9 indie games in this list, released 2009, from developers such as Broken Rules, Invent4 Entertainment, Kloonigames. Pick one to read our editorial note and jump to its store page.
These are editorial pages. The developers and publishers are not affiliated with The Gaming Nest unless explicitly stated.
And Yet It Moves is a puzzle platformer in which you can rotate the entire game world at will, turning walls into floors to steer your character through dangerous environments. Its levels are designed around that single idea and presented in a paper-collage visual style. Developed by the independent Austrian studio Broken Rules, it began in 2007 as a student project in computer science at the Vienna University of Technology and was released in April 2009.
In the puzzle game Bad Rats, players spend a series of levels positioning rats and fixed objects to steer a ball into a trap that finishes off a cat. Retrospective coverage was critical of its graphics, puzzles and physics, yet it gained a reputation as a curiosity from Steam's hand-curated era and a popular gag gift, passing 400,000 owners by 2018. It was the 2009 debut of Brazilian developer Invent4 Entertainment.
Crayon Physics Deluxe is a puzzle game in which drawn objects obey a two-dimensional physics simulation, reacting to gravity, mass, momentum and kinetic energy. Designed by Petri Purho and released by Kloonigames of Finland in 2009, it grew out of an earlier 2007 Windows version called Crayon Physics. It includes a level editor and an online service for trading custom creations. The Deluxe edition took the grand prize at the 2008 Independent Games Festival.
Cricket Revolution is a multiplayer sports game devoted to cricket. Alongside offline and LAN modes, it is built around online matches and a community system that records detailed player statistics, plus tournaments against AI opponents. It was developed by Mindstorm Studios in Pakistan, released for Windows in 2009, and is described as the first game from a Pakistani developer to appear on Steam.
Hammerfight is a 2D action game built on physics, created by Russian developer Konstantin Koshutin and released on Windows in 2009 through publishers KranX Productions and 1C. It later reached a wider audience in 2011 as part of the third Humble Indie Bundle, when its underlying Haaf's Game Engine became open source and gained cross-platform support. A version titled Age of Hammer Wars also appeared on PlayStation minis and iOS.
Machinarium is a puzzle-driven point-and-click adventure from Czech studio Amanita Design, released in October 2009. Players progress by interacting with the hand-crafted scenes and solving puzzles, in the tradition of graphic adventure games with an art-game sensibility. Originally built in Adobe Flash, it received a Definitive Version in 2017 that moved to a DirectX engine with full-screen support, and it has reached many platforms from iPad to PlayStation Vita.
Spectromancer is a turn-based fantasy card game about magical duels. Rather than building a deck in advance, each player receives twenty random cards across five elements, gains mana in every element each turn and plays one card per turn until one side's life falls to zero. It was developed by Apus Software, a studio from Belarus, with Three Donkeys LLC, designed with input from Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, and released in 2008.
A psychological horror art game from Belgian studio Tale of Tales, The Path reworks the Little Red Riding Hood tale and broader folklore in a present-day setting. Players pick one of six sisters, each sent by their mother to visit a sick grandmother, and decide whether to keep to the path or stray into woods where wolves wait. It came out for Windows in March 2009 in English and Dutch, using the Quest3D engine, with a Mac OS X port arriving later.
Zeno Clash is a first-person fighting game with shooter elements and the debut title of the Chilean studio ACE Team. It is set in Zenozoik, a strange punk fantasy world, where Ghat flees his vengeful siblings through close, brutal hand-to-hand fights. Its bizarre, highly original world design made the studio's name.