The Best Games of 2025 You Can Grab for Under $20
With console prices climbing and big-budget releases flirting with the $80 mark, it’s easy to feel like gaming is becoming a luxury hobby. Between the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and premium-priced hits like Mario Kart World, the barrier to entry can look pretty steep.
Yet, beneath the glare of AAA marketing, 2025 has quietly become a stellar year for players on a budget. Independent studios are putting out sharp, imaginative games that don’t demand a 4K TV, a monster GPU, or a triple-digit bank withdrawal. Many of them run on older hardware—or even modest laptops—and still manage to be some of the most memorable experiences of the year.
Every game highlighted here costs $20 or less at standard pricing, with many dipping significantly during seasonal or platform sales. If you’ve got a bit of holiday cash or gift card balance, this list is where you’ll get the most playtime per dollar.
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Why These Games Stand Out in 2025
Indie games are no longer just “small side projects.” In 2025, they’re pushing the medium forward. You’ll see:
– Bold visual styles instead of generic realism
– Personal, risk-taking stories you won’t find in blockbuster franchises
– Clever mechanics that prioritize creativity over cinematic bloat
– Reasonable system requirements that welcome older PCs and handhelds
Crucially, these titles respect both your time and your wallet. They’re affordable, focused, and designed to be finished—rather than padded with endless grind.
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Ball x Pit
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles (with modest specs)
Ball x Pit looks deceptively simple at a glance—just a ball, a pit, and a set of physics-based challenges. In practice, it’s a razor-sharp arcade puzzler that tests your timing, precision, and patience in equal measure.
Levels start out approachable—nudging a ball across simple platforms—but quickly escalate into elaborate obstacle courses full of moving hazards, shifting gravity, and environmental tricks. The tight controls and instant restarts make it dangerously easy to fall into that “just one more try” loop.
For players who love score-chasing and leaderboard bragging rights, Ball x Pit is a perfect fit. It’s also incredibly lightweight, running comfortably on older machines and low-power handheld devices.
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Hollow Knight: Silksong
Price: Budget-friendly at launch, under $20
Platforms: PC, current and last-gen consoles, handhelds
Hollow Knight: Silksong finally lands in 2025, and it somehow lives up to years of anticipation. You step into the role of Hornet, leaping and dashing through a sprawling, hauntingly beautiful metroidvania world teeming with secrets.
Silksong doubles down on what made the original Hollow Knight beloved: sharply tuned combat, intricate level design, and an eerie, melancholy atmosphere. Movement is faster and more acrobatic this time, encouraging aggressive play and stylish takedowns.
Despite its scale and polish, the game keeps its price low compared to most big-name releases. Performance is also generous: you don’t need cutting-edge components to get a smooth experience, making Silksong one of the best value propositions in 2025 gaming.
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Despelote
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles
Despelote is a narrative-driven game framed around a simple pastime: kicking a soccer ball around a city. Set in Ecuador, it blends light exploration with gentle, organic storytelling, letting you experience neighborhoods, parks, and side streets through the eyes of a child whose life revolves around the sport.
Rather than bombarding you with objectives, the game invites you to wander, talk to locals, and see how a single ball can become a social catalyst. Conversations, overheard stories, and small interactions build a surprisingly rich portrait of place and community.
Despelote doesn’t rely on hyper-realistic graphics or heavy action. It’s an atmospheric, grounded experience that runs well on modest hardware, offering high emotional impact for a modest price.
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Luto
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles (best with headphones)
Luto is a psychological horror experience that trades jump-scare spam for slow-burning dread. The game traps you inside a looping, suffocating domestic space that shifts and distorts the more you explore. Hallways stretch, rooms reconfigure, and familiar spaces turn hostile as the narrative digs into themes of grief and mental health.
The focus is on exploration, environmental storytelling, and unsettling audio design rather than combat. You won’t be gunning down monsters; instead, the horror lies in what you discover—and what the environment implies about the protagonist’s state of mind.
Its relatively low price and undemanding graphics make Luto a great pick for horror fans who want something tense and memorable that doesn’t require top-tier hardware.
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Megabonk
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles
Megabonk channels the spirit of chaotic party games with a modern, absurdist twist. Think of it as a blend of slapstick physics and competitive minigames, where half the fun is in how spectacularly things can go wrong.
You and your friends (locally or online) throw yourselves into short, ridiculous rounds—platforming, dodging, racing, and knocking each other off bizarre arenas. The controls are easy to grasp, making it instantly accessible to non-gamers, but there’s enough nuance to keep regular players hooked.
Because the visual style is stylized rather than resource-hungry, Megabonk holds steady on most systems while delivering tons of replayability for a small price tag.
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No, I’m Not a Human
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC, potentially other platforms
No, I’m Not a Human leans into identity, perception, and what it means to be “real” in a digital age. It’s a narrative-heavy game with branching paths, where your dialogue choices and small decisions steadily reshape how the world treats you—and how you’re allowed to exist within it.
The aesthetics borrow from retro pixel art and glitchy UI design, giving the game a distinctive, layered look that matches its themes of artificial selves and shifting reality. Instead of bombast, it wields quiet, unsettling moments and morally ambiguous choices.
Players who enjoy story-first experiences and philosophical sci-fi will find a lot to chew on here, and the low entry price makes it a low-risk, high-reward pick.
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Nubby’s Number Factory
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and possibly mobile/handheld
Nubby’s Number Factory takes the idea of “edutainment” and makes it genuinely fun. At its core, it’s a puzzle game about numbers, logic, and automation—but the presentation is playful and charming, never dry.
You’ll assemble and tweak whimsical machinery to transform inputs into the desired outputs, chaining together logic operations, basic math, and conditional flows. It scratches the same itch as programming puzzle games, but wrapped in colorful visuals and approachable tutorials.
Because of its low system demands and short, self-contained levels, it’s perfect for both short sessions and deep, late-night “just one more level” marathons—all at a very wallet-friendly price.
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Peak
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles
Peak is a minimalist climbing and exploration game centered around a single imposing mountain. Instead of throwing markers all over your map, it asks you to read the terrain, experiment with routes, and manage your limited stamina and equipment as you inch your way upward.
Weather, time of day, and your chosen path affect how each ascent plays out. Sometimes you’ll find a clever shortcut that shaves minutes off your climb; other times, a misjudged jump or poorly timed rest sends you sliding back down.
The result is a meditative but challenging experience with striking vistas and a lean performance profile. It’s both technically accessible and emotionally satisfying for less than the cost of a movie ticket in many places.
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The Séance of Blake Manor
Price: Under $20
Platforms: PC and consoles
The Séance of Blake Manor blends classic detective work with supernatural twists. You take on the role of an investigator invited to a crumbling estate to help unravel a decades-old mystery through a séance that doesn’t go as planned.
Gameplay alternates between exploring the manor, piecing together clues, and participating in séance sequences where spirits alter the environment and bend time. Conversation choices and discovered evidence influence which truths surface—and which remain buried.
The game uses stylized visuals and rich sound design rather than heavy graphical effects, so it runs smoothly on a wide range of hardware. For fans of narrative mysteries and light horror, it’s an easy recommendation well under the $20 threshold.
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Budget Gaming in 2025: What You Actually Need
A recurring advantage of these titles is how forgiving they are on hardware. Many of them:
– Run comfortably on CPUs and GPUs that are 7–10 years old
– Play well on integrated graphics or entry-level laptops
– Are perfect fits for handheld PCs and lower-powered devices
This means that if you haven’t upgraded your rig in a while—or you’re gaming on a budget laptop—you can still enjoy some of the year’s best design work without replacing half your setup.
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Stretching Your $20 Even Further
Even though each of these games is already inexpensive, there are easy ways to push your dollar further:
– Watch for seasonal sales and bundles—prices often drop significantly.
– Prioritize games that offer strong replay value (like Ball x Pit or Megabonk) if your budget is very tight.
– Mix genres: pairing a short, emotional narrative like Despelote with a deeply replayable title like Nubby’s Number Factory gives you both impact and longevity for under $40 in total.
By stacking a couple of these budget releases, you can assemble a varied mini-library that easily rivals the price and playtime of a single blockbuster.
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Why Indies Are Beating AAA on Value
The gap between cost and value has rarely been clearer than in 2025. Big-budget games often arrive with hefty price tags, massive patches, and live-service hooks, while smaller studios quietly ship complete, focused experiences at a fraction of the cost.
Indie teams are more willing to experiment with form, theme, and mechanics, leading to games like No, I’m Not a Human and Luto that feel personal and distinct. For players who care more about fresh ideas and strong design than about massive marketing campaigns, these under-$20 releases are often more satisfying than the latest blockbuster.
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A Note on Tech: No Crypto, No Blockchain
All of the games listed here are firmly in the traditional gaming camp. They don’t use crypto, NFTs, or blockchain integrations of any kind. If you just want to buy a game outright, install it, and play without any extra tech layers, these titles keep things refreshingly simple.
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The Bottom Line
In a year where hardware and high-end releases are pushing prices ever higher, 2025’s indie scene is quietly delivering some of the most interesting, polished, and emotionally resonant games for $20 or less. Whether you’re scaling a lonely mountain in Peak, unraveling ghostly secrets in The Séance of Blake Manor, or losing hours to the intricate challenges of Hollow Knight: Silksong, you don’t need a premium budget to experience the best that modern gaming has to offer.