Have you heard of Polish indie studiolette CD Projekt and their hidden gem The WItcher 3?

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Game of the Year, a good chunk of the staff has never worked on a game before, solidly French.

• Blasphemous 1 and 2
• STALKER
• Disco Elysium (awesome game, but the studio got into shady stuff and the game creators were booted. Just pirate it).
• Commandos
• Tzar
• Imperivm
• Tropico 3
• Noita
• Satisfactory
• My summer car/my winter car (I personally have not played them but they have good reviews)

Not very indie:

• Europa Universalis
• Crusader Kings
• Hearts of Iron
• the Witcher 1, 2, 3 (the 3rd one is the best)
• Cyberpunk 2077

Noita and Baba Is You are both brilliant games from a few Finnish people. Baba Is You is a puzzlegame involving rearranging the rules of the puzzle you are in. It will make your brain hurt in the good way. Noita is a roguelike in which you are a witch and you build wands with the spells you find along the way. You can make ludicrously powerful wands with some creativity, and the game is ruthless enough that it basically demands you do so.

I've already mentioned Heaven's Vault elsewhere here, so I'll plug A Highland Song from the same British indie team too. It's an exploration / climbing game with some simple and really cathartic rhythm sections. The visuals and music are gorgeous

CrossCode (Germany), charming 2D Action RPG where you play a virtual MMO.

Vintage Story is being developed in Europe. They won't even host on Steam

No mention of Dead Cells? Play Dead Cells.

My current favorite game (Valheim) is Swedish, I believe.

Factorio is made by a small Czech studio and I've never seen a game more polished and bug free in my life.

You can always play your AAA games if you pirate them

Make sure to buy on GoG of possible.

The studio developing Ori and the Blind Forest is Austrian if I remember correctly.

Sektori is a dual-stick shooter (similar to Geometry Wars) made by two Finns.

Just played through Crisol.
Gorgeous game. Gothic Spanish style. $17 on steam right now.

Play it in native Spanish. The English dub is terrible.

Mix between silent hill. Resident evil village.

Mostly puzzles and traversing areas. Light combat action.

Has a really unique combat mechanic. Your amo is made from your blood.

Also it's Eldritch horror. That caught me by surprise and was unexpected based on the trailers I saw.

Took me like 13 hrs to play.

Not a perfect game but def worth $17.

Story could have been developed more but no apparent plot holes.

Probably budget was a limiting factor there. https://youtu.be/5ZjZTQ5-xpM

I'm currently playing Death Howl by The Outer Zone (Denmark). It's an indie turn-based game with interesting deck building mechanics, I highly recommend it.

Fights in tight spaces

Chernobylite is really good.

Haven and Hearth https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/

Owlcat Games - they made two Pathfinder games, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, some of my favorite CRPGs in recent memory. Their latest, Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, is supposed to be great as well, but I haven't had the time to do more than check out the character creation so far.

Why is the (average) European indie dev in the meme template about European indie devs?