Indie Games & Difficulty: Reconsidering Old Principles

Uncle Bartek at Fextralife writes, "I spent the last week on a variety of cool gaming-related activities, most of them being Dark Souls 3 or anything Souls-adjacent. In my DS downtime I decided to give two very different indie titles a go. The first one was the groundbreaking Super Meat Boy that opened a lot of doors for indie developers a couple of years back. My second pick was a direct beneficiary of these open doors; the wildly popular Enter the Gungeon. Both games focus on a seemingly endless variety of new challenges and levels that are driven by a punishing difficulty level. Over the last 7 years the term “indie” has become a shorthand for extreme difficulty in game most of us just accepted that as an integral element of independent games."