5 Best Indie Sci-Fi RPGs

Role-playing games make up a broad and varied genre, heavily saturated across a variety of sub-genres. From old-school CRPGs such as Baldur’s Gate to turn-based RPGs such as Octopath Traveler, all the way to the first-person open-worlds of Skyrim and Fallout, there’s something for everyone.

RPGs often cover a grand scale, but indie role-playing games tend to have a smaller scope, usually having to make sacrifices elsewhere to make room for ambition. Caves Of Qud, for example, is a tremendously expansive experience despite being an indie game but features minimal art direction. Indie games tend to thrive off of limitations, however, and this has led to a great number of ambitious RPGs across creatively-realized sci-fi worlds.

5 Star Traders: Frontiers

An Ambitious Sandbox RPG Set Across A Dangerous Galaxy

While its lower indie budget may be apparent, Star Traders: Frontiers is a wholly ambitious sci-fi RPG that’s sure to please fans of sandbox gameplay. Star Traders: Frontiers puts players in the role of a captain, leading and managing their crew on an abundance of adventures across the galaxy. This leads to a variety of role-playing opportunities, as players are able to heavily customize their crew, specializing them for specific roles.

Players can expect to spend plenty of time roaming the galaxy, trading goods (or contraband), hunting bounties, and defending themselves from savage pirates. Star Traders: Frontiers also features quests to complete, unique mini-games, and a dual combat system for space and ground combat. All this to say that Star Traders is a varied experience packed with content and role-playing opportunities, offering a low-budget sandbox that punches above its weight.

4 Griftlands

A Unique Combination Of RPG And Deck-Builder

Developed by indie darlings Klei Entertainment (the team behind greats such as Don’t Starve and Oxygen Not Included), Griftlands is an ambitious spin on the rogue-like deck-builder that blends in several elements of the RPG genre. As with all of Klei’s games, Griftlands features a tremendous art style, depicting a strange and alien world populated by quirky characters with memorable designs.

Griftlands excels, however, with its unique gameplay loop, which combines RPG-style character dialogue and important choices with a mixture of turn-based deck-builder combat and an inventive negotiation system. This negotiation system allows players to solve conflicts in a passive manner, adding to the game’s role-play mechanics and deepening the experience as a whole, as it requires players to build and master two unique decks.

3 Space Wreck

Platform(s): PC
Released: 2023
Developer(s): Pahris Entertainment SIA
Genre: RPG

This criminally underrated sci-fi RPG features a charming old-school art style and gameplay to match, offering players a Fallout-inspired experience that’s designed to be played multiple times. Space Wreck is a bite-sized RPG, short and sweet, and this goes hand-in-hand with gameplay that revolves heavily around the stats of a player’s character.

In fact, many of the player’s options in Space Wreck are limited by their stats, making character creation important and encouraging players to experiment with multiple characters in order to see all there is to see. Space Wreck‘s old-school isometric style and retro-RPG gameplay hearken to the original Fallout in more ways than one, but it stands out as its own beast with its accessible nature and short run-time.

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2 Citizen Sleeper

A Contemplative Sci-Fi RPG Inspired By The Tabletop

Taking heavy inspiration from tabletop RPGs, primarily in the name of player agency and immersive role-playing, Citizen Sleeper is a quiet sci-fi RPG with a cyberpunk overtone. The game takes place on a desperate, ruined space station populated by a diverse ensemble of memorable characters.

Citizen Sleeper is a text-heavy experience that won’t appeal to the less patient, but those who take the time to enjoy its writing and immerse themselves in its world will find a remarkably atmospheric game underneath. There are mechanics, too, choices to be made, driven by dice mechanics and ticking clocks in true TTRPG fashion.

1 Caves Of Qud

Exploring A Surreal Sci-Fi Fantasy World

Set to finally leave Early Access later this year, there’s never been a better time to jump into Caves Of Qud. This expansive RPG takes place in an imaginative open world that blends science fiction with fantasy in inventive ways, offering a strange and beguiling land that’s full of surprises and fun to explore. Caves Of Qud may be minimal in its art direction, but the creativity on display is sure to fire up the imagination.

Caves Of Qud‘s aforementioned minimalist visuals are in keeping with its traditional rogue-like gameplay, but players shouldn’t let either of these things scare them off; the unforgiving nature of its gameplay can be side-stepped via the game’s role-play mode, which allows players to enjoy the game as if it were a regular RPG. Furthermore, the minimalist visuals allow players to enjoy the game like they would a book, with the vaguely drawn sprites providing evocative prompts for the player’s imagination.