some of these like cruelty squad, dark souls, DE, even system shock/thief etc. are really obvious, but some like DCSS are baffling. Is there a cabal of auteur gamedevs admiring DCSS's design philosophy that I don't know about?

yes.

another comment, 10 months later: i foresee "living world games" becoming pretty influential among indies if they aren't already; i.e. games which make an attempt at simulating the minutiae of their world; games where every door can be opened and where no pack of literal roadblocks will prevent your exploration; the "single city block game" Warren Spector talks about; and especially games where NPCs have greater mechanical agency than normal, they "go on their own quests" as it were rather than merely standing around idly to give out quests etc, especially when this is "dynamic" rather than hard-coded etc etc etc. maybe one of the listed games i know less about represents this present/future trend but i don't see one. i suppose it's the realization of what "immersive sims" have been attempting and largely failing to do for around 30 years, so maybe those games' inclusions count.

examples of this phenomenon include https://www.backloggd.com/games/hexcraft-harlequin-fair/, https://www.backloggd.com/games/shadows-of-doubt/, and, of course, https://www.backloggd.com/games/dwarf-fortress/ and derivatives like RimWorld

in reference to my original comment: coming back to this, it seems dead obvious that DCSS's design philosophy or something close to it is basically what every questionable-in-wisdom game design youtube channel promotes, even if they don't know about DCSS specifically. not that that per se implies much about indie spaces, though it likely will for many future devs.

@muck-- ive been ruminating on this for a few days now, and i'm genuinely sorry for my sarcasm earlier. i agree with almost everything you say here, but I have a couple notes (and i've been drinking a bit, so forgive the rambling and nonsense.)

most of my concern with the direction of indie games has to do with aesthetics... indie game design, increasingly, trades in reference and allusion moreso than innovation. as I see it, the proper way to determine what'll be an indie hit at any give time is to look back ~25 years to "cool"-ish nerd stuff.

Look at the massive indies right now: one obvious pick for me is Bomb Rush Cyberpunk. The design has tragically little soul of its own, focusing on "modernizing" the Y2K atmosphere of Jet Set Radio. the goal is purely aesthetic-- instead of making indie games to challenge the larger industry, we seem now to make them in praise. the goal is to convince a demographic of teenagers that they're experiencing culture exactly as it was during that strictly aesthetic sweet spot.

(The more obvious-but-outdated example here is Undertale, with its connections back to the Mother franchise)

In 10 years, Heavy Rain will be as old as jet set radio is now. They're approaching the massive flattening of "cool" games, both visually and mechanically. what happens when they catch up to the Telltale titles? to later Final Fantasy titles? to unity-horror walking sims?

it's my genuine belief that the indie scene will die (and hopefully be reborn) within the next 10 years.

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As far as DCSS goes, since it seems to be a particularly sticky point here: look to the game's peers. CD:DA has been revived through Project Zomboid, UnReal World (kinda) through Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress through its own re-release. Nethack/DCSS are next up-- they've got to be. Looking online, attention to those two games in particular has perked up quite a bit over the last few years. A year ago, DCSS got an iPhone port, for example. maybe it's just some particular fanboy-iness in myself, but it's near impossible for the scene to avoid the return of the classic obtuse roguelike.

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Lastly, just some thoughts about "living world games." I think you're right about their return-- I could have sworn I included Dwarf Fortress here, but I did not, and I will amend that immediately after posting this.

The biggest cultural piece of interest for me involving this, though, comes from the overpromises we've seen in high-budget games over the last decade or so. Most recently, Cyberpunk 2077 claimed to be exactly that on a triple-a scale. infamously, press releases for almost every bethesda game (especially fallout 76,) no man's sky, watch_dogs to a certain extent... I worry that the concept of "open design" is being conflated with lazy, scrapped together open world games and lying developers.

it creates room for indie devs to emulate those mechanics we want so badly, but at the same time... they just don't have the horsepower to get there. simulation programming (and design) is miserably hard, even on a very very small scale. these projects take years, often decades, of very highly skilled work to complete. there aren't that many people on earth willing to buckle down for that kind of work.

however, and I don't want to sound like a tech evangelist, but AI is making this kind of thing almost scarily easy. both for writing code and actually deploying stuff, it's insane how much time it saves. there's certainly going to be a boom soon (as if there's not already) of fully-featured games using GPT (or similar) to produce dialogue. both Hylics games toy with this, but in an obviously facetious way with the randomly generated text.

I dunno. I love Spector, but I'm just not sure his brand of dynamism can serve as a mark of quality anymore. games that explode now seem to be pretty, tightly designed experiences with pretty limited scope. I'm not holding out for a proper version of Battlecruiser any time soon.