In the first wave of capital-I Indie, the developer as star auteur emerged, and with it there was a strong undercurrent of game design traditionalism; that AAA had lost its way, and in bloated capitalist money-grabbing had alienated the true gamers. Many of these developers promised to deliver games that made you feel like a kid again, as good as you remembered and better. They understood Game Design as applied science and they were cutting out the corporate middleman, and also could analyze and discard the awkward, naive, and janky parts to extract that core crystal of Good Game Design. Philosophically you still see this sort of undercurrent: Early games were good by accident and coincidence, but now that we understand game design, we can craft simple, elegant experiences, iterated on lovingly and blended into a pure perfect gamer's juice we all sup upon like delectable ambrosia.
In the late 00s and early 10s, simplicity and elegance in code, art, and design felt like a sharp contrast to AAA at the time. Thinking very concretely and specifically about the nuts and bolts of game design was and is an important step in understanding how games work and what they do, but then as now there is a tendency to think that this is all games are--there is the Game, and there is the window dressing. There is platonic code and elegance in the heart of the universe, and there is bullshit. The frame data is the Real game, the math that drives creation, and the animation is pretty but deceptive flesh that will ultimately betray, in a kind of gamer's Manichaen heresy.
But Heresy is not native to the world. It is but a contrivance. All things can be conjoined. And recently I've watched as simple, elegant, mechanics-focused puzzle game have given way for games that are stranger and weirder, that don't feel the same need to make sure the mechanics are as simple and elegant and polished as possible, that being so might not be the only way to be a good game, or only way to do Good Game Design, or the only way to demonstrate you know what you're doing. If there was a tendency to think of old games as diamonds in the rough that just needed to be polished and understood to be perfected, now there is much more of a movement to go back to older games and look at everything that seemed broken and unnecessary and treating those parts as valid artistic goals and intentional design choices. Is that jank, cruft, or friction actually an unnecessary hindrance, or is it a part of the experience?
Embracing the complexity and the cruft also means appreciating the Whole Game as if every part was equally important, not just the design and code. At GDC I gave a talk about how I wanted much weirder games because I wanted games made from the heart, about ugly and unwanted feelings; this is the other half of the conversation, about ugly and wanted mechanics and art that should be studied and celebrated and used creatively.
Being abrasive or 'wrong' can be a goal. Cruely Squad embraces how much it can look and feel like a huge, cacophonous mess, and is filled with systems that build on that same bizarre mess. It's not a stripped down Deus Ex; it's an "immersive sim" that rather than take on the burden of trying to simulate a whole world, it simulates only the most abrasive and insane parts of murder capitalism, with fishing and a stock market that make the hell worse and more complicated. Why do you reload by flicking the mouse instead of anything reasonable? Because you can do anything in a video game, and abrasion is just another color of paint on your canvas.
I also really enjoy Sylvie's games for similar reasons; she's often taking absurd premises or mechanics that feel 'incorrect' very seriously and designing games around a totally different set of assumptions than a puzzle platformer following what is commonly assumed to be 'correct' design. A platformer should have jumps that behave in this particular way and there should be coyote time to smooth out their experience invisibly so the game behaves in a way that the player would expect to be physically if cartoonishly accurate. Instead, many of Sylvie's games have jumps that feel like a naive programmer's first attempt at making a jump with none of that knowledge of how a jump is 'supposed' to work in a platformer, and then building a whole game whose mechanics explore the possibilities of what it would be like to play with this 'wrong' type of jumping. In doing so, she's exploring very interesting spaces that designers typically are taught to not find worth exploring, while asking the player to play with and take seriously a way of playing they've been taught to feel is wrong.
And there are some games only exist inside of complexity, and cannot be simplified without losing something essential, like fighting games or card games or psx jrpgs. Without the complex interactions of systems, there often isn't actually a pure and naked core of game design that is inherently fun and better. Many of these game genres tend to buckle when you simplify them too much, because the systems are too deterministic and brittle and when there isn't enough room you don't get the experience of mastery and exploration that are so important. These games NEED bullshit, and the bullshit is the best part. You can reduce these games if you want, and often the result is not a perfect gamer's crystal that Solves the genre. Sometimes even from the perspective of entirely mechanics-focused design, there's just nothing that can be gained and much to lose from trying to get too simple.
As an artist, I do believe there's as much craft and skill involved in making a game that feels strange, janky, abrasive, or 'wrong' and that like any feeling and every artistic tool, it is valid and human. Every part of the game is the Real Game, even the failed and wrong parts. And are they truly failed or wrong? Can even a failed and wrong tool be useful? Maybe history didn't end in late aughts and maybe game design isn't solved.
I get that on some level, and I certainly don't want to put a cap on creativity, but you have to admit that purposefully eschewing polish and embracing game mechanics that are abrasive and alienating to the player experience are, well, going to alienate a lot of people, and so will be a resultantly niche product. Video games, being most similar to participatory forms of live theater like murder mystery diners and theme parks, inherently rely on the player being a part of the experience, and if a game designer makes it their mission to antagonize the player, it's no surprise that most players would react negatively. Again, this isn't to dismiss something deliberately abrasive like Cruetly Squad as worthless, as I'm sure it's great for what it is (I haven't played it myself). I'm just arguing for why such types of games would be hard sells for a lot of people, and as such, not be so widespread.
It's also worth mentioning that indie development has been a part of the scene for a very long time, particularly on the PC where it's been easier to get your software circulated. Many popular series today have begun as very small-team projects or mods, like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress. In fact, you could argue that Id Software is the actual start of capital-I indie super-star development, as Id had left their publisher and started doing things on their own through the peak of their glory days, and their atmosphere was very informal and frat-house up until Quake's development pulled them apart. Those developers have been very open about how the jank in their games emerged, either from not being able to implement and test everything to perfection due to time constraints or development goals drifting over time.
And they weren't alone. Back in those "olden" days, there wasn't any real codification of what game design was and was not -- no B.A.s in game design or anything like that -- and people were often just experimenting with what could work with given tech and what was fun. It was clear even then just how much experimenting was going on at the time just to figure out what was good, and as ideas proved successful and failures in the open market, people ended up mostly leaning on the successes to make their own titles and discarding the failures. I think this is why so many of those old titles can feel janky"to modern audiences; a lot of the systems we take for granted these days simply weren't there 20, 30, or 40 years ago, and people had to start from somewhere, see what worked and what didn't. And what you see in that old jank is often an experiment at a system which was supplanted by a different standard down the line. Before Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot set the standard, most 3D platforms games used tank controls.
In fact, I'd venture a guess that this is why that old jank is appealing to some people these days. It offers a now-fresh perspective at a system that was still being hammered out at the time but has since become codified, sometimes to the point of rigidity.
Finally, I think it's worth remembering what the state of gaming was in the late 00s, early 10s. This was the era concurrent with the Wii, where games were just beginning to breach the mainstream but still largely stuck in the perception that they were nerdy toys for boys, something that the maturing medium was DESPERATE to shake off. Every game that wasn't aiming at Nintendo's demographics was even MORE desperate to be taken seriously -- sometimes through surface-level "M-for-Mature" tripe, but sometimes through more complex narrative or serious presentation (though of course, they weren't mutually exclusive). Digital distribution platforms were just taking off, allowing many small developers new platforms to release their games without having to go through the hurdles of a publisher but still mitigate piracy risk. "Retro gaming" itself began to be a real thing, with the success of New Super Mario Bros and Mega Man 9 proving that ideas from those old titles were still good even after the medium had spent the last 20 years or so rejecting its past to embrace newer and newer technology (incidentally, this was also the era where the diminishing returns of more and more computing power began to manifest).
I think a lot of indie developers at the time, in addition to the pressure to be the opposite of the AAA bloat, fell under many of these trends and so felt they had to position themselves as an "evolution" of the past -- in dialogue with those old titles, but also "better" than them. Those over-streamlined experiences you're referencing were oft the result. With 15 more years of time, it's funny to see how the reception of many of those games has also shifted. Braid was considered a masterpiece at the time, but nowadays people look at it and laugh.
