34 published games carry Steam's Adventure genre tag; 34 of them also carry the “Indie” tag.
Steam's "Adventure" genre is used for games of very different shapes: point-and-click and narrative games, exploration-heavy Metroidvanias, and open-world action games that add the label next to "Action". The field says a game was filed under Adventure by its publisher; it does not say how much of your time is combat.
The games below are the published entries whose Steam genre field contains "Adventure". Read the "Good for" and "Avoid if" notes on each page for what the game actually asks of you; those notes are drafted by Claude from the store page and are not based on play-testing.
Counts on this page are computed at build time from the published data; the genre field itself is copied from Steam. See how this site is made.
by Halberd Studios · published by indie.io
9 Years of Shadows is a Metroidvania action-adventure following Europa, a warrior who wields music and light to restore color to a world consumed by darkness. Developed by Halberd Studios, it blends tight combat with exploration across interconnected areas unlocked through new abilities. The color-restoration mechanic ties aesthetics directly to progression, shifting environments visually as you advance.
ActionAdventureIndie
by adamgryu
A Short Hike is a compact open-world exploration game set in a provincial park, where you guide Claire to a mountain summit at your own pace. The game takes 1-2 hours to complete, with optional diversions — fishing, racing, chatting with other hikers — that extend the experience without requiring them. Solo developed by adamgryu, it prioritizes relaxed discovery over challenge.
AdventureIndie
by Frictional Games
Amnesia: The Bunker places you in a WW1 underground bunker hunted by a single AI-driven monster that dynamically responds to sound and light. Unlike earlier Amnesia titles, it emphasizes resource management — fuel for the generator, ammo scavenged from lockers — and allows more agency than pure hiding. The monster's behavior is procedural rather than scripted, making each run feel different.
ActionAdventureIndie
by The Game Kitchen · published by Team17
Blasphemous is a 2D action-platformer set in Cvstodia, a fictional world of extreme Catholic-inspired imagery and body horror, developed by The Game Kitchen. Combat is deliberate and execution-focused, with parry windows and unlockable abilities. The aesthetic draws heavily on Spanish Renaissance religious art, making it visually distinct from most pixel-art games.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Double Fine Productions · published by Double Fine Productions, Xbox Game Studios
Broken Age is a hand-animated point-and-click adventure by Double Fine Productions and Tim Schafer, funded via the landmark 2012 Kickstarter campaign that revived interest in the genre. Two narrative threads — a boy in a storybook world and a girl volunteering to be sacrificed to a monster — eventually intersect. Voice acting includes Elijah Wood and Jack Black.
AdventureCasualIndie
by Maddy Makes Games Inc., Extremely OK Games, Ltd. · published by Maddy Makes Games Inc.
Celeste is a precision platformer about Madeline climbing Celeste Mountain, developed by Maddy Makes Games. Each screen is a self-contained challenge built around tight jumping and dashing mechanics, with a narrative about anxiety and self-doubt that develops through dialogue and environmental storytelling. An Assist Mode lets you modify game speed and dash count, making it accessible without removing the default challenge.
ActionAdventureIndie
by NineStarWorks
Contact Me is a $1.99 indie horror game from NineStarWorks with minimal description and broken English in its store page. The game involves finding a key to progress in a horror context. Based on the limited description and community reviews, it offers a very short experience with rough production values.
AdventureIndieRPG
by Massive Monster · published by Devolver Digital
Cult of the Lamb combines a roguelite dungeon crawl with a base-building cult management sim. Between runs you build facilities for your followers — assigning tasks, managing their faith and needs, performing rituals — while the runs themselves provide resources and unlock new doctrines. Developed by Massive Monster and published by Devolver Digital, it received significant post-launch content updates including online co-op.
ActionAdventureIndieStrategy
by Motion Twin
Dead Cells is a roguelite action-platformer where each run through a procedurally generated castle is independent, with no checkpoints and permanent death. Combat is fast and punishing, with a weapon build assembled through each run that defines your playstyle for that attempt. Lore and world-building are delivered through environmental fragments rather than cutscenes. Extensive DLC expansions add new biomes, weapons, and a bestiary of new enemies.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Door 407
Diplomacy is Not an Option is a medieval fantasy RTS where you command a town against endless waves of enemies — thousands of units attacking simultaneously in battles that escalate toward the absurd. You build defenses, raise armies, and manage resources between assaults. The Steam Workshop enables custom maps and scenarios. Developer Door 407 targets players who enjoy being overwhelmed by escalating scale.
ActionAdventureCasualIndieSimulationStrategy
by Klei Entertainment
Don't Starve is Klei Entertainment's single-player survival game with a dark, Tim Burton-esque art style, where Wilson (or alternate characters) must gather resources, craft tools, and survive hunger, monsters, and sanity loss in a procedurally generated world. Death resets progress, though some unlocks persist. No objectives are given — survival itself is the goal.
AdventureIndieSimulation
by Klei Entertainment
Don't Starve Together is the standalone multiplayer expansion of Don't Starve, letting up to 6 players share a survival world. The cooperative survival loop remains — gathering resources, building a base, surviving seasons and boss events — but coordination adds social complexity to the resource management. The game receives ongoing free content updates including new biomes and characters.
ActionAdventureIndieRPGSimulationStrategy
by Humble Hearts LLC · published by Xbox Game Studios
Dust: An Elysian Tail is a single-player action RPG created almost entirely by one developer (Humble Hearts), with hand-painted backgrounds and fluid combo combat centered on a spin attack and AI-companion Fidget's projectile spam. The game runs approximately 10 hours and tells a linear story through voiced characters. It won the 2012 Xbox Live Arcade Game of the Year.
ActionAdventureIndieRPG
by Team Cherry
Hollow Knight is Team Cherry's Metroidvania set in Hallownest, a vast underground kingdom of bugs. Its map is interconnected and layered with secrets — areas unlock as you acquire new movement abilities, and most of the game's lore is delivered through scattered environmental detail rather than explicit narration. The combat is deliberate and demanding, with precise parry (soul) mechanics for progression through the game's optional Colosseum and boss rush content.
ActionAdventureIndie
by No Brakes Games · published by Curve Games
Human Fall Flat is a physics-based platformer where you control a wobbly human with ragdoll physics, solving puzzles by manipulating objects, climbing, and leveraging the unpredictable physics engine. Levels are dreamlike floating environments with open-ended puzzle solutions. Online and couch co-op with up to 8 players makes it a party game context as much as a puzzle platformer.
AdventureCasualIndieSimulation
by thatgamecompany · published by Annapurna Interactive
Journey is thatgamecompany's short exploration game set in a desert world with ancient ruins, where you guide a robed figure toward a distant mountain. The game takes 2 hours to complete and has no dialogue or text — emotion and narrative are conveyed entirely through music and movement. Online co-op places anonymous strangers alongside you who can only communicate via musical chirps.
AdventureIndie
by Zeekerss
Lethal Company is a co-op horror game where 1–4 players scavenge abandoned industrial moons for scrap to meet a corporate profit quota each cycle. Each moon has randomized monster placements and loot, and dying forfeits all collected items for that round. Tension comes from balancing greed against survival as higher-value moons host increasingly dangerous creatures.
ActionAdventureIndieEarly Access
by intiny
Love Is All Around is an indie life simulation and strategy hybrid where players navigate romance, friendship, and community management in a cozy village setting. It blends RPG character progression with simulation mechanics like resource management and building relationships over multiple in-game seasons. The game emphasizes personal choices and their downstream effects on community dynamics.
AdventureIndieRPGSimulationStrategy
by Borealys Games
Mages of Mystralia is an action-adventure where spell crafting is the central mechanic — players combine modular rune components to design spells with custom behaviors, trajectories, and effects. The game was developed with input from author Brandon Sanderson, whose magic-system philosophy shaped the modular rune design. Exploration and environmental puzzle-solving reinforce the spell-crafting loop throughout.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Charge Games · published by Digerati, Doyoyo Games
Overloop is a puzzle-platformer built around recording and looping your own movement, then interacting with past actions as physical entities in the same level. Players coordinate their current self with stacked ghost recordings to solve timing-sensitive environmental puzzles. Mechanical complexity escalates as recordings accumulate and must interact with each other and the environment simultaneously.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Lucas Pope · published by 3909
Papers, Please is a bureaucratic puzzle game set in a fictional Soviet-bloc nation where players work as an immigration officer examining documents, catching discrepancies, and deciding who crosses the border. Moral tension arises when rule-following conflicts with human stories — helping a refugee may cost your family's wages. Daily rules, new document types, and stamp requirements escalate systemic complexity throughout.
AdventureIndie
by Owlcat Games · published by META Publishing, Owlcat Games
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is Owlcat Games' deep CRPG based on the Pathfinder ruleset, set during a demonic crusade in a besieged city. The Enhanced Edition adds the Inevitable Excess epilogue DLC, balance patches, and mythic power systems that grant near-deity-level abilities in later acts. Character creation spans hundreds of feat, class, and mythic path combinations requiring significant system knowledge.
ActionAdventureIndieRPGStrategy
by Sergey Bobrov
Planet in the Shadows is an indie atmospheric exploration game set on an alien world where players uncover environmental clues and navigate hazardous terrain to piece together the planet's history. Progression is driven by environmental storytelling and discovery rather than combat or narrative dialogue. The game prioritizes atmosphere and exploration pacing over mechanical complexity.
AdventureIndie
by yayapipi · published by Yayapipi Studio
Pulut Adventure is a Malaysian indie platformer featuring a sticky-rice-inspired character navigating vibrant environments drawn from Southeast Asian visual culture. The game focuses on accessible platforming mechanics with collectibles and level exploration rather than challenging combat. It represents a growing wave of Southeast Asian indie games bringing regional cultural aesthetics to the genre.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Redbeet Interactive · published by Axolot Games
Raft starts players on a small wooden platform in an infinite ocean, tasking them with hooking floating debris, expanding the raft, and surviving shark attacks while following narrative clues toward island destinations. Resource collection and crafting escalate from basic survival toward engine-powered vessel construction and story island exploration. Multiplayer supports cooperative raft-building with up to 8 players.
AdventureIndieSimulation
by BiscuitPlay
Red Forest is an indie atmospheric adventure set in a dark and hostile forest environment, blending exploration with survival elements and occasional combat encounters. Players navigate dense woodland areas uncovering environmental storytelling while managing limited resources. The game prioritizes mood and tension over mechanical complexity.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Coffee Stain Studios · published by Coffee Stain Publishing
Satisfactory is a first-person factory automation game on an alien planet where players build increasingly complex conveyor belt and production line networks to extract, process, and synthesize resources. Unlike top-down factory games, its first-person perspective makes industrial scale viscerally tangible as production networks stretch across kilometers of terrain. Co-op multiplayer supports up to 4 players building shared factories.
AdventureIndieSimulationStrategy
by BlueTwelve Studio · published by Annapurna Interactive
Stray is a third-person adventure where players control a stray cat navigating a post-human cyberpunk city populated by robots, solving environmental puzzles and uncovering the city's history through companion robot B-12. The game is notable for accurate cat movement and behavior animations, including the ability to knock objects off shelves. Main story completion takes roughly 5–8 hours.
AdventureIndie
by Re-Logic
A 2D sandbox action-adventure game where exploration, crafting, and boss progression interlock tightly. The world generates differently each run, and gear progression follows a clear path through 20+ bosses across pre-hardmode and hardmode phases.
ActionAdventureIndieRPG
![The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]](https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/963450/header.jpg?t=1667004057)
by Leonard Menchiari, Daniele Vicinanzo, Giulio Perrone · published by Playsaurus
A faithful remake of a 1987 CGA game with deliberate 2-bit graphics aesthetics and methodical platforming combat. The game's visual and audio design are its primary distinction — mechanical depth is modest but the atmosphere is exceptional.
ActionAdventureIndie
by Endnight Games Ltd
A first-person open-world survival horror game where a plane crash survivor must build shelters and fight cannibal mutants. The combination of crafting, exploration, and enemy AI creates emergent tension, especially in co-op. VR support is included.
ActionAdventureIndieSimulation
by Galactic Cafe · published by Galactic Cafe, Klei Publishing
A first-person narrative game that deconstructs player agency and game design through a self-aware narrator and branching paths. Most playthroughs are under an hour, but discovering all endings and the meta-commentary beneath them rewards replaying extensively.
AdventureIndie
by Smartly Dressed Games
A free-to-play zombie survival game with blocky low-poly aesthetics, extensive Steam Workshop modding support, and a long history of active development by a solo developer. Supports large multiplayer servers with PvP and PvE modes.
ActionAdventureCasualIndieFree To Play
by Iron Gate AB · published by Coffee Stain Publishing
A Norse mythology survival and exploration game for up to 10 players where progression unlocks through defeating biome bosses. The building system is detailed, the sailing and exploration create a genuine sense of discovery, and the world is procedurally generated.
ActionAdventureIndieRPGEarly Access