Golly gosh, Spilled! is one of the surprise indie game hits of 2025. This was a solo indie dev project by Lente, who lives in the Netherlands. It’s her first game and she used social media and Kickstarter to help the project gain traction.

Short but sweet, it’s an environmentally conscious title where you have a little boat and go around cleaning up polluted waters. It’s super charming and we feel Celina Dion should sing a Titanic-based ship song about it in its honour.

Clean Up That There Pollution in Spilled!

It took Lente two years to complete Spilled! She actually lives on a houseboat in Holland, having grown up on a ship (she doesn’t explain the specific circumstances for why).

But this is one of the more unusual game developments we can think of. All of it completed on a boat! Lente has provided a game dev (devblog) including a boat tour and game updates.

It’s a charming game, if a short one—there’s one hour of gameplay here.

For £4 it’s well worth the investment, as it’s a relaxing time of it. These minimalistic games are, with the gorgeous pixel art style and upbeat music. The art style reminded us of the open world area of the glorious Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie’s Double Trouble (1996), which brought back happy childhood memories.

The gameplay loop is to guide the boat around, recycle junk, earn coins, and upgrade your boat.

But this is one of those games you can sit back and just watch unfold. No need to play it, although we did enjoy our time guiding the SOB boat around. Here’s the FULL game in action.

After you complete Spilled! there’s a level selector available, so you can choose to replay your favourite stages (eight in all).

Its slow pace (the boat chugs along) is what adds a great deal to Spilled! You never feel like you need to rush the experience, more savour it one.

Even though the full run through is over in an hour, you’ll want to play it again. There’s not much to it other than its minimalist gameplay and relaxing, feelgood qualities—classic cosy game territory.

The cosy game genre is rapidly become very crowded.

But so far indie devs continue to throw up impressive surprises within its criteria. Lente’s effort is a world-class example of how it can work and Spilled! is already hailed as one of the best indie titles of 2025. Yarr.