Fascinating things, sofas. The word sofa, I've just found out, comes from the Arabic "suffah", which means 'to lie down'. In ancient Rome, only men were allowed to park their corpulent bodies on them, while the poor, longsuffering ladies of the day had to suffice with a chair or the floor. Bean bags, sadly, had yet to be invented.

If science ever discovers a means of inter dimensional travel, it'll be found in a foetid gap between the cushions of an old DFS sofa; among the crumbs, batteries and old groats, they'll find a tiny wormhole into a universe of forgotten, unloved and mislaid stuff.

Our settee came from a shop called Sofa King (priceless motto: "Our prices are Sofa King low"), and it's a fearsome, monstrous thing - a crimson monolith of sponge, chipboard and fabric, its numerous voids and crannies home to all manner of knick knacks, tiny animals and ephemera. Today, I evicted a small kingdom of spiders from its shadowy underbelly: I sucked them up mercilessly with my hoover like a jaundiced ghostbuster. I found a lost television remote tucked away in a dusty old fold, along with a marble, a biro and a 2007 birthday card.

A strange karmic law governs our sofa. Appease it with a clear-out and a good hoovering, and it repays you with sweets. Or that's what happened today, at least - a karmic sweet, hidden under a squashed cushion. And it wasn't just any old sweet. It was one of those hazelnut chocolates wrapped in purple cellophane, the kind you rummage through tins looking for at Christmas.

Which brings me to XBox Live's Indie Games service. Tucked away in the recesses of the console's Market place, it's an Aladdin's cave of home-grown, bedroom-coded loveliness. Thanks to a reader's recommendation (thanks, Malky!), I've already enjoyed the unhinged delights of I Made A Game With Zombies In It (or I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1, as I believe the kids call it), which is a kind of gonzo Robotron with a ferociously catchy theme tune. Not only is it eminently playable and full of character, at 80 Microsoft Points (or less than a quid if you're in the UK), it's a bargain.

Last night, I discovered the joys of the Arkedo series. Released each month, they're little matchboxes of joy, distilled droplets of simplistic gaming delight. The most recent offering, simply called PIXEL, plays like a classic Super Mario platformer and looks like a late-eighties Gameboy game, with wilfully simplistic dot matrix graphics. It's loaded with charm and humour, poking fun at the genre obsession with collecting objects - there are treasure chests to find containing 'useless relics' - while its enemies, tired of being bounced on by PIXEL's feline hero, eventually decide to arm themselves with spears and tin helmets.

Indie Games is full of titles like PIXEL and Zombies, playful little experiments coded by one or two people. Some of them are rough around the edges (though Arkedo's games are beautifully polished and presented), but the best ones are made with genuine thought and conviction.

There's something refreshing, too, about these games' lack of hype. We've become used to the standard two-year hype machine that inevitably clunks into gear after the announcement of the average big-budget game: the previews, the screenshots, the demos, the endless forum discussions.

By contrast, games like PIXEL and Zombies aren't marketed - they sit there waiting to be discovered. Like hoovering around among the crevices of a grotty old sofa, hunting around among the dozens of Indie games available on XBox Live - or elsewhere on the web - will throw up an inordinate amount of dross, the gaming equivalent of finding an old sock, or a broken biro (I was particularly disappointed with Avatar Golf - not a blue N'avi in sight). 

But every so often you'll find a real gem among the fluff, a veritable chocolate in purple cellophane, and PIXEL is arguably the sweetest Indie game I've uncovered this week.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.