Queer Indie Games That Deserve a Spot in Your Steam Library

Indie games have been doing something the big studios mostly haven’t: treating queer players like people who deserve stories written for them. These games range from quiet and melancholy to chaotic and joyful. All of them are worth your time.

A Mortician’s Tale

You play as Charlie, a mortician, and the game is a slow, warm, thoughtful exploration of death and care. Each level involves preparing a body for burial or cremation while receiving emails from your boss and colleagues and watching the small business you work for navigate a changing industry. It is not a horror game. It is, genuinely, a comfort game about the people who take care of us when we’re gone. Charlie’s life is implicitly queer and the game handles death with more gentleness than almost anything else in the medium. About an hour long. Worth every minute.

Boyfriend Dungeon

A dungeon crawler where your weapons are also your romantic interests, and you can date a sword, a spear, a dagger, or a cat, among others. The game includes both male and female romance options and a non-binary option, and its inclusion of an aromantic/asexual character is one of the more thoughtful representations in games. It is also just fun. The combat is breezy, the writing is charming, and the voice acting is good. A good first indie game for players who mostly play mainstream titles.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

You are a worker in a future corporate dystopia, cutting apart spaceships for salvage to pay off a massive debt. The game is about labor, class, and the way workers are ground up by systems that don’t care about them. The protagonist is canonically queer and the story that unfolds across the campaign has real stakes. The gameplay loop, methodically cutting apart ships in zero gravity, is deeply satisfying in a way that is hard to explain. Meditative and politically engaged at the same time.

Coffee Talk

You run a late-night coffee shop in a contemporary Seattle where humans live alongside elves, orcs, werewolves, and other creatures. Your job is to listen to your customers and make them the right drinks. The game is a visual novel and the stories it tells are quiet and specific: a musician struggling with their career, a couple navigating cultural differences, a woman reconnecting with her estranged father. Several characters are LGBTQ+ and their identities are simply part of who they are, not plot points. Extremely cozy. Perfect for rainy evenings.

Celeste

Celeste is a precision platformer about a young woman climbing a mountain. It is also, as creator Maddy Thorson has confirmed, a story about being trans that didn’t fully know it was that story when it was made. The metaphors are present throughout: the mountain as dysphoria, the summit as self-acceptance, Madeline’s shadow self as something to integrate rather than destroy. It is one of the most acclaimed indie games of its generation and the queer readings are not projections, they’re baked in. Accessibility options make it playable for everyone.

Disco Elysium

A point-and-click RPG where you play a detective with no memory trying to solve a murder in a city haunted by a failed revolution. The game is a massive conversation with yourself, your skills, and the broken world around you. Its politics are leftist and its treatment of identity, failure, and self-reconstruction resonates deeply with queer players. Dense and long and absolutely worth every hour.

Any of these are worth buying on sale or at full price. Put a few in your library and come back to them when you need them.