After 11 years, Xbox is bringing back the best part of those summers with Xbox 360

Bastion
(Image credit: Supergiant Games)

Xbox is starting up a new program to support and promoteඣ the best indie games on the platform, and it sounds like a delightful throwback to the Xbox 360 era and its regular Summers of Arcade promotions.

Indie Selects is a new ID@Xbox initiative which aims to regularly highlight a curated selection of top indie titles. If you hit up the store page on your Xbox right now, you'll find an indie highlight section with a few themed categories, including titles from international studios and games with playable cats. These categories will rotate on a weekly basis and exist alongside the Featured Indies category, which simply highlights no♍table recent releases. The first Featured Indies group includes the likes of Laika: Aged Through Blood and The Talos Principle 2, so the bangers are already among us.

explains. "With a dedicated, permanent, curated collection in the Xbox Store, we’ll be able to bring more attention to games that we feel are particularly special."

This whole initiative is making me nostalgic for the Summer of Arcade, an annual promotion that ran from 2008 to 2013 on the Xbox 360. The event would highlight weekly releases of five indie games every year, and helped bring attention to genuine indie classics like Braid, Limbo, Bastion, and more. Indie Selects seems a bit less formal than all that, but it does give us curation - something that's real tough to find in dig🌜ital games stores these days. Here's hoping that this whole initiative helps good indies get some more attention, and connects players with some games they'll love.

We can also help with that whole curation business: here are 10 indies that might have gone under your radar in 2023. 

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently b🐈ased in Missouri. He's b♈een covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.