This is a challenging film to watch. I am glad I finally saw it though.
Indie Game: The Movie is a piece that speaks to the creative. If you are person who makes things, has made things, or at least understand the creative process, this is probably going to be difficult to sit through, just because you'll probably identify parts of yourself in this film.
Before I get too real on that though, I should elaborate on what this is. This documentary looks at the past of indie games (Braid, with Jon Blow), the present of indie games (Super Meat Boy with Team Meat) and the then future of indie games, with Fez and Phil Fish.
It gives us some brief dialogue from Jon Blow, before following closely the nightmarish struggles of Team Meat (Edmund McMillan & Tommy Refenes) trying to finish their first big, real video game, Super Meat Boy, as well as Phil Fish's struggles in bringing Fez to PAX and showcasing, exposing this game that isn't quite ready yet, that has bugs, game-breaking crashes and glitches in it, at one of the biggest industry events in the world.
These individuals discuss in some detail, what indie games are, how they are made, what they are working on, where their creative energy comes from, and why they do what they do.
While the profundity of the dialogue varies from scene to scene, overall, it's worth sitting down to watch this just to listen to these people talk, because they have stuff to say. I think Phil Fish is the weakest, nothing he really has to say is terribly insightful in my view, but at the very least I did come to understand him a little more and why he is the way he is and what Fez meant to him and how big a struggle it was to make. I understand him a little better, so it was worth hearing from him all the same.
Anyway, all this hits me pretty hard, because, you get to listen to a lot of people in this film speaking very plainly and very openly about deeply personal, private things. The word 'depression' is thrown around nigh constantly and for good reason - all of these people basically are poor and struggling just to live, and on top of this are working on some toy that may or may not even work. Phil Fish threatens to kill himself if Fez fails, while Team Meat nearly kills themselves by crunching on Super Meat Boy.
Since they're all baring their own selves to the camera, I may as well do it too.
It's challenging to watch this because, I see a lot of myself in these people. Jon Blow's insecurities about the success of Braid, of his game not being understood, and being very disappointed in the reactions to Braid, I fully understand that and always have. It's something I have to deal with every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ day of my life on this stupid internet we all share. I have to live with being misunderstood. I am, in every sense, alone. So I can understand how he got to this point where, he was commenting on every thread that ever mentioned this thing he really cared about - it's a mirror of how I can't stop commenting on every stupid comment people make, about games and stuff that I care about, things that I didn't even make but I care about them so damn much.
It's so frustrating when you run into, hundreds, thousands of opinions that do not match your own, when you realize that you think one thing and 99% of people don't understand your opinion, will never understand, and cannot understand. That even the 1% who might feel similarly, still might not feel the same for the same reasons. That lack of connection is, difficult to describe just how lonely it can make you feel, and I am sure Jon Blow puts this into his own words in this very film.
He wanted Braid to be, like a conversation, through his level design, with the player. And I totally get that. It's a hard thing to pull off, and only people operating on like the exact same level as you, approaching the game from the perspective of a level designer, are going to intuit that. Most people who play games don't think about games like this. They aren't constantly breaking down the graphics, the worlds, the enemies, the waist-high walls Nathan Drake crouches behind, they are just experiencing the thing in rough, simplistic terms, compared to what it's like when, you make games or have some understanding of how games are made, and you play that same video game.
Even though I'm not a developer of video games, I still get a kick out of seeing reactions to the stuff I say. That's my thing - I write a lot about what video games are. I try to be objective, to find the facts of the game and present them in a readable form. So it's frustrating and almost depressing, when I'm faced with a game like, Sekiro, or Red Dead Redemption for example. I know that people, LOVE this game, and I'm stuck being the one who deeply, deeply hates it. Not because I have some predetermined bias, or I just want to hate the thing, I just speak frankly about what I think are flaws with the game, and frequently I end up being the only one who can see them, or, I have to deal with people who don't seem to understand how to critically analyze anything, and just download their opinion from some YouTuber who told them what to think.
If a game isn't just a gigantic pile of garbage that doesn't even work, most people won't seemingly complain.
And I find it hard to not be cynical about games, I just see the structure, I see how it works when a game is demanding like hours of your time daily just to keep up with it. And it's so much more depressing to me, that on top of this, these games can be successful. Even if a game is mixed reviews - just an absolute dumpster fire, even if it fails critically, it can still succeed, survive, drive sales, and in the end win, even if it's garbage and has no artistic merit or creative value. It's beyond depressing.
And I was thinking too, that, when you watch this film, aside from all this, aside from literally watching a depressed, sad, unhealthy, poor, rail-thin nerd inject himself with insulin on-screen, so he doesn't die from diabetes, aside from all that, I mourn this time period.
We had no idea how much worse things were going to get. Now, we just live in a nightmare of live-service slop, and 'free' soulless gacha games that only cost one soul to play - and your credit card, too.
As much as I malign Braid, as much as Fez seems to me just like a 6.5/10 game, these games were so much more pure than anything released in the past decade. It's difficult to feel optimism, when everything just seems to keep getting worse, year, after year, after year.
