I've been applying "brutalism" to game feel and it's a funny & apt way to describe how a lot of games feel like to play, for better or worse.
Let's start with brutalism itself. According to Wikipedia :
Brutalist buildings are characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design. The style commonly makes use of exposed, unpainted concrete or brick, angular geometric shapes and a predominantly monochrome colour palette; other materials, such as steel, timber, and glass, are also featured.
To reductively boil my understanding of it down - it's a style that focuses on a kind of "honesty" & rawness, trying to show what the building actually is fundamentally.
When applied to game feel, brutalism to me means that the games try to represent their actual mechanical interactions in the most honest, most barebones way possible. It means matching attack sprites with hitboxes, it means foregoing coyote time and other assists, it means minimizing or removing buffers, it means only animating things to the extent that is necessary to convey important gameplay information. Every invisible layer that's meant to compensate for the player's small misinputs gets removed, and every layer that makes things feel more lively bouncy and flashy is removed as well.
On a mechanical level, it also means only giving the player enough to make certain interactions possible - instead of giving beefy hitboxes, give them hitboxes large enough to be able to, say, out-range enemies if they hit them with the tip, and nothing else. Stressing recovery frames is also important for brutalist game feel - letting players cancel out of animations is dishonest.
Examples of brutalist feel would be a lot of euroshmups with tiny player shots (think Raptor), older fighting games with link combos and little to no buffering, old beat em ups with their lack of cancels and desperation attacks only doable from neutral, etc.
Now, I usually dislike this approach to game feel, but there can be some cool qualities to it. Final Fight would certainly not have that "raw macho energy" if you could cancel & flow through your attacks and it was devoid of awkward interactions. And some games like Ninja Gaiden 3 Razor's Edge could use more brutalism - they are so flowing and assist-heavy that it often feels like the characters' moves barely correspond to your inputs. It's nice to get "close to the metal" sometimes, so to speak.
