8 Best On-Budget Obscure RPGs

When you’re gaming on a budget, sometimes you have to skew your balance of quality and quantity a bit. For example, if you don’t mind forgoing the latest and greatest graphics and design sensibilities of the hottest new releases, you can get your fair share of surprisingly dense RPGs for a relative song. That’s what’s fun about checking out a bargain bin; you never know what kind of cool stuff you’ll find that was overlooked by everyone else.

If you know where to look, you can find RPGs with a wide variety of styles and gimmicks, some with a quick, snacky setup you can enjoy in a few sittings, and some that go way heavier on dense mechanics than you’d expect from such a production. Who knows, you might just end up finding your next RPG hyperfixation, which is both a generally fun experience and existentially frustrating because no one else will have played the game in question.

8 Half-Minute Hero

You’d Be Surprised What Can Happen in 30 Seconds

Have you ever actually counted down 30 seconds in your head while you go about your day? It’s way longer than you think it is. In the span of 30 seconds, I can walk over to my fridge, grab a drink, pour it into a cup, and sit back down at my desk, all at a leisurely pace. If you can do all that in just 30 seconds, surely saving the entire world in a comparable timeframe is doable. That’s the idea behind Half-Minute Hero.

Half-Minute Hero is a hypersonic RPG where the world is going to end in exactly 30 seconds, and you need to get strong enough in time to pummel the jerk responsible. You have to rush through map exploration and random battles, accruing EXP and cash, then hoof it back to the safety of town where time is paused. You can reset the clock for gold, but it gets more expensive every time, so you still have a deadline to keep.

The base game mode is made up of 30 light-speed missions, though there are other game modes including a more strategy-centric Evil Lord mode, a shoot ‘em up Princess mode, and modes with time modifiers like 300 seconds with no resets or just 3 seconds.

7 Underhero

Anyone Can Be A Hero

The Paper Mario games have served as a major inspiration for a large swath of independent game developers, largely because Nintendo itself apparently refuses to make a new game in the same vein as them. One such game that isn’t shy about showing its respect to its paper-y roots is Underhero.

Underhero is a platformer RPG, using the open world platformer framework of Super Paper Mario with an ATB combat system. You’re a generic underling for the local big baddie, forced to take up the role and sword of the hero after the real hero gets himself stomped. While you get into traditional encounters with enemies, there aren’t actually any turns; you fill up an action bar by waiting, and avoid incoming enemy attacks by dodging and ducking in real time, with bonuses if you do so to the beat of the BGM.

Something fun about Underhero is that, since you’re technically a baddie yourself, you can chat with the enemies you encounter to get hints, lore, or jokes. They won’t stop fighting you, but they’re civilized enough to have a quick chat with one of their own, at least.

6 Knights Of Pen And Paper

I’ve dabbled in tabletop gaming on and off, and while I like it conceptually, I’m not the best at sitting still at a table while a DM monologues. If you want a tabletop RPG experience you can enjoy at your own pace without your friends hogging all the chips, try Knights of Pen and Paper.

In Knights of Pen and Paper, you’re in charge of both the DM and players of an elaborate fantasy adventure. Controlling both roles means not just running your players through the quest to accrue cash and experience, it also means setting the quantity and difficulty of the monsters you encounter and the overall direction of the adventure. How fun and interesting this all turns out to be, as well as how coherently your party levels up, will depend on how much risk you’re willing to take.

Building up your party isn’t just about grabbing four dudes and assigning them random classes, it’s also about the kinds of players they are. Inviting your little brother to play gives him a bonus to initiative because he can’t sit still, while your jock friend’s natural muscle gives him a bonus to attack rolls. It’s a two-pronged class system with a surprising degree of depth.

5 Cthulhu Saves The World

Someone Will Go Mad… With Fun!

If you’re going to have an RPG with a Lovecraftian tinge to it, odds are good the Elder Gods like Cthulhu are going to be on the antagonistic side of things. Even Cthulhu knows when to read the writing on the wall, though, and in Cthulhu Save the World, he can be persuaded toward just causes with the right incentive.

In Cthulhu Saves the World, ol’ squid-face was gearing up to plunge the world into screaming madness when a wizard sealed most of his powers. The only way to break the seal is for Cthulhu to become a true hero, so that’s the plan, even if he complains about it the whole time. It’s a pretty overt parody of traditional console RPGs, with our “hero” making it no secret that he’s only saving the world to destroy it later to his party of inattentive weirdos.

Encounters and combat are fairly straightforward, with one major wrinkle: as is his signature, Cthulhu’s skills can drive enemies to abject madness, which can alter their properties and stats. Careful, strategic application of mind-crushing can make all the difference between an impenetrable foe and a very much penetrable one.

4 Costume Quest

Everyone Likes Free Candy

When you’re a kid, Halloween is one of the tentpole holidays. Yeah, you don’t get the day off from school, but you do get as much free candy as you can carry, which is a sensible trade-off. That’s why some kids take Halloween very seriously, which is fortunate when otherworldly monsters come knocking in Costume Quest.

Originally released on PS3 and 360 in 2010, Costume Quest is a fun sized RPG from Double Fine’s back catalog. You play as one of a pair of Halloween-loving twins, whose counterpart is kidnapped by monsters after being mistaken for an oversized piece of candy corn. Using your trick-or-treating prowess, you accrue candy from the houses of the neighborhood, solving the occasional environmental puzzle with your costumes’ unique abilities.

When monsters attack, you transform into a titanic costumed warrior for streamlined turn-based combat, making extensive use of timed inputs and button-matching for max damage. Costume Quest isn’t a particularly long or difficult game, but that does make it fun to blast through in a single sitting on Halloween or any other less candy-centric day.

3 Fretless - The Wrath Of Riffson

Now That’s A Slam Jam

There’s something magical about music and its associated culture that makes it excellent fodder for games of all kinds. It’s an invisible force that has the power to unite the hearts and minds of all humanity, which is pretty fantastical if you think about it. Music is a world within itself, as that old song goes, and it’s a pretty excellent world to set an RPG like Fretless - The Wrath of Riffson in, as it turns out.

Fretless follows an indie guitarist named Rob as he attempts to venture out into a musical world in pursuit of true rock stardom, as well as preserve the planet’s musical harmony in the process. The game’s presentation is a highlight, with every facet of the world having elements of music and sound pouring out of it, right down to the rhythmically swaying grass beneath your feet.

In turn-based combat, you can load up various riffs from your deck and string them together into powerful harmonic attacks, following the beat of the backing track to maximize your damage and minimize incoming damage. My fellow writer Ethan Krieger sang some major praises for Fretless in his review, and has called it one of his sleeper hits for 2025. Considering what a loaded year it was, that’s saying something.

2 Epic Battle Fantasy 4

A Flash RPG, Fully Realized

Back in the day, Flash game sites like Newgrounds were an unexpectedly reliable place to find games of every shape, size, and length, all for free. The Flash game days may be largely behind us, but many of the hits from back then have evolved into full, proper releases that maintain their addictive nature, including Epic Battle Fantasy 4.

The fourth entry in a series of Flash RPGs released on Newgrounds in the late 2000s, Epic Battle Fantasy 4 has a cute and simplistic presentation that belies its depth of content. Every character in your party gradually accrues a positively gigantic library of weapons, armor, magic, and skills to utilize, with damage numbers eventually reaching titanic proportions as you get into the endgame and beyond.

It’s a very tongue-in-cheek game, full of nods and references to classic games and anime, and a handful of memes from its era, so in addition to being generally fun, it’s also a nifty time capsule of early 2010s internet culture. Culture, which I’m just realizing, was prevalent over a decade ago. Good heavens, I’m getting old.

1 Chroma Squad

Make Your Own Sentai Show

Just about any general concept can be turned into an RPG with a bit of creative thinking. RPGs themselves are just fantasy adventures abstracted with numbers, after all, so the same framework should work just as well on, say, making your own homebrew Power Rangers knockoff. Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what we got out of Chroma Squad.

Chroma Squad is a strategy RPG where a gaggle of young actors, freshly fired from a stunt action show, decide to go into business themselves to become TV’s new favorite costumed superheroes. Prior to filming an episode, you need to sign deals with advertising agencies to generate income and boost viewership, then raid the bargain bin at the local hardware store to build better, more authentic prop weapons and armor.

When the cameras are rolling, your team of teenagers with attitude must work together, orienting themselves for high-flying stunts and utilizing assigned class abilities to not just beat the monsters, but do so in a flashy, revenue-generating fashion. It’s an RPG that forces you to think outside the box, setting up plot beats and impressive stunts instead of just pummeling baddies and calling it a day.