Indie games are great. Like in our sister industries, film, music and literature, a selection populated solely by mainstream blockbusters orchestrated by Death Star companies is a dull one indeed. Fortunately, console developers are acknowledging the tiny little art projects of independent developers and realizing them, giving us a new wave of the future in terms of selection and creativity on offer.
Perhaps predictably, there is, as with those other industries, a hipster sort of culture emerging around indie games -- if you listen to bands no one's ever heard of, why not play games no one's ever heard of, too? Then, when those games finally get their booth at a big game show and the jaws of the media and the culture alike hang open at the simplicity, the beauty, the innovation on display, you can scoff, flip your hair, and proclaim you already played it, and now you're just so glad this tiny team -- or, even better, this heroic one-man show -- is getting the recognition he or she deserves.
After all, some of these less heard-of games are damn good. But, at risk of showing my unsophistication here, I must admit some of them make me feel like the hayseed who wanders into MoMA and stares, perplexed, at the often odd experiments on exhibit. Like, I know that Jenova Chen's fl0w is great. But, you know, I didn't really get it. It's simple; there's not much to get. The gameplay is explained thusly:
- Dive deep into the space eat and evolve
- Red makes you dive down
- Blue brings you back up
- Filling up your body to grow longer
- + makes your current body segment evolve
- Move slowly to make smaller turns
Um... okay. I mean, I've played it, I guess it's fun enough, And as beautiful as the above Flower trailer is ("it's Flower, not Fl0w-er!") I just don't know what it's about. Perhaps my overstimulated little brain is just habituated to more... stimulation, and I guess if I were a truly enlightened, spiritual individual I could just chill with fl0w.
It gets much, much worse, though -- fl0w is perhaps a bad example if you're trying to highlight sheer weirdness. You've seen them -- screenshots filled with weird 2D animals or household objects strewn left and right in indecipherable chaos, and out of that you're supposed to determine it's a shooter. With an educational purpose, or a spiritual message.
Lovely readers of SVGL, I challenge you this week for Best of SVGL to describe a game so trendy it hurts, so independent, so individual, that it makes sense to no one but you -- because everyone else is an Extreme Mountain Dew-chugging juvenile prostituting themselves to the mainstream. Give it a name, describe the genre, and explain the gameplay. If you've got your own hosting to link to (I don't think Blogger lets you embed pics in the comments) I encourage you to make a screenshot, which should, of course, be high-contrast black-and-white, drowse-inducingly minimalist, or surreal swirls of positively artistic color festooned with a conflagration of weird Japanese sprites spiraling all over the place. Lemme give it a try:
Suupa Genki Okama Atama Densetsu
Spiritual journey of an unfortunate as a metaphor for self-actualization
- Explore infinite levels of complexity
- Gameplay seamlessly integrates with ambient sound response
- Shoot violets to divert atrophy, plant irises to encourage entropy
- Seed the enemy to gain more points!
//kukku.
The product of several months' research into human behavioral algorithms is finally an interactive experience. In //kukku., you are the hierophant, colocating endemic algorithms across an open society, with the aim of expanding the potential in humans, glyphs and "xeblyds" in a world governed by electronica.
- Over 256 randomly generated xeblyds
- Original compositions by GASTRIC, Pika and nAkke
- Evolving mathematical fabric means no two experiences are the same
- Infinite number of potential outcomes
- What does it mean to "win" ?????
Also, as the designer of The Next Big Indie Game, you should have a hip name or pseudonym. After all, you're about to be all over the Internet. What's that, you say? "Sephiroth" is already a game character? Why would you name yourself after a game character, technical concept, musical instrument or graphical element? Because you are that cool, and when your game is featured on InsertCredit and you have your own booth at next year's E3, instead of laughing at your name, everyone will actually be fearful at pronouncing it incorrectly and revealing their total lack of culture.
Do your worst, guys!
