The game was pretty good, often laugh-out-loud funny. "Die Anywhere Else" has been stuck in my head for months. The game's a bit longer than it needed to be, but I can see how people might like just getting lost in the dying small town aesthetic. I liked it!

But what it REALLY got me thinking about was this trend with indie games. Why is it such a widespread thing to have an indie game start out looking all cutesy and fun and then get creepy/disturbing at the end? It happens all the time! I have a whole list of them, but obviously listing those kinds of games here would be spoilery for all of them.

I have to assume there's some Venn Diagram where the small circle of successful indie devs widely overlaps with a much larger circle of people who loved Hot Topic and that Happy Tree Friends-esque combination of cutesy with edgy. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just trying to understand the trend.