Indie Game Tier List

What a cute game! The visual style is beautiful, the characters are adorable, the world is fun to explore, and the game is impressively polished.

What first seemed like a generic Super Meat Boy clone ended up pleasantly surprising us. The main mechanics of swapping sets of platforms and sticking to walls and ceilings turns the game into a "think-on-the-fly" platformer that makes it a little more mentally stimulating than a standard execution-based platformer. The game has a tasteful, subtle sense of humor and while not visually or musically amazing, the overall package is still well made.

Though the main mechanic here isn't particularly novel, the fact that it's open world in the NES Legend of Zelda sliding-screens sense is pretty clever. It provides a sense of continuity, as if the whole game is one big puzzle. In reality it's still mostly compartmentalized, but it's the puzzle game equivalent of having no loading screens between levels. The aesthetic is cool, but the music gets a bit tiresome since it loops for long stretches of time. Most importantly, the puzzles are well designed and enough new things are sprinkled in over time to keep it fun.

A "reverse-detective" point-and-click adventure, where you play a character that doesn't know how to express facial emotions. You have to manually adjust your face, which affects the story depending on how you choose to present yourself. The art and graphical style is very cool and perfectly suit the creepy atmosphere. It has a sort of Life is Strange mechanic of starting the game over with knowledge and items acquired in previous runs. It's a good and interesting game but ultimately the story, characters, and dialogue didn't grab us the way the mechanics and art style did.

An ambitious first person exploration game set on a spaceship, The Fall of Lazarus unfortunately falls short in just about everything. The developers bit off more than they can chew with their attempt at photorealistic graphics that have performance problems. The puzzles are arbitrary and annoying. The characters aren't very likeable (though the main voice actress did a good job). The interface is bad. The story isn't well presented. It's sometimes hard to tell what you're supposed to be doing or where to go.

That being said, a developer wrote an interesting post-mortem detailing what was happening behind the scenes, what he feels went wrong, and the hard numbers on cost and income. I definitely sympathize with the developers and playing the game with this new knowledge in mind puts it in a new light. As a game-player and not game-maker, it's interesting to see the story behind a failure and not a smash-hit success.