Toxic Indie Gaming

I am not a huge fan of Indie games. Let's get that out of the way first. However, I'm not against playing some of them. My favorite game of this current generation is Life is Strange, which was made by then small company Dontnod despite getting backing from Square Enix. The thing is, it has to depend on the title in question. A lot of them don't impress me. The ones that do are either because I'm curious about it. A premise might be enticing. Or it stands out in a way that it's not some generic NES type game.

My feelings of Indies in the paragraph would get both praise and criticism. And this is one of the bad things about this particular community. There's this snobbish elitism that comes from these fans. I love the 90s as much as the next guy, but if I wanted 90s type games, I'm going to play my Sega Genesis. Or my Super NES, PlayStation, N64. Play some old DOS games. Indie games most of the time are not that unique. The other side aren't the brightest themselves with bashing these games. Some of the AAA games don't exactly wow me like they did back in the 2000s.

What it comes down to is the overvaluing of these titles. As I said, most of them are not unique. The difficulty is very ridiculous at points. I don't want to see games holding people's hands, but we don't need to go back to 1987 with sloppy design and poor mechanics. An example is Epic Dumpster Bear. The title alone got me interested. It's a cute concept, but an atrocious difficulty and physics that don't work in your favor bog it down despite graphics that aren't 8-bit and not being a pure side-scrolling game. Yooka-Laylee tried too hard to be Banjo-Tooie and was only okay. The sequel was a bit better and offered more to the throwback experience.

Of course, there's the horrors of developers not wanting to deal with fans. Indie or AAA, they do want to make gamers happy. With the Internet, that's easier said than done. One little gripe can lead to a viral outbreak of harassment. It's why specific people bite their tongue 99 percent of the time. The instant one does flip out on a "fan", it's a meltdown that has consequences for the worker.

There's great Indie games. You have to sift through a lot to find the ones that will pique your interest. However, the fans need to be better. No excuse to gloat about generic NES type games and bash anything AAA. It's a reason why there is toxicity in it, though it's not the only kind of toxicity in gaming.