I love indie games. I want to state that upfront because I’m going to delve into my frustrations, especially with a specific type of indie game. Binding of Isaac (Edmund McMillen). There. I said it. And to be clear, I adore Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I 1001%ed it, and then played a run a day (roughly an hour) for years after. I’ve put in a Northerlion-amount of time into the game, and it was my comfort gaming for quite some time.
Then, Edmund ruined it by doing what many indie devs do–he listened to the community too much and broke it beyond repair. I’ve seen this happen many times with a popular indie game. The first was Nuclear Throne by Vlambeer. I loved that game. I adored it. I played it every day. It was hard as nails for me, but I didn’t care. Much. I beat the throne twice. But then I realized that I could not do the post-throne content because it was even harder, and that’s when I reluctantly gave up on the game. This was after 700+ hours. I quit cold-turkey once I realized I had hit a wall. I went back once when there was an update of additional content including new characters. It was still way too hard for me, and I quickly gave up again.
There was one game, Streets of Rogue (Matt Dabrowski) that handled it well, I thought. You could change the way the game played for the different characters to make it easier or harder depending upon how you felt like playing it. I found the game too hard to play ‘pure’. So I put a few mods on the soldier such as unlimited ammo and had way more fun with the game. I gave that one up because I grew more uncomfortable with the politics of the game as it went on, but I appreciated the generous modding you could do in the game.
Another game that had me quitting at the end (not the real end, but the ‘end’) was Dead Cells by Motion Twin. Which, by the way, is a developer that has an egalitarian company where everyone gets paid the same and supposedly has equal say. I qualify it because I don’t know; I don’t work there. Plus, I have a hard time believing any company is truly 100% hiearchy-free.
Anyway, I loved that game. It’s a roguelike/lite that has Souls elements to it and gorgeous graphics/environments. I adored the skills and the story/lore, and the ‘one more run’ feel to it. I love the ice skills and would normally run with an ice build. It was a difficult game. But, I got better and better until I finally made it to the castle. Where, I would promptly die to the final boss (final, again, in quotes). Like in 10 seconds die. OK, not quite that quickly, but it was brutal. I had the max on damage reduction which was something like 80%, but it didn’t matter. Plus, the ice skills did not work on the final boss. He just laughed and was not frozen. At all.
So I had to scramble to find the shop in the castle and hope that I could find items that were not ice-based–and that I had enough money to buy them. And then die, anyway, wasting an hour of my life. At this ponit, I had nothing else I could buy that would stay with me from run to run because I had bought them all. So I could do a full run and have nothing to show for it because I died in two seconds on the final boss. And I did not make it there very often. Maybe once in ten runs or so.
I gave up because it wsa not fun. I was not able to see enough of the final boss’s moves to formulate even a rudimentary plan for dealing with him before he killed me. When I talked about the game on the RKG Discord much later, I found I wasn’t the only person who had the same experience. Going through the game, feeling like a god with a fantastic ice build, only to die in less than 30 seconds to the final boss.