What was the last game you played from a small independent studio?

Every time there’s a bug found in a Blizzard games people like to joke about it being a ‘small indie studio’ — but how many people actually play games from small independent studios?

I will admit that I probably spend more time in Blizzard games than anything else — after that is probably Nintendo titles. But I also play little text adventures and cult games from small developers. 

There is currently a court challenge in the UK over the Microsoft acquisition of ABK — the main issue at hand is whether Call of Duty would become an XBox exclusive preventing people on PlayStations from playing the game. Blizzard games aren’t even part of the conversation despite being caught up in the dispute as a result of Activision buying Blizzard Entertainment in 2008.

I started playing computer games a long time ago. The very first computer game I ever played was The Hobbit (1982) published by Melbourne House on an Amstrad owned by one of my cousins. When I got to university I started playing text adventures like Zork (1980) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) published by Infocom. Text adventures, and even early versions of games with graphical interfaces (looking at you Doom) were small enough to fit on a floppy disk and needed much smaller teams to write. Somewhere in a storage box I have an original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game disk that also has Macintosh System v4.0 — they both fit on a 400k disk along with any saved game files you might have. My current World of Warcraft folder sits at 150GB.

There’s been a discussion raging in film and television circles in recent years about the loss of mid-range film production. Between low budget art-house and student films, and the billion dollar franchise blockbusters – there used to be medium budget films where directors and cinematographers and performers got their start. For every big budget director you can think of today – they spent years making smaller sub-$20 million films. Today films in that range are just not getting funding. It makes it harder for new talent to get a chance to learn and experiment and grow. Spielberg, Tarantino, Lucas, they all got their start with small and mid-budget awards bait.

Game development is in danger of finding itself in the same place.

There are some great little independent games out there. I had a blast last year playing Cult of the Lamb, a cutesy little worker management and roguelike where you play a Lamb who is putting together your own cult to slay minor gods for the approval of your god. And I played Stray (though I need to find time to go back and finish it) where you are a stray cat trying to get home in the midst of a post-apocalypse robot city. At the start of lockdown my husband and I spent several weekends working through the puzzles in Return of the Obra Dinn, a supernatural mystery story with an interesting time travel mechanic and truely unique graphics. Life is Strange is another game with a novel time management mechanic and a story line that a big studio would struggle with. 

On the Playstation I’ve been playing The Room VR, which is a sequel to the earlier games on the iPad – it’s a series of puzzle games in a Lovecraft type universe. Another quirky little platformer is Journey — it’s mostly a single player game, but you can encounter other players online, interact with them anonymously – your characters have no name or identifying marks – and at the end go the game you get a list of how many different people you interacted with while playing through. Another very different game we have been playing on the PS4 is Baba is You — a block moving puzzle game with a difference.

Big budget games, much the same as big budget movies, need to make safe choices. There is too much money on the line to try anything truely radical.

If you want something surprising and genuine – independent games are where it’s at.

What’s a game you’ve played in the last few years that surprised you? What’s a recommendation you would make for a small publisher to look out for?