I find a frequent trend with game reviews, whether by the public or by critics, is the tendency to go a lot softer on indies, often ignoring many flaws. You don’t want to pick on the little guy, after all.
While I’m certainly not immune to this, if I put on my objective game criticism glasses and look at a bunch of indie games without my typical joy and whimsy, the cracks show quite a bit more.
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Even fans of indies would be hard-pressed to recommend this batch. Several indies that had potential but utterly failed to realize it.
A ton of indies have great ideas, are pleasant to run through the first time, and are unique enough that you don’t want to be too harsh on them, even if they get repetitive, lack polish, or just aren’t all that.
These are examples of games that generally get an 8/10 or higher, and while I’m certainly not saying they’re all horrible, they get way higher critical reception and praise than they deserve, for what they are.
10Unpacking
Skimming The Surface
While I enjoyed my rather chill time with Unpacking, I only really remember the story, which comprises around 5% of the entire game. Most of the game involves clicking on an object and then dragging it to the designated spot.
It’s enjoyable and relaxing, but especially when playing with a controller, constantly dragging items across rooms and figuring out where they go can start to drag on. Which is all the more staggering, given the game’s length.
This concept never evolves beyond moving items between rooms, and there isn’t much of an alternative gameplay gimmick to liven things up. It’s almost the same game for around 2 hours straight.
Maybe I’m just easily bored, but I had to play this game in around three different sessions. I just felt my body getting tired of watching books slowly slide across the screen towards the shelf, despite the charm.
9What Remains of Edith Finch
Boiled Down
What Remains of Edith Finch
While I do enjoyWhat Remains of Edith Finchfor beingquite entertaining as a walking sim, these games can tend to be extremely overrated, since people tend to forget that video games should be interactive experiences.
Check any review for this game, and you can count the times they speak positively about gameplay mechanics on one hand. The story is engaging, and walking through the history of your family is intriguing, but I don’t think it carries the experience.
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My favorite thing about video games is when they take advantage of their medium in a way that proves they couldn’t be anything else, my biggest example being Outer Wilds. Edith Finch could be a movie, and it would lose nothing.
Does that make it bad? Far from it, but I think the 42,000 glowing reviews on Steam primarily come from people who could’ve just watched a movie and felt the same impact, and while a great story is still great, I don’t think it’s great as a game.
8Dwarf Fortress
Overwhelming Niche
Dwarf Fortress
Off the bat, I want to say I have immense respect for Dwarf Fortress trucking on through twodecades of constant development, and I think it’s 100% a great strategy sim game for people who are into that.
However, I can respect something and still never want to play it. Dwarf Fortress is extremely committed to building a massive fantasy world and giving you near full control of everything, which is a bit too much to handle.
I already find strategy games like Civ a bit overwhelming and far more stressful than enjoyable, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. Dwarf Fortress is that intimidating feeling, but kicked up to 11.
It’s really only a game for nerds who want to delve deep, multitask, and handle management in a game that didn’t even have a proper UI until 2020, and I think it’s fair to say the vast majority of people won’t enjoy it.
Simple and Slippery
While I do recommendN++to anyone looking for areally hard precision platformer, I would not recommend it to anyone else, despite my enjoyment and respect for the game and its rather lengthy development cycle.
Unlike precision platformers likeCelesteorMeat Boy, N++ controls like a nightmare and puts far less control in the player’s hands. The game feels like every level is an ice level, and that sucks the first time, and never stops sucking.
Air resistance is tuned up to the max, and the game expects you to master these rather unintuitive, mildly horrible-feeling physics if you want to get anywhere. You can eventually get the hang of it, but it doesn’t feel great to move around.
There’s a ton of content, and I know why it’s got a fairly good rap from the rather niche community surrounding it, but you won’t see me coming back to the game with sluggish stick figures sliding around over most other platformers.
6Magical Delicacy
Split Apart
Magical Delicacy
Maybe you’ve never heard ofMagical Delicacy, and despite its mostly positive rating on Steam and an 82 on Metacritic, I’d say that’s for the better. As the poor soul who had togive this game an honest review, I never enjoyed my time with it.
This game attempts to combine cooking, platforming, and Metroidvania elements in a cozy, wholesome soup, but it fumbles all three of these elements on an almost impressive level, making the game feel like a complete mess.
It has the ingredients of a good game, but it burned them to an inedible degree. The platforming feels janky and unsatisfying, the exploration and unlocks suck, and the cooking mini-games are pretty whatever.
I look at the positive reviews of this game and feel like I played an entirely different thing. Maybe others just don’t care about what makes a good platformer or Metroidvania, or the admittedly charming story was all that mattered to them.
5Papers, Please
Unfortunate Classic
Papers, Please
Formany people, the so-called “golden age” of indie games was around 2010-2015, and it seems that few want to criticize most of the big hitters from that era, despitePapers, Pleasebeing fairlyclearly overrated.
The style is incredibly charming, the art is really well done, and the game is iconic, but I can say all of that about Monopoly, and who gives a damn about Monopoly? Papers, Please is overtly simplistic, and it gets boring fast.
Dare I say it, but the vibes combined with YouTube let’s plays taking off at the time are the only reasons this game was as much of a smash-hit success as it was. It’s just reading and stamping passports. I can’t be the only one who finds that uninteresting.
The interrogations seem like they could get interesting, but they often involve merely stacking more information and paperwork, rarely leading to anything more than cross-referencing data and leaving one just as bored as they were hours ago.
Beaten To The Ground
I suppose I’m in the minority with all of these takes, as is the point of this list, but I especially feel like mytake on Bullet Heaven gamesis controversial. I generally hate most of them, especially when you feel like an inactive participant.
I respect Brotato for being one of the most successful Godot games, and that’s about it. The upgrades feel really boring once you get down to things, most of them just being different kinds of damage that ultimately do the same thing.
I want movement abilities, I want something manual to attack with. I want something that makes me feel like I’m participating in the action instead of slowly sliding around the map while I watch my character do everything for me.
I think that might invalidate it from the genre or something, but being able to move around, dash out of attacks, and actually aim attacks is why I love Terraria’s bosses, and generally get bored out of my mind playing Brotato.
3Laika: Aged Through Blood
Rage Inducing
Laika: Aged Through Blood
I feel a little bad about this entry, because Laika: Aged Through Blood is an immaculate game in terms of story, visuals, music, and atmosphere, but I never want to play it again due to the gameplay decisions made.
It’s a Metroidvania that takes place entirely on a motorbike that controls like a Trials game, and while that can be all well and good, the controls make you do a hundred things a second when combined with the 360-degree gunplay.
Itfeels immensely overwhelming, and every little frustration turns into controller-throwing levels of rage. I hate the blood of enemies blocking my vision, I hate their bullets being incredibly hard to see, and I want off this ride.
I don’t even find the exploration or side quests satisfying, and there isn’t much of any platforming to speak of, so those are my favorite elements of Metroidvanias stripped away. It’s great, as long as you aren’t playing it.
2My Time At Portia/Sandrock
Surface Level
My Time at Portia
I thinkMy Time At Portiaand My Time At Sandrock are both very interchangeable, and extremely middling. A ton of cozy indie farming games fall into the trap of trying to do everything Stardew does, but only in a very shallow way.
The farming is barebones, the combat could’ve been better with theMonster Hunter-esque weapons, but it ends up sluggish and uninteresting, and the mining is even more boring than anyone should have to deal with.
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If I ever need to fish in Terraria ever again, I’m going to lose it.
Stardew Valleyseamlessly integrates farming with everything through money, making mining worthwhile with upgrades, and combat is also pretty engaging, although it’s not perfect. Everything feeds into something, but these games just don’t do that nearly as well.
It feels like I’m completing a series of disconnected tasks in the cluttered UI surrounding these stock asset flip-looking models, and the more I play, the more I become bored and want to do just about anything else.
1Vampire Survivors
Brain Rotting
Vampire Survivors
Once again, in my hater era regarding Bullet Heavens,Vampire Survivorsfeels just as, if not more, boring as Brotato, yet it is one of the most popular indie games ofthe last few years, and for the life of me, I don’t know why.
You literally just run around, grab upgrades, hope they’re good enough to automatically kill everything around you, and repeat for the entire run with very little else happening. My mind starts to numb whenever I hop on.
Maybe that’s why people enjoy it, as a way to pretend the game isn’t even happening as you zone out. While I can also enjoy that feeling, that doesn’t make the game good, and I’d rather the game be genuinely engaging instead.
Perhaps I’ll never understand this genre, but I find it incomprehensible that this game has 245,000 positive Steam reviews, as well as an 88 on OpenCritic. I’m genuinely curious, what do people see in this that I simply don’t get?
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I feel old, having played Cave Story for my entire life.
