Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Indie for the Holidays!

As the time ramps up for year in review pieces to start rearing their ugly heads, I realize that I haven’t played too many games that actually, definitively came out this year. Life has been more distracting than usual and with life’s distractions I’ve played less during this boom season than I’d like. I want, for example, to sit down with Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood in the near future (which I’ve named Ass2Bros in the manner that PvP recommends). I didn’t play Halo: Reach, which is kind of unfortunate given how much I love the story of Halo and how story-heavy Reach is supposed to be. I didn’t try the new Medal of Honor, the new Civ, and dozens and dozens of other games I just didn’t have the money to grab. Hell, I haven’t even beaten games I bought over the last year like Final Fantasy XIII, a game that kind of makes me angry given how long it’s been in my disk drive. I’ve been a bad gamer.

But for all the laziness I’ve experienced as a gamer and all the disappointment I’ve caused in myself there have been some amazing titles that I’ve been privileged enough to play over the last year, games I’ve bought in droves of late while Steam rolls out sale after amazing sale. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be another essay fawning over how great Steam’s sale system is. This essay is going to be all about how awesome Indie titles, the majority of the titles I’ve actually bought over the last year, are.

The recent indie sale on Steam made me jump up and grab a huge number of arthouse games I’d been sitting on my hands about for the last few months. Some of them, like Puzzle Agent, were kind of disappointing but kind of fun. Some of them, like Gish and Amnesia, are exciting little tidbits I haven’t had the chance to play yet. Still others, like Flotilla, are old favorites that the sale made me sit down and play again. Most of them are weird little games I probably won’t have a chance to sit down with until mid January at best, when graduate applications are finished for better or worse and I can work on creative projects again rather than trying to convince people to let me work exclusively on creative projects for a few hectic months out of the year.

But I digress. I want to talk about indie games, and how even though I’m not necessarily playing all the neat little games I bought I’m still playing a few and loving them. I’m still spending hours on end solving puzzles and colonizing planets and thinking about just what it means to be a game. I’m enjoying playing, and sometimes replaying, neat little bits of indie love that came out over the last year in a flood of indie titles. And I’m looking more and more to small studios for new ideas, ideas that impress me and make me care about games again.

Because lately I’ve had trouble. Many of the games that I’ve been playing are totally excellent examples of more of the same. Starcraft 2, for example, is an update of Starcraft with very little changed in terms of actual gameplay. It’s streamlined, rebalanced and rethought, but really Starcraft 2 isn’t anything new under the sun. Nor is Call of Duty: Black Ops, unless you consider incredibly bad playtesting and optimizing to be something new under the sun, which would make you a fucking idiot, in which case you’re not only playing this game but have probably also figured out how to use its art tools to make a swastika. These are, all joking aside, great games, but they’re games that are well trodden ground. They’re old hat, and while I enjoy playing them sometimes I get a little bummed out at the feeling that I’ve been to these places before. I get the sense that games are stagnant as a medium.

Enter Zen Bound 2. This is a game I picked up incidentally to the entire sale atmosphere, a game a friend told me to buy so I’d relax after playing it. I thought my friend was full of shit. I thought it sounded like a stupid concept for a game, winding string around wooden carvings of animals so I could cover them with an allotted amount of string. I thought the title conjured up images of some sort of serial-rapist cum philosopher, and I can’t say it out loud. I wasn’t even aware there was a Zen Bound 1, but after playing Zen Bound 2 I really don’t give a shit. I don’t give a shit because after playing Zen Bound 2 for fifteen minutes I’m pretty sure I’ve smoked marijuana earlier in my day and have now reached a state of peace in my evening.

See, Zen Bound is a small, un-ambitious game. It’s a game that does things no big game could ever do or would ever want to do. It’s a game about interacting with items in a space and changing those items in weird, relaxing ways. It could be that I went into the game wanting to de-stress or it could be that the hippies at my organic grocery store put some hash in the tea I bought. Or it could be that a tiny indie studio totally hit the nail on the head and developed a game about chilling out with wooden toys and string. Whatever the fuck happened I feel incredibly relaxed writing this, even though I still went to my terrible job and had a shitty, exhausting day today.

And this feeling, beyond just being great, makes me happy because it shows that games are doing more than offering me worlds to explore or means by which to compete. There are games out there that aren’t trying to sell themselves to the hordes of bunnyhopping fucksticks with silenced shotguns and insignias that are variations on attempting to give me the finger. Those people can all fuck themselves, because indie developers are making games about doing their own thing, games like Zen Bound, games like Flotilla, games like Eufloria. And the ignorance of the majority public, the greed of the industry at large and the relative lack of money these games receive and make isn’t really hurting their ability to make games seem cool and capable of incredible things once again.