I think?), but I sort of lump them into a "lower budget" category.

Not so much an RPG, but if the brief is primarily turn based, I love the dance battles in Ooblets. In fact even as I'm typing this I can hear the music in my head, and the noises that the little Ooblets make when I play different cards.

Might be stretching the indie definition since it got published by THQ, but Expeditions: Viking may be an all time favorite of mine. Excellent storytelling with some quite interesting characters that doesn't gloss over a lot of the historical reality of the time period.

For the full indie experience, Vaporum is a delight. Classic dungeon crawling blobber but with a steam and clockwork twist. Quite challenging too!

Star Stealing Prince by @earlronove remains a classic to this day

How could I choose just one?

• I love Hylics 1 and 2's use of jamming music and surreal visuals.

• I love Ocean OI's super minimalist setup. Everything is removed but the core essence of JRPG battling.

• On the opposite end, Damien Crawford's maximalist design sensibilities are inspiring to see, even if the games themselves are often bewildering to play.

• Is Palace of Woe a turn-based RPG? It doesn't feature dialog, level ups, or conventional battle gameplay, but it certainly feels RPG-like in its delivery. The atmosphere, exploration, and puzzle aspects are excellent.

More broadly, I love seeing how the indie RPG scene has grown in the 8 years since Undertale's release. Undertale wasn't the first indie RPG, of course, but it did inspire a lot of developers to get cruder, more personal, and more weird with their games. It's hard to find a modern indie RPG developer who hasn't learned something from Toby Fox.

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is a great RPG, and has two systems I want to highlight.

First, the Surprise/Alert system. You can surprise an enemy to make them skip a turn, this makes them alert when they clear the effect. Alert lasts longer the more times they are surprised. This leads to a careful balance of interpreting moves that are harmful without overdoing it.

Second, the stealing system. You don't steal items-- you steal hopes, dreams, plans, numbers and time. Each enemy that you can steal from has unique interactions with the command in battle; this leads to whole new ways to deal with some combats.

Also, if you take a moment to digest the true ending, it leads to a lot of thinking of the care of people at that stage in life. The game stuck with me, even with how it's outside of my preferred stories.

I might have some recency bias, but I loved Cassette Beasts!

Fuga: Melodies of Steel and Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2 are both very excellent turn-based strategy RPGs, where half of the game is managing your resources. The sales pitch is, in short: if you're not careful, you may have to end up sacrificing a party member's life. The player is beholden to a set path, with few branches, so there's minimal opportunity to grind for exp or items.

It's just very smartly designed and satisfying to push through a fight by the skin of my teeth. Managing your resources isn't just the obvious item maintenance or tank upgrades, but also fostering relationships between the children... which feeds back into combat, as this boosts their support affinity with one another and allows the use of super powerful Link Attacks.

Note though that, while the second game does ease away from this, the first game's setting is very obviously inspired by WWII and is not the least bit subtle about the enemy Berman forces being nazi stand-ins.

It's gotta be Off and it's not even close for me

If tactical rpgs count, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark deserves a mention. In a landscape where there's a lot of lazy self-styled "spiritual sequels" it could be easy to write off as a FF:T clone and in a lot of ways it wears that influence on its sleeve, but at every turn it makes the right creative choice within that space; the story is interesting enough and the creativity and cleverness that went in to the character classes and abilities creates a really pleasing depth of customization and experimentation. Instead of feeling like it's just trying to make something as much like the nostalgic favorite as they could without outright copying it feels like the devs took the basic framework and built something new on it.

Last Scenario is one of my fav rpg games and it's a shame more people don't know about it

hylics 2. definitely hylics 2.

Lots of cool indie turn based games every year but not played a lot of them but this list is my favorites that I have played of turn based JRPG/RPG style games that I finished or played a bit of! I am talking specifically about classic normal turn based games where you fight with skills and abilities and no movement on the battlefield like a sort of Xcom/Banner Saga element. Indivisible is pretty fun but its a sort of turn based real time hybrid game. All games here are single player with story as well and no roguelite elements. Don't have the energy/time now to put steam/trailer links to the games here or type of my thoughts and descriptions on each game.Might in the future, I did enjoy all games listed here and I would recommend any of them checking them out.

-1.Omori

-2.Casette Beasts

-3.Virgo Versus the Zodiac

-4.Undertale

-5.Jack Move

-6.Pixel Noir

-7.Child of Light,

-8.Demo only now but I loved the demo so far for volleyball pals!

-9. Lisa the Painful/Joyful, not played the definitive edition yet

-10. Played very little but Fear and Hunger 1 and 2 are pretty cool and Fear and Hunger 2 seems like a big improvement over 1 and it came out this year

-11.Monster Sanctuary

-12. Crystal project

-13. West of loathing and its sequel

-14. Fuga Melodies 1 and 2- kinda a stretch since the team has worked for AAA companies and made Fuga games on DS.But still it’s a much smaller team and project then a AAA game or maybe even a AA game.

-15. TemTem-gameplay good fun although would rather it was a fully offline single player game

-16 Costume Quest 1 and 2

-17. Steam World Quest-I do recommend the game although do note its like 20 hours long and feels like it should have been 10-12 hours max

-18. Ooblets-farming simulator creature raising hybrid game has cute simple turn based combat although its not the major focus of the game.

-19. Suits Business RPG

-20.OFF

-21. Sunday Gold

-22. Underhero

-23. Cthulu Saves Christmas

-24 I wasn't mad about it but I now plenty love Bug Fables for just being like Paper Mario RPG and not much different.

Lot of games but they are the ones I remember and enjoyed out of all the turn based classic styled games.Probably being a bit harsh on Bug Fables, it seems/feels like a good game just the excessive hey remember Paper Mario and very slow combat turned me off it a bit.Might return to it someday,writing was charming for the 3 main characters especially the player character Bee one.

I think I mentioned it on the last post, but it's still relevant: FRANKEN by splendidland. It's a neat little game that takes inspiration from old school jrpgs, but the music makes it feel like you're playing through some dramatic anime from the 70's. The pixel art is lovely. It doesn't take itself to seriously. The characters are funky (but in a good way, imo).
I'm not sure how much of an "rpg" it really is since uh... you only have one attack. But it's a great, short, curated experience that made me feel things.

taking a moment to share rpg maker dungeon here: https://cohost.org/pig/tagged/rmdungeon

(otherwise: check out ruina fairy tale of the forgotten ruins, hat world, enchant farm, geasaga, weird and unfortunate things are happening, demon king chronicle, dhux's scar, exit fate, hero's realm, space funeral, helen's mysterious castle, unterwegs in dusterburg, false skies, capella's promise, nepheshel...)

(also, touhou rpgs! touhou puppet dance performance, genius of sappheiros/devil of decline, artificial dream in arcadia, and fantasy maiden wars--if you know japanese)