In Celebration of Indie Games!

I’ve become known as the person who plays cool indie games on my streams. This has happened mostly by accident, but I’m pretty happy to be known as that person. We’ve covered a lot of ground playing games from Reverie to Dandara to Celeste. I enjoy the stories that smaller and mid-sized studies are willing to tell and it’s always nice to find solid gameplay to accompany these stories. Today is a celebration of Indie games. Let me know in the comments some indie games that you’ve loved as well!

Image from the Hollow Knight Press Kit. Features the main character surrounded by blue leaves.

Sharing New Games

Streaming has become a weekly practice for me. While I started off playing popular games, I’ve found a home playing indie titles like Hollow Knight, Dandara, Celeste, and Spiritfarer. These games always make me think deeper about the stories they tell or the way that they interact with the real world. I stream mostly indie games now because it allows my community and me to experience some dope games together. Indie games don’t get a ton of press because they don’t often bring in the same kind of money and traffic to news websites as AAA titles (games typically made by major publishers). So streaming these games to my community has introduced them to a section of games that they may not have seen on their own. It also gives us the chance to talk about what we like and don’t like about the games that we play, indie developers get to take more risks with the stories that they tell, sometimes that pays off and sometimes it doesn’t.

Stories

Stories have always run my existence. And I know that’s dramatic but it’s true. Since I was a kid, it’s always reading and experiencing stories that have brought me out of my darkest moment. Having the chance to interact with stories told through the medium of video games has been fascinating because it’s another level of immersion in the story you’re experiencing. But even beyond that, games allow us a look into the variety of ways that we can tell stories. In Hollow Knight, Team Cherry chose to do so by placing different obelisks and monuments throughout the game that would give clues into what really happened in the kingdom of Hallownest. Matt Makes Game tells the story of Madeline attempting to overcome and then accepting herself through the characters of Theo, Badeline, and Granny in Celeste. Hyper Light Drifter decided to not have any written dialogue in their game. You learn of their world through small photo flashbacks and vignettes into what happened when the world broke.

A screenshot of my attempt at chapter nine in Celeste. This room ended my tries, it says “i dislike this room” in bold letters.

Humanity will always ache for stories, no matter how we receive them. There’s a movement in the gaming community on how we can tell better, more inclusive stories that go beyond the tropes that we have seen again and again. Indie devs like the ones listed above are pushing gamers and other developer studios to think more deeply and critically about the games that we play and the stories that they share. It also allows streamers and their communities to have discussions on how the stories impacted them. My community and I discussed beating Children of Morta by Dead Mage. We loved the game, the ability to play with each family member and learn the ways that they were trying to protect their family and the world was a great experience. Then we got to the ending. I won’t go into spoilers here, but you can check out my article on in by clicking here.

Being able to debrief and discourse about the ways that we agreed or disagreed, or loved/didn’t love stories in games is one of the best parts of streaming. It allows us to see how we all have similar but different experiences and how we can connect with each other over a game.

An image from the Dandara press kit. It features Dandara meeting Lazuli for the first time.

Innovation

The other thing that keeps me excited about indie games is that these studios are really out here making new paths in how we play familiar game genres. An older example is Shovel Knight (and all the DLC attached to it). Shovel Knight legit runs around beating people up with a shovel, it’s a way to think about the fact that sometimes people make do with what they are given but can achieve wild success while doing it. Dandara takes platforming and really makes you think about new ways of interacting with a world. The devs made a Black woman who was unaffected by gravity and so you soar through the levels leaping from platform to platform while fighting the Oppression and greed that plagues the world of the Salt (you can check out my article on Dandara and the history behind the titular character by clicking here).

In a larger game community, where it seems like the AAA titles are remakes with one or two new changes, it’s refreshing to see games that test the boundaries on how we interact with games. Even Spiritfarer and Hades have helped people think about management and dungeon crawler games in a new way. Hades has a story that makes it feel almost rewarding (I said almost) to have to return to the House of Hades each time you die to one of the difficult bosses. Spiritfarer (you can read more here and here) lets you consider what it means to help people move on into the next stage of life (in Stella’s case, death). They tell beautiful stories and even though the topics may be hard, they comfort the player while going through it.

An image from the Children of Morta press kit. Features Linda standing in front of the boss door before she begins the boss fight.

Indie games have held me down through the pandemic. I’ve gotten to experience more stories through indie games this year than I have in any other medium. Mostly this has been through playing them on my own, but it’s also meant watching other streamers play them on their channels. I’d recommend checking out any of the indie games mentioned above. They are all games that I could see myself coming back to, in all honesty. They are exciting to me in a way that not a lot of other things are right now. Thank you to the developers who have put out the games that I’ve gotten to play, whether that’s on the full release or a vertical slice of the games they’re working on. Speaking of, definitely be on the lookout for Freyr. It’s an adventure RPG that mixes farming simulator and dating sim elements, it’s gonna be dope and it’s a game that I’m eagerly looking forward to watching as it grows until its release date. You can see my early thoughts on it here.

An image from the Freyr press kit. Features the main character standing in front of a statue that’s providing the only light in that area of the game.

Thanks for reading yall! Let me know in the comments games that you’ve loved playing recently, indie or not. I love finding new games to check out! Also, please feel free to check out any of the links above to find out more about the games that I mentioned. You can also see other articles that I’ve written on Medium about indie games by clicking on my profile pick!