Indie games are the backbone of the gaming industry. They represent the next generation of game makers and, more often than not, take wilder creative swings than the generally risk-averse big-budget AAA space. And at a time when The Game Awards nominates titles produced by major corporations as indies, it feels all the more important to celebrate the games that are actually made by small teams with limited resources.
Nowhere is that indie spirit more prominent than in Canada. Often, we Canadians undersell ourselves, humbly refraining from touting our own achievements, even when they’re particularly impressive. After all, we’re quite a small country in terms of population, yet we still manage to be the third-largest producer of games in the world, with an estimated $5.5 billion of our GDP coming from the national gaming sector.
2023, in particular, was a strong showing for Canada’s indie game scene. From two notable The Game Awards wins to some of the top-rated releases and even shoutouts from prominent executives, Canadian indie developers took the world by storm in 2023.
Goodbye Volcano High
Image credit: KO_OP
Developer/publisher: KO_OP (Montreal, Quebec)
Genre: Narrative adventure
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5 (timed console exclusive), PC (Steam)
Goodbye Volcano High has been a long time coming. After facing multiple delays (in part to commendably maintain the developer’s no-crunch, four-day workweek routine) and a deplorable harassment campaign, the anthropomorphic dinosaur game was finally released in August. In Goodbye Volcano High, players take on the role of Fang, a non-binary pterodactyl (played by non-binary actor Lachlan Watson) who’s the lead vocalist of a band. In your final year at school, you’ll have to jam out to catchy songs and deepen bonds with fellow teens before time is up. Most impressively, Goodbye Volcano High took home the top honour at this year’s Tribeca Games Festival out of many other titles from around the world, as well as a nomination for Games For Impact at The Game Awards.
Hill Agency: PURITYdecay
Image credit: Achimostawinan Games
Developer/publisher: Achimostawinan Games (Hamilton, Ontario)
Genre: Narrative adventure
Platform: PC (Steam)
Last year’s Ubisoft Indie Series winner is an Indigenous “cybernoir” story set in a dystopian world. As hardboiled detective Meeygen Hill, you’ll have to investigate murders in an Indigenous (Néhinaw) city that’s thriving beneath a corpo-filled metropolis. Distinguishing its cyberpunk setting from the likes of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell is a focus on Indigenous characters and Cree language throughout the city, plus a striking black-and-white aesthetic punctuated with neon highlights. Indigenous women are the most under-represented voice in Canadian media, so it’s wonderful to see a game like Hill Agency pushing for more of that representation.
Ravenlok
Image credit: Cococucumber
Developer/publisher: Cococucumber (Toronto, Ontario)
Genre: Action-RPG
Platform: Xbox consoles (plus Game Pass), PC (Epic Games Store)
After the 2017 co-op-supported dungeon-crawler Riverbond and the 2021 retro-inspired turn-based RPG Echo Generation, the adorably named Cococucumber completes its so-called ‘Voxel Trilogy’ with Ravenlok. That means the action-RPG features the same aesthetically pleasing blocky visual style to tell its Alice in Wonderland-inspired tale about a young woman who travels to a strange world to stop an evil queen. With a simple and easy-to-pick-up real-time melee combat system and wonderfully creative boss fights, Ravenlok is well-paced and consistently engaging. Meanwhile, Xbox president Sarah Bond has specifically shouted out Ravenlok, while the game also made it onto Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer’s Xbox Year in Review list. Best of all, the popular Can You Pet The Dog? Twitter X account said the game offers one of the fastest TTPs (“time-to-pet”) — at 15 seconds in!
In Stars and Time
Image credit: insertdisc5/Armor Games Studio
Developer: insertdisc5 (Toronto, Ontario)
Publisher: Armor Games Studio
Genre: RPG
Platform: PC (Steam)
Another LGBTQ+ positive title on this list, In Stars and Time is an Undertale-inspired party-based RPG about breaking out of a time loop to stop a tyrannical king. While the Rock-Paper-Scissors style combat is solid, it’s the neat spins on the time loop structure — like equipping memories of your friends to build out your character — and well-written and diverse cast that really stick with you. Oh, and it’s got a delightful cartoony black-and-white aesthetic that looks ripped right out of the Game Boy era — what’s not to like?
Sea of Stars
Image credit: Sabotage Studio
Developer/publisher: Sabotage Studio (Quebec City, Quebec)
Genre: RPG
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5 (and PlayStation Plus Extra/Premium), Xbox consoles (plus Xbox Game Pass), Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam)
Sabotage co-founder Thierry Boulanger grew up in Quebec playing games like Chrono Trigger, dreaming one day that he’d get to make that kind of RPG himself. How lovely is it, then, that he and his small team got to do just that with Sea of Stars, a stunning pixellated throwback turn-based RPG that even features music from Chrono composer Yasunori Mitsuda? As it did with the 2018 action-platformer The Messenger, though, Sabotage consciously removed a lot of the friction of retro games in Sea of Stars by eschewing random encounters and any need for grinding. Despite all of the aforementioned controversy surrounding Best Independent Game at The Game Awards, Sea of Stars ultimately took home that honour, and it was so deserved.
Season: A Letter to the Future
Image credit: Scavengers Studio
Developer/publisher: Scavengers Studio (Montreal, Quebec)
Genre: RPG
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, PC (Steam)
There have been a lot of “end of the world” stories in games, but Season: A Letter to the Future approaches that conceit more interestingly than most. Since you can’t actually prevent it, you’re instead tasked with venturing out in the world, camera in hand, to capture the world in its final moments. In this way, there’s a profoundly meditative quality to the entire experience. On your bike, you’ll ride around largely abandoned areas, soaking in the bittersweet tranquility, until you meet strangers with whom you’ll develop short but memorable bonds. Who said the end of the world can’t be beautiful?
Slay the Princess
Image credit: Black Tabby Games
Developer/publisher: Black Tabby Games (Toronto, Ontario)
Genre: Visual novel
Platform: PC (Steam)
Toronto-based Black Tabby has consistently been putting out some of the top horror visual novels in years, and it’s done so once more with Slay the Princess. In a clever twist on “save the princess” style stories, this game, as the title suggests, tasks you with actually killing one. To do that, you’ll have to go through narrative loops in which your choices lead to impressively varied outcomes. Throw in sharp voice acting and gorgeous hand-drawn art by Abby Howard and you have a real gem.
Solace State
Image credit: Vivid Foundry Corp.
Developer/publisher: Vivid Foundry Corp. (Toronto, Ontario)
Genre: Narrative adventure, visual novel
Platforms: Xbox consoles, PC (Steam)
Like our last cyberpunk game on this list, Solace State aims to stand out in the genre by focusing on diversity. As lead developer Tanya Kan tells it, it’s rare to see a queer woman — especially one of colour — have a prominent voice in a large community, but that’s exactly who lies at the heart of Solace State. In the game, you play as Chloe, a queer Asian woman tasked with uniting communities against against a biotech company. The politically-charged narrative offers many branching paths based on your decisions, all told through a unique 2D-3D visual novel aesthetic.
Tchia
Image credit: Acaweb/Kepler Interactive
Developer: Awaceb (formerly in Bordeaux, France, now located in Montreal, Quebec)
Publisher: Kepler Interactive
Genre: Action-adventure
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, PC (Epic Games Store)
Childhood friends Phil Crifo and Thierry Boura had a heartful goal in mind for Tchia: share their childhood home of New Caledonia with gamers. To do that, the pair’s development studio, Awaceb, leveraged the hands-off exploration mechanics — particularly the “climb or glide anywhere with a stamina metre” setup — of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That’s not to say Tchia lacks any identity of its own; far from it. Besides being lovingly rooted in New Caledonian culture (including, most notably, featuring local Indigenous actors), the gameplay allows you to “soul-jump” into animals and even inanimate objects to control them. That earnest desire to highlight the small French island clearly struck a chord with audiences, as the game won Games For Impact at this year’s The Game Awards.
Venba
Image credit: Visai Games
Developer/publisher: Visai Games (Toronto, Ontario)
Genre: Narrative cooking
Platforms: PlayStation 4/5, Xbox consoles (plus Xbox Game Pass), Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam)
While Venba has been on our radar for a couple of years now, it’s been amazing to see the larger gaming community discover and embrace the Toronto-set narrative cooking game over the past several months. Commendably, creative director Abhi wanted to break from convention and tell an immigrant story from the perspective of the parents — specifically, an Indo-Canadian mother — rather than the children. With delicious and painstakingly recreated Tamil cuisine at its centre, Venba explores the struggles the titular matriarch has in retaining her heritage in Toronto amid her son’s Western upbringing. It’s a powerful story that hits close to home for immigrants the world over, not just in Toronto, and it even netted much-deserved Best Debut Indie and Games For Impact nominations at this year’s The Game Awards.
Given how many games are made in Canada, that only scratches the surface of the indies released this year. It also doesn’t account for the bigger games made by non-indies or much larger teams, like Montreal-based EA Motive’s splendid Dead Space remake or Vancouver-based Phoenix Labs’ delightful Animal Crossing-esque Fae Farm. Even Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield, two of the biggest games of the year, have support teams in Quebec. Then, naturally, there were the latest annual sports games from EA Vancouver: NHL 24, EA Sports FC 24 and UFC 5.
Meanwhile, big ongoing Canadian games like Dead by Daylight (Montreal’s Behaviour Interactive) and Warframe (London, Ontario’s Digital Extremes) got major updates; the former added Alien‘s Xenomorph while the latter is introducing new characters voiced by Ben Starr (Final Fantasy XVI‘s Clive) and Neil Newbon (BG3‘s Astarion), among other new content.
Of course, there will be many more Canadian games launching in 2024, including Rocket Adrift’s Toronto-set horror game Psychroma and Metroidvania platformer Earthblade from Vancouver’s Extremely OK Games. We’ll have a full round-up of 2024 Canadian games to look out for in January.
For now, though, what were your favourite Canadian games of 2023? Let us know in the comments.
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