My Top 10 Game Developers
I'm jumping ahead a bit in the Blaugust prompts, but I saw this topic and knew I had to cover it. Today, I'm sharing my top 10 game developers, and it's quite a long post, so grab a coffee or tea and get ready to dive in!
A note: I want to highlight indie devs for the most part, but there are a couple of triple-A devs on this list. While I don't particularly want to focus on larger studios because I feel they already get plenty of attention and they tend to treat their employees worse than indie studios, at the same time, the developers working for them are regular folks just trying to make a living and they deserve credit. It would be disingenuous for me not to include the two triple-A studios that are listed here because they're genuinely two of my favorite developers, and I appreciate the work that everyone does to bring us their games.
Another note: My only rule is that I'm not including development studios that are no longer operating or releasing games. Otherwise, LucasArts would've easily been listed here.
Spooky Doorway
This Irish studio is, without hesitation, at the top of my list. The Darkside Detective series had already cemented them as one of my favorite devs, and then they came out with The Seance of Blake Manor.
The Darkside Detective games are classic point-and-click adventures with a lot of humor. You play as Detective Francis McQueen, who solves puzzles cases with his sidekick, Officer Patrick Dooley, in America's 34th most haunted city of Twin Lakes -- legally distinct from Twin Peaks. I started playing for the quirkiness and stayed for the heartwarming friendship and quotes like the one in the above screenshot.
The Seance of Blake Manor is more serious in tone, and it's one of the most unique and impressive deductive games I've played, with fantastic writing and voice acting and a time mechanic that keeps things interesting. I had a lot of trouble pulling myself away from it. I'll follow this studio to the ends of the earth at this point.
Discover more at their official site.
Lucas Pope
Best known for Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, you can find more of Pope's work at his official site.
The aforementioned games are two of my all-time favorites, with Papers, Please being an affecting work-as-play game where you process immigration documents and Obra Dinn being an deductive game where you're an insurance investigator inspecting a shipwreck.
I love his earlier smaller games as well, especially the tense 6 Degrees of Sabotage and The Republia Times, which feels a bit like a precursor to Papers, Please. Pope's work focuses quite a bit on information gathering and illustrating how disinformation can negatively affect people. It uses history to shine a light on problems that still plague us today, and it's endlessly interesting.
Octavi Navarro
Navarro is a pixel artist and solo dev who created the Midnight Scenes series of point-and-click horror games. They're presented as episodes of a show similar to Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and they're pretty straightforward stories without many puzzles accompanying them. I've played nearly all of them, along with the standalone game Unwelcome, and I plan on playing his newest game, The Supper: New Blood, as well.
The pixel art is definitely a highlight of Navarro's games, and he's a master of doing a lot with a little. Each game is a wonderful little short story that builds dread until the shocking moment when everything comes together, which is always a sight to behold. I look forward to new games from Navarro and can't wait to see what he does next.
You can find his lovely pixel art and a link to his games on his official site.
Kitty Horrorshow
Best known for Anatomy, a game about a house that's alive, Kitty Horrorshow has made some of the most interesting horror games in existence, full stop. She hasn't released anything new in a while and doesn't seem to have a huge internet presence, but her games are all fascinating, going beyond simple scares to make you think about how deeply the places we visit and inhabit are ingrained in us.
I highly recommend the Haunted Cities series, along with Anatomy. The latter is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I've ever experienced, the kind of horror that seeps into your skin and settles in your bones. It also inspired one of my favorite video essays by Jacob Geller.
Passerine
Passerine is Sarah Willson, who creates some of my all-time favorite interactive fiction. You can find all of her games on her itch.io page.
I discovered her through The Krampus Case, which I had a ton of fun going through last Christmas. The writing is so good and had me laughing out loud. I've since played more of her games, and my favorites are The Good Ghost, The Column, Dead Mall Mystery, and Swap Wand User.
The puzzles in her games can be quite challenging, really stretching your mental muscles. They remind me a lot of some of the older text adventures I've played, where there is absolutely no hand-holding involved. They're well-written too, full of dry humor and puns. She has such a distinct style that I feel like I'd know if I was playing a Passerine game even without any indication of who the author was.
Atelier Sentô
I support this artistic duo on Patreon because I'm super excited about the work they do. I played the first iteration of their upcoming game The Doll Shop a few years ago on itch.io and fell in love with it. I can't wait to experience the full revamped version when it comes out soon. Please be sure to wishlist it on Steam if it interests you! I wrote a blurb about the original version on my Indie Game Recommendations page.
I played their other horror game, Yûrei Station, and loved it as well. They do such a great job with atmospheric horror and developing a sense of place. One thing I love about Yûrei Station in particular is that all of the graphics were hand-painted by high school students at the devs' workshop in Nantes.
Atelier Sentô's work really feels like it's done with human hands. Not that the other games listed here aren't, but they have a handmade feel to them that's more welcome than ever in a time when everything feels overrun by AI. Check out their games and other art at their official website.
Ludipe
Ludipe has recently become one of my favorite puzzle developers. You can find all of his lovely puzzle games on his itch.io page.
His puzzles are quite abstract, and a lot of them involve following instructions that intentionally aren't clear, relying on you to use contextual clues to figure out exactly how they're supposed to work. A Confusing Map is the purest example of this and one of my favorites. It brings to mind being given directions by someone before we had phones with built-in GPS and trying to draw a map based on their spoken instructions.
I'm also a big fan of Overwhelmed, which uses a puzzle to teach you about Madrid's public healthcare system, and Solitario Bártulo, a really fun take on Solitaire with some poker elements. I tend to enjoy doing puzzles in the morning with coffee, so I've added a couple of Ludipe's games to my morning routine.
Supergiant Games
Supergiant is one of those indie devs who have kind of broken away from the "indie" descriptor and become almost as successful and mainstream as a triple-A company. They're best known for their narrative roguelike Hades, which I devoted a lot of time to recently.
My favorite game of theirs, though, is the lesser-known Pyre, an RPG with a sports element. It's one of the most unique games I've played. You're essentially acting as a sports manager for a group of exiles, determining which of them earns their freedom based on the games they compete in. I fell in love with every single character, and making decisions in this game was brutal.
Supergiant's lead composer, Darren Korb, is also one of my favorite game composers of all time. The Bastion soundtrack in particular is in my top five video game soundtracks, with its odd mix of folk and industrial that somehow works so well.
Remedy Entertainment
Although Remedy is a triple-A studio, they often feel like a smaller developer. They started out with the Max Payne series, then expanded to horror series Alan Wake and Control. Their games take place in America but feel very Finnish, owing to the fact that Remedy is based in Finland and incorporates a lot of Nordic mythology and Finnish folklore into their plots.
The Remedyverse is dictated by the Unknown and mythological gods. It's like if David Lynch met the skalds. I love simply existing in their weird worlds for a while, and that's why they made this list. You can visit the official Remedy site for more info.
Capcom
The obvious one. Capcom has been around for a long time and has created some of my favorite game series: Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Ace Attorney, Mega Man, Monster Hunter, Dragon's Dogma, Dead Rising, Street Fighter... They basically need no introduction.
It's worth noting that Capcom has refused to work with union contracts and has had other labor issues in the past. Their stance on AI is also shaky. They've stated they won't use AI assets but will allow generative AI to "improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process."
It's all the usual disappointing stuff that you find from big game development companies these days. Remedy has said pretty much the same thing about using AI. My thoughts on this could fill a blog post of its own, but essentially I appreciate the openness but worry very much about the future of game development.
Despite this, I can't deny the magic that Capcom brought to me as a young gamer, and I've continued to enjoy the results of the work their human developers have done over the years. Resident Evil is my favorite game series of all time, and the strides it made for horror in the gaming world are undeniable.
Honorable Mentions
- FromSoftware, the studio that perfected environmental storytelling
- ConcernedApe, the one-man developer behind Stardew Valley
- Frictional Games, who brought us the horror gems Penumbra, Amnesia, and SOMA
- Hinterland Studio, for bringing me many lovely hours spent in the Canadian wilderness of The Long Dark
- Ice-Pick Lodge, for the incredible Pathologic games that stole my life away for a while