Indie games tend towards minimalism because that's usually the only way an individual or small team can finish developing a game in a reasonable timeframe. “Rein in your scope” is probably the number one piece of advice on indie game dev forums. Don't spend 5 years making your dream game; break it down, take out everything but the minimal components, and make a manageable version of your dream game in 3 months.
But some indie developers say "fuck that", and embrace maximalism in some or all parts of design. 1000 enemy types, 100Km2 map, pixel art animated at 30fps, that kind of thing. You can often find one or two people developing a game like this in any game dev community, and they may have been working on their game for a very long time.
It's worth noting that "maximalism" doesn't just mean "having a big project scope". It means deliberately being excessive in one or all parts of the design. It's a conscientious decision to include far more than what is considered ordinary or tasteful.
(The "conscientious decision" part goes for minimalism too. A blank Unity project isn't minimalist in itself, but with intention, it becomes a minimalist game).
So what examples of maximalist games do we have?
- Damien Crawford's games. Take IHLSBMCILSIREIKTFTDL, which consists of long boss battles where the player has to issue commands to 99 characters, each with their own skills and niche uses.
- Vampire Survivors. It's minimalist in its player interactivity, but the swarming of enemies and attacks quickly becomes an overwhelming visual mess. Any game with 100 enemies on screen has some degree of maximalism in its design, even if it's just on an aesthetic level.
- Similarly, what are bullet hell games but maximalist shoot 'em ups?
- Umineko When They Cry by 07th Expansion is a supernatural murder mystery visual novel that really dives deep into the nature of truth and the power of belief. Consequently, it's really long. By one redditor's count, the work totals 1,154,971 words, which makes it over twice as long as David Foster Wallace's infamously long and maximalist work Infinite Jest.
That last example is interesting to me because, where as a game like Touhou is maximalist on a superficial level, a game like Umineko gets closer to the literary definition. Literature professor Takayoshi Ishiwari writes:
These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic.
Umineko is a game obsessed with dissecting truth, in seeing events from every angle and perspective, and letting the player come to their own conclusions. It is a game explicitly about including both the authentic and the inauthentic. Similarly, Damien Crawford's recurring choice to include every RPG class in faer games, rather than just the selecting what would be suitable for the game, feels like an attempt to catalogue everything the RPG genre has to offer, good and bad.
There's more that can be analysed here, breaking down minimalism and maximalism in videogames on aesthetic, game design, and literary levels. There's probably some debate to be had about what counts as a "maximalist game" too, although personally I'm more interested in what could be included than what could be kept out.
I admire indie devs who strive to make maximalist games. It takes sincere passion to go all-in on one or two design elements, and it takes an uncompromising vision to ignore the well-meaning people who advise you that it's a poor business decision.
You can make a bad maximalist game, but you can't make an uninteresting one.