As someone who complains a fair amount about the state of "AAA" gaming, one of the solutions that I often hear is to play more indie games. Indie games are not plagued with a lot of the issues that infest the big company games these days. They're reasonably priced, often single player focused, and rarely riddled with microtransactions or other unsavory practices like always online DRM. If you like gaming the way it used to be then indie games provide a limitless supply of new games to play, and while a lot of them are mediocre, or even trash, enough are sublime that you'll never run out of good things to play.

On its face this is definitely true. I play my share of indie games, both new and old, and some of them are among my all-time favorites. Hades and Neon White on Switch can stand toe to toe with all but the very best that Nintendo puts out. Limbo and especially Inside were spectacular. Sea of Stars manages to capture a lot of the magic of old school JRPGs while not being dragged down by outdated design conventions. Indie games are fantastic.

And right now I'm playing a few indie games that I really enjoy.

Agent Intercept is a throwback to those PS2 3D Spyhunter games, with graphics that use a flat-shaded type look (though they actually are textured) to create a bold and stylish aesthetic. It's got solid gameplay and presentation and feels like a remake of a B-tier Dreamcast game, which is not at all an insult.

Anomaly Agent is a 2D game that's part platformer, part 2D beat 'em up (more like Kung-Fu Master than Streets of Rage), part platformer, and part Rolling Thunder but with powers. It's got surprisingly good level design, a fun story, and a pretty deep combat system including parries and special powers.

Ultros is a gorgeous and trippy 2D Metroidvania with an absolutely gorgeous art style and some unique game play ideas and mechanics, as well as an abstract and weird story that manages to be intriguing rather than annoying. I played through to the "bad" ending within a few days of getting it, even though it's a 10+ hour long game.

And of course Balatro is one of the best deckbuilders of all time.

So that's a number of great indies, three of which are from 2024 (Agent Intercept is from 2021) that I can say I really enjoy and have played at least some of within the last week. The indie hater has emphatically not logged on.

And yet there are things that I just cannot get from indie games. Polish is perhaps the most debatable one, and varies from game to game. I would say that Balatro is exactly as polished as it needs to be, with a simple presentation that works perfectly for the kind of game it is. Anomaly Agent also feels pretty polished, though its presentation is pretty scaled back and it sets its sights towards very achievable goals, with graphics that are fine for what they are, but other than resolution and the speed at which they move wouldn't really feel out of place in a mid 90s PC game.

Agent Intercept is the only game of the lot with voice acting, and it's fine, but it doesn't have cut scenes (other than quick in engine action shots) just talking heads, and it definitely takes away from the presentation when compared to what it would have been like on Dreamcast or PS2, with some cool CG action or even live action actors hamming it up. It's not game ruining by any means, but it makes it feel a little bit like an imitation of the real thing rather than a "real" game from that era. The controls are also a bit janky, especially in flight mode, and could have used another pass or two. Neither of those issues are game ruining, but they are detriments to the experience.

Ultros has lush and gorgeous graphics, but again the controls can be a little wonky, some of the level design is very inconvenient to navigate (though I think that was intentional, even though the game's combat is ludicrously easy so it's not meant to be a super challenging game) and there's a major mechanic I don't want to spoil that could have used significant polish work to make it less of a giant PITA, which did reduce my enjoyment of the game. It also has semi roguelike elements, but poorly implemented, so they just amount to you replaying the exact same sequences a half dozen times, and while those fit into the narrative very well they add nothing to the gameplay and should have been streamlined.

Now of course you can point out that many AAA games these days ship not just unpolished but completely falling apart, and you'd be right. Most of them do eventually get to a fairly polished state, but it's ridiculous how happy companies are to take people's money in exchange for a game that barely works. But I'm not really comparing indies to the bad AAA games of today. I'm more saying that at the top end of polish, something like Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you're almost never going to get that from an indie. The sheer aesthetic ambition and the time Nintendo, specifically, takes to make sure everything works properly doesn't seem possible at the smaller scale. There are some exceptions, like Hades, which went through extensive early access revisions, but even there we're talking about a 2D action game with relatively simple interactions, and it's notable for the sheer level of polish applied.

Then there's spectacle. I think this is a clearer argument. For big bombastic sequences you need big budgets. Of the games I'm directly discussing here, the 2D titles don't even really try. They're not spectacle games, and that's fine. They have fun moments and big reveals but they're not aiming to make you say "whoa" in the way that FF VII did all those years ago with its fancy CG. Agent Intercept does have some big explosions and the like, but because it kind of looks like a Dreamcast game from almost 25 years ago and it does everything in engine none of it comes off as spectacular, even if some of it is kind of cool. Spectacle requires budget, and when you play Spider-Man 2 with that opening Sandman fight it feels like something no indie can provide. It had a huge budget but at least it put it up on the screen for you in this spectacular and immersive way that is really unique to AAA gaming, and is something I do enjoy.

Finally there's discourse. And this is perhaps the most unfair because it occurs outside of development itself. Almost every AAA game will have some interesting discourse about it. Whether it's posts on this forum, articles on websites, videos on major Youtube channels, discussion on the Bombcast, Quicklooks (less so these days I guess), there will be plenty of places to read or watch thought provoking stuff and have conversations.

With indie games its a crap shoot. Yes, if something breaks through like Balatro or Hades there will be plenty to mull over, but for other games it's much harder to find. I picked up Ultros on a whim because it was released this year and was half off on a PSN sale with great graphics and good reviews. I did enjoy it, but I haven't seen a lot of discussion in my normal outlets. I suppose I could seek stuff out, and I will, but for the most part I am left alone with my own thoughts about what is a really thought provoking game, mechanically, narratively, and artistically. That's frustrating! The same is pretty much true of Anomaly Agent and Agent Intercept. Some of these may get a Bombcast mention or whatever, but the fun part of comparing your impression of a game to other people's and talking about it muted when so few people have played something. And these are all good games that deserve to be played.

In Stars and Time still doesn't have a Wiki page on this site (I should fix that) and if you look at trophy tracking sites basically nobody played it, and that game was fantastic in the first half, and fascinating throughout. For someone who likes talking about games, that's frustrating. Heck even Penny's Big Breakaway seems like it's mostly slipped under the radar and that was from the Sonic Mania guys. Sonic Mania was a big deal. Penny's Big Breakaway is really interesting! Everyone's talking about Dragon's Dogma 2 and Helldivers 2 instead.

And of course I get it. Those games are huge, have more players by a factor of probably at least a thousand, and in some ways have a lot more to them. But if the future of games for people who like more single player experiences is mostly in indie games, with a few Nintendo releases and a couple bones thrown by big publishers a year, then the discourse is going to fracture even further. Part of the reason that I loved Giant Bomb in the first place was getting to hear people I admired talking about the games I was playing, whether it was contemporaneously or after the fact. Getting to compare my opinion to those of numerous Jeffs. And now that's getting harder and harder because while there's still stuff I love to play, a lot of it is kind of at the periphery of the industry.

There was more discussion of Gollum, an awful game, than of all these games combined (even Balatro) and that's because the game had a license and a budget to put it on the radar. And most indie games can't do that.

So while I do love indies, I miss being closer to the mainstream discourse. I know this happens in almost every medium as you get older, but with something like movies they haven't really changed. Dune and Oppenheimer are the same kinds of movies I liked when I was younger, just newer. And even the movies for the kids are basically the same. Movies themselves are less culturally important than they were in 2000, but the movies haven't changed. AAA games have, and indies can't replace everything that the older single player titles used to deliver.