Seven acclaimed indie games, including Sifu, Vampire Crawlers, and No Man’s Sky, are making their Apple App Store debut today.
Today, Indie Games Week lights up the App Store with a celebration of the incredible catalog of imaginative games made by independent teams with big dreams. Players worldwide can jump into their next adventure with seven highly acclaimed indie games, available for download or pre-order on iPhone and iPad. All week, the App Store will spotlight these indie gems with daily features and curated collections.
“Indie games are constantly pushing the boundaries of creativity to deliver unique gameplay experiences to Apple users, and we wanted to take a moment to celebrate these games and the teams that take creative risks to push gaming forward,” said Carson Oliver, Apple’s head of App Store Worldwide, in a statement. “Whether from a solo developer or a growing studio, the App Store gives bold ideas a global stage — turning daring visions into worldwide hits. We’re thrilled with the incredible games launching on the App Store this week and amazed by their breathtaking artistry, brilliant design, and deeply moving stories.”
There are whole new worlds to discover during Indie Games Week, from building empires, to brawling through cinematic combat, to getting lost in another universe entirely. With the critically acclaimed Sifu, Indie Games Week puts the art of combat front and center. This stylish third-person brawler follows a young kung fu student on a relentless path of revenge. Battles are ferocious and unforgiving, with enemies attacking simultaneously, forcing players to parry strikes, chain combos, and weaponize everything around them. Sifu arrives fully adapted for iPhone and iPad, with custom-tuned touch controls, a reworked camera system, and full controller support.
For players looking for quick bursts of strategy mixed with dark humor, Vampire Crawlers is an invitation to rough up skeletons, bats, and other nefarious creeps in a gothic card battler. The spin-off of the smash hit Vampire Survivors cleverly trades dodging bullets for tactical deck building. Players conquer chaotic dungeon runs by discovering game-changing card combos, uncovering secret relics, and mastering the luck of the draw.
After celebrating a decade of continuous evolution, Hello Games’ groundbreaking space odyssey No Man’s Sky makes its mobile debut on iPhone and iPad on October 28. The game includes every major content expansion to date, including the most recent Cosmos update, where players can command their own space stations. Set in an infinite, procedurally generated universe rendered entirely at runtime, No Man’s Sky lets players explore, trade, fight, and survive across an interconnected galaxy — all in the palm of their hands.
Also this week, players can guide a curious feline through an open-world metropolis in Little Kitty, Big City, assemble card armies to conquer royal adversaries in the strategic kingdom builder 9 Kings, dig deep to fend off foes in the alien mining simulator Dome Keeper, or grapple with agonizing moral choices to save a crumbling empire in Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall. All will be featured throughout Indie Games Week and are available now to download on the App Store.
To discover more of the App Store’s indie games catalog, explore this in-depth overview of indie gems curated by App Store editors. On Mac, players can browse a great catalog of standout indie titles too in this indie games guide.
The Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers story
Vampire Crawlers is a spin off from Vampire Survivors, a hit game created by a solo developer named Luca Galante of the game studio Poncle.
Galante was hoping the game would sell 200 copies when he launched it. The game came out in early access in 2021 and hit its full release in 2022. Now it’s on the PC, Xbox, mobile, Switch, PlayStation and Meta Quest.
Vampire Survivors has more than 26 million players, and that has enabled the team working on the franchise to grow to more than 30 people, said Tommaso Verde, producer of Vampire Crawlers at Poncle, in a press briefing. The game has more than 260,000 positive reviews on Steam, and there’s a board game version of the title as well. Poncle team with a studio dubbed Nosebleed to make Vampire Crawlers.
“We try to make games for fun, and make fun games for everyone,” said Verde. “We do take things in a little bit of a silly way, as we like to have fun. We try to make things differently. We still love and are obsessed by video games.”
Because of the past success, the studio has leeway to choose what it will work on.
Regarding Vampire Crawlers, Verde said, “I like to call it the accidental smash hit spinoff. Vampire Crawlers tries to bring all the ideas and all the pillars of design from Vampire Survivors into deck builder form, adapting it into something new. The title debuted in April and it got more than 8,000 positive Steam reviews and it sold a million copies in its first week.
“Vampire Crawlers is intended to be a deck builder for everyone, so it brings takes inspiration from classical deck builder games, but also old old school dungeon crawlers,” Verde said. “The loop of the game is intended to be very simple. You choose a crawler, you pick a dungeon, and use your deck to create world-ending combos, so you can defeat infinite hordes of enemies and find treasure. Then rinse and repeat.”
Verde said the team took time to optimize the title for iPhone and iPad so it could run as smooth as possible. And there’s a new update for the App Store release, dubbed the Death Parade. There are new weapons, new gems and a new story. There’s a new stage dubbed Moongalo, where you explore new challenges after you finish the game.
The game is launching on iOS today.
How No Man’s Sky on iOS came to be
Sean Murray , founder of Hello Games, said he was super excited to bring No Man’s Sky to iOS during the App Store Indie Games Week.
“It’s nice to to remind ourselves that we’re still indie studio. Our big game is No Man’s Sky that launched 10 years ago, and created by a really tiny team, a tiny indie team, and we’ve been really lucky with it. It’s it’s been played by tens of millions of people on console and PC, and we’re super excited that we’re we’re bringing that to that whole experience to iPhone and iPad.”
The game has had many updates since its launch in 2016. None of them have included microtransactions or paid expansions. Last year, the company’s Voyagers update saw the biggest number of players since the launch, and another update, Cosmos, also saw big numbers.
Murray said the team had to study whether a big game like No Man’s Sky could even work on iOS, as everything is generated by the computer you play on in real time.
“It gives us the ability to create this infinite universe that we let people explore, putting that universe in your pocket — that seemed like a like a fun idea,” Murray said.
Getting on to mobile meant reaching players that No Man’s Sky hadn’t reached yet.
“It’s an opportunity for us to introduce them to No Man’s Sky, but it’s also an opportunity for us to have existing players be able to jump into the game anytime they want, which is really lovely,” he said.
The challenge was to figure out how the complex game could run on a device that had memory or processing power constraints on mobile.
“There was something really exciting about it, and the goal for us wasn’t just to restrict this to the newest flagship devices. We wanted to bring it to as broad an audience as possible, so we set ourselves the even bigger challenge that it runs on everything from iPhone 11 up and on iPad Air, third generation onwards,” he said. “We wanted it to be as accessible as possible, as broad a range of people as possible, and give people the complete No Man’s Sky experience.”
The team built the touch controls from scratch.
“We redesigned a lot of menus and UI. We also have full controller support. We even have mouse and keyboard support that you can use on your iPad, and it’s designed to manage heat and battery life, so you can play for long sessions,” Murray said.
The good thing is that procedural generation, which is what the game uses to generate planets and various objects in the game, has a smaller executable size.
“The entire game fits under the five gigabyte limit, so you can just download it straight from the app store,” he said. “There’s no extra download when you come into the game.”
Hello Games has a very small team, with a dozen on No Man’s Sky and just a few working on the iOS version. And another team is working on the latest game, Light No Fire. Still, team members managed to bounce between projects as needed, Murray said.
The game is available for preorder and it will debut soon.