Worst indie game of the 2010's?

[augment]

Braid, "a game that actually matters", spearheaded the whole Games As Art stuff and its malaise, but you cannot objectively call it a bad game, no way. Same with Among Us, with its dirt cheap price and entry-user friendly concept.
Derivative shit like Undertale or Fez that are just the devs jerking off to their respective influences aren't bad either.
To make a complete an utter failure, you need to visualize something like Yandere Sim, a piece of fan-fetish service that is unplayable, or Gone Home, a non-game propped up by the laughable journalism circle.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

Braid, "a game that actually matters", spearheaded the whole Games As Art stuff and its malaise, but you cannot objectively call it a bad game, no way.

"bad" has many connotations and personally I prefer overhyped vaporware like Star Citizen (counts as an indie game btw ) over the sheer vomitous self-importance of a technically feature-complete but shallow and masturbatory piece of shit like Braid or Gone Home

by that metric, the worst on the list is easily Five Nights at Freddy's, the glorified browser game that makes real your childhood nightmares of *checks notes* being eaten by the animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese...? and also makes you want to fuck killer robots judging by the sheer volume of r34 material that series has produced

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

Portal 2. I hated the constant unfunny memes that that game spawned so much that I was put of playing it at all. For literally years afterwards on places like reddit it was impossible for any large thread to not have some unfunny, upvote-baiting faggots repeat lines from that stupid fucking game.
It didn't matter what the thread was about, it could be some horrible news story thread where people are talking about some kids in a warzone getting all their limbs blasted off and the neckbeards would find a way to post "hurrrr lemons" and the other neckbeards would always upvote that fucking garbage like it was the pinnacle of comedy.

Also fuck Valve in general: all their games are overrated shit. Half-Life 2 is the most overrated game ever made and Team Fortress 2 is also responsible for many, many painfully unfunny memes that mouth-breathing fedora tippers hammered into the ground and it probably seeded the creation of the billion crappy team shooter games that litter Steam.

Valve isn't an indie company, dumbass

 

[Pissmaster]

 

[BlueSpark]

Valve isn't an indie company, dumbass

I don't care, I hate them so much my brain glossed over a word in the thread title.

 

[Colon capital V]

Actually I've brought up a few indie games that were severely overrated before so I guess I'll post about them here again:

Baldi's Basics: Slender clone with a few new gimmicks to make it a bit more interesting than Slender but still just as shallow and the only reason it got so popular was because of let's players and jerking off zoomer's non-existant nostalgia for 90s edutainment games.
Actually while I'm on the topic..

Slender the Eight Pages: This game is straight up so barebones and boring I'm surprised it even took off like it did. A walking simulator unity game where you go around and pick up pages and don't look behind you. That's it. This game pretty much kickstarted the "walk around and collect shit so the game would get harder" trope that's infested so many indie games to this day.

Bendy and the Ink Machine: Another walking simulator whose art direction is the only thing that's carried this whole game through.

Hello Neighbor: pretty much shat the bed on all fronts when the game started getting more popular and I'm not holding my breathe that its sequal will be any better.

Sonic.exe: while this game set out to recreate what was said in the original creepypasta, it's still a quick and shallow experience that's not gonna leave you with much of an impression but for some reason hellspawned a million shitty (insertmediahere).exe clones in the early to mid 2010s. Not to mention throughout the years it's apparently been adding unnecessary elements to the game like secret levels and voice acting that sorta detracts from what it set out in its original purpose.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

I don't care, I hate them so much my brain glossed over a word in the thread title.

Autism is one hell of a drug

 

[Soycast Guy]

Easily Yandere Sim. I have a certain respect for FNAF despite hating the Fanbase. And also the creator of YS is a lolcow.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Hunt Down the Freeman was the kind of cancer that understandably put a divide between fanbase and company, Valve had to treat most fan projects the way Tolkien responded to fan contributions: "it isn't a thing and if we have to treat it like a thing, it's an insult to our image, fuck off and never put our legacy in the place of your shadow ever again". It was yet another good reason to lump famous youtubers in with the rest of Hollywood's filth. Give them an inch and they wrap around the earth quadruple times.

Gone Home is not only... not really a game at all, it brings up the question: when is a game not a game anymore, and just a movie with buttons? Simulators aren't exclusively games, a "game" implies a feasible goal or series of goals to complete along with the implied penalties for losing.

 

[Pissmaster]

Braid, "a game that actually matters", spearheaded the whole Games As Art stuff and its malaise, but you cannot objectively call it a bad game, no way.

Yeah, seriously though, I guess my actual vote for the worst indie of the '10s would be Braid for this same reason. The game itself isn't particularly bad, but it's not what I'd call great. But, back in '08, you'd think it was the next Final Fantasy VII with how much praise it got.

Braid was novel back in '08, a time when 2D platformers were just starting to be a thing again, and the rewinding time mechanic was unseen by most before. It was cool, but excruciatingly pretentious, and led to insufferable shit like this Penny Arcade comic:


And, yeah, it spearheaded the Games As Art stuff at the time, and possibly helped open the floodgates to zero-effort artgames that've just been a mainstay for over a decade now. There are countless games that are much worse than Braid, but very few that brought forth so many pretentious maladroits.

As for Depression Quest, that's a very good pick, but man, that's barely even a game. It always seemed to be like the absolute most zero-effort thing anyone could make in order to call themselves a game developer, and then throw their weight around as a true & honest gamedev, back when you couldn't just call yourself anything you wanted, and your naysayers would be henceforth considered bigoted.

 

[Jaimas]

Depression Quest, obviously, if you include anything other than just the game. It)'s terrible even if you don't, but worse games were released, hard as it can be to fathom.

As someone who has read every '@Jaimas plays a terrible game' thread, none of which made the list, I'd nominate them, with special attention to Patriarchy Simulator 2000, and whatever the one was called where you play a games journalist and all you do is mash the keyboard so a self-pitying article appears, one letter at a time.

I would honestly make the argument that Depression Quest, Patriarchy Simulator 2000, Games Journalism Simulator, and fucking anything made by James Corbett do not count as actual video games. At best they're either glorified powerpoint presentations (PS2K), shitty artistic minimalist "experiences" (Corbett's trash), or barely-interactive CYOA fodder (Depression Quest). I'm planning to completely re-do the JPATG bottom ten at some point, and these fucking abominations will not be on the list clogging the bracket. If they can't even get video games being an interactive medium, they do not get a place on the bottom ten. Nor does open smut fiction like Blood Pact.

I will still review them and grind them into the dirt until they cry, of course.

I only have eight so far - not ten - that I feel are worthy of the designation of complete trash. Some are actually worth playing despite this, or even enjoyable despite this, and others are undiluted suffering. They are as follows:

Spoiler: Current Bottom Ten

8. Smash MAGA by Twin Trouble
Usually, when I review a game, I analyze if a work is contextually good, and if it's mechanically good. A game can have an absolutely shit story or premise but good gameplay and that may actually be enough to get it over the bar with me (this happened with Chloe Sagal's Homesick). Alternately a good enough story or premise can redeem shitty game mechanics (this is what saved A Night in the Woods). Smash MAGA is the unholy result of failing both requisites. The political messaging of the game is outright mean-spirited, the game exists essentially for its developers to jerk off about how cool and "with it" they are, and the game barely ran on my old rig when I JPATG'd it. Now, with my vastly more powerful gaming PC, the game run a whole three frames a second faster and somehow, impossibly, looks even worse. An absolute train-wreck, beginning to end, it revels in how hostile it is to basically anyone critical of its developers' insane worldview.

7. Extreme Meatpunks Forever by Heather Flowers
EMF is a fucking Rosetta Stone of terrible modern game decisions - if you ever want a hands-on-analysis of what you, as a game developer, should never fucking do in terms of worldbuilding, game design, or characterization, EMF's propensity to fail in ways that are almost experimentally bad is worthy of your attention (or at least my review of it is). It's rare in that it's actually almost enjoyable for all its hideously broken design and terrible dev decisions, but it fails in such fundamental ways that it's actually a little crazy. I rarely can say I enjoyed making a review, but this one was broken enough to let me say exactly that.

6. ReGiCiDE by Punch Drunk Games
Years pass, and with the lone exception of Smash MAGA, this is, thus far, the single most miserable gaming experience I've had for this website. A game using a pre-optimized engine running at 4 frames a second because of utterly incompetent programming, which broke every 20 seconds or so when I tried to play it, and which actually never would have become a full review if I hadn't been so fucking determined to extract every scrap of entertainment I possibly could out of it. With a plot that literally boils down to "lesbian gets raped," the game's developer thought it was good enough to crowdfund for twice. Fucking awful.

5. Bomber Bother by Darelooks
An incompetent "trans positive" game riding HBomberguy's dick and ripping off a Donkey Kong Country minigame. Effectively only existing because of hatred of the developer's critics, the game starts simple and gradually becomes virtually impossible as the game was clearly never properly QA tested. Shameless in ripping off DK, it manages a bit of accidental levity by effectively becoming /pol/ the video game when you interpret the enemies of the game as a terrible stereotype of the Red Sea Pedestrians.

4. T-Runner by From Fire Games
An endless runner in which contact with disembodied penises, the word "dude," and the men's bathroom symbol kill you instantly. Mark Boyd is fucking incompetent but man if this isn't entertaining to laugh at. The game is basically threadbare aside from this and would probably be the most-open-and-shut entry on this list if the menus for this game weren't fucking incompetently designed and nonfunctional.

3. Hackers vs Banksters by Kimberly Crawley
A VN-CYOA game with actual decisions, offset by being utterly incompetent on every level. If there's any JPATG entry worthy of being ridiculed by drunk friends, look no further; this one's an oddity all its own. The art style and writing are so bad you'll swear it's a parody until the moment the dev insists it's to be taken seriously.

2. That Really Hot Chick by Horrendous Games
Chloe Sagal, on the whole, was a good indie developer. This game is not one of her good ones. Incompetent and utterly impossible to actually beat, this game was designed as a mobile game and then excreted onto Xbox Live Arcade. It exists now as a sort of time capsule; the earliest known title Sagal ever released and a rare turd from someone who would later aspire to do much better. The game is fucking broken, though.

1. Revolution 60 by Giant Spacekat Studios
So-awful-its-awesome is a thing, and this is its messiah. The Plan 9 from Outer Space of games, this game features a legitimately interesting setup and world hamstrung by the fact that the person in charge of the setting was Brianna Wu. It's a broken mess with a few good ideas held together with tape, rubberbands, and cold cream. Parts of the game do not function and will never be patched, while other parts show self-awareness and even a few snippets of good design. Recommended as a case study of bad game design they should use to teach correspondence courses.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

Goat Simulator, because if you deliberately make a shit game, you just have a shit game. So bad it's good only works when the deluded creators think they're making a masterpiece and fail completely, which is much harder with videogames since they an interactive medium. Plus it showed other hacks they could make money with their lol so random meme games that blue haired manchild streamers would screech over.

 

[MrHoneyBadger]

The Letter.

I thought you were talking about that shitty VN "horror" "game", and now I can't decide which is worse.

 

[Maurice Caine]

I thought you were talking about that shitty VN "horror" "game", and now I can't decide which is worse.

even Joe's Diner is better than that schlock, I dunno.

 

[Ungrim Ironfist]

Has Dear Esther been mentioned? Arguably the progenitor of all the terrible walk-and-be-narrated-to 'games', it has all the characteristics of shitty indie vidya: Started as a mod, is described as an 'experience' rather than a game and is revered by the faggiest parts of the video game community. The devs originally described the gameplay as minimalistic. Nigger, this is an audio book that you have to hold down the w key to advance in. Very, very disrespectful.

 

[Thiletonomics]

It would be David S. Gallant's I Get This Call Every Day, due to the absolute zero effort that was put into the game, that makes games like Revolution 60 and Depression Quest look polished and complete, in comparison.

And it was also one of the games that @Jaimas unfortunately played, too.

 

[BlazikenLover]

Fez and Gone Home, cmon man how much of a newfag can you be to not known about those?

Was FEZ actually good? I heard its creator was peak soyfaggot, but I remember reviews saying it's truly a work of art, so I assume there's some merit to it?

The game (in)famous on /v/ because of how much of a douchebag Phil Fish was (look up his famous quote "suck a dick, choke on it") and journos singing praises for what ended up being a meh game. In fact, Fez was many people's first exposure to how incestous and cliquey the indie game scene was and how full of shit journo's where.
The game's gimmick was ripped off from a game that was on Kongregate or a similar website, that's on top of the development going at a glaciar place and despite all of that Phil Fish became the face of indie games, appearing in interviews, documentaries and being invited to events. Mind you, dude only ever made one fucking game, he also threw a fit and said Fez 2 was cancelled because someone was mean to him on twitter.
Sure You got devs who released "one game", but take notch for example, whose only notorious game was Minecraft, he wasn't the best programmer either and his work ethic was terrible, but the dude did try making small games from time to time, he seems to like making games as a hobby, while Phil Fish seemed to be into it more for the clout and "fame"

 

[CarlosDanger]

Anybody remember Firewatch? For a time no one would shut the fuck up about this game. Another "deep" walking simulator with some of the cringiest dialogue ever written.

 

[BlazikenLover]

It would be David S. Gallant's I Get This Call Every Day, due to the absolute zero effort that was put into the game, that makes games like Revolution 60 and Depression Quest look polished and complete, in comparison

Holy shit, revolution 60 was actually released? Thought Brianna Wu cancelled the project and ran with the kickstarter money.

 

[Colon capital V]

Mind you, dude only ever made one fucking game, he also threw a fit and said Fez 2 was cancelled because someone was mean to him on twitter.

Didn't he also have a partner to help him out with making the bulk of the whole game? They apparently split up soon after Fez was released, and given Phil's faggy and insufferable nature, I have my doubts he would ever have the manpower to ever make another game like Fez alone.