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This video from Iron Pineapple is part of his ongoing “N Souls-Like games you’ve never heard of” series where he dives deep into the ‘souls-like’ tag on Steam and digs up what’s most often some truly incredible levels of jank. Sometimes he finds something amazing, more often… not.
But!
I think what’s really cool about this series is the fact that many of these games even exist, and that they’re on Steam at all. It speaks to the promise of the internet and of computers — anyone can create and share something with the world. In this series, Iron Pineapple has played games from China, student projects, game-jam submissions, Kickstarter pre-alphas, and more. Many of them don’t even reach the level of ‘indie’ games; they’re first projects, tests, and experiments. And they’re all available for download.
Imagine walking into GameStop and seeing Knights of the Kitchen Table on the shelves in the early 2000s:
The Knights of the Kitchen Table Steam Page
It just… wouldn’t happen.
Democratization of publication is a given these days — anyone can put anything online for anyone to see. I just think we sometimes forget how incredibly cool that is. How remarkable it is that we can have real-time conversations with people on the other side of the globe:
There’s a lot of bad that comes from democratized access to publishing tools, but freedom is freedom and that means freedom for the good and the bad and the ugly. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for moderation, of course, but I do think there’s something pretty incredible about the fact that a game like Pain Party has the same kind of storefront as a game like Call of Duty. Pain Party actually has a better description in this type of iframe…
The fact that one lacks the backing of a multi-billion dollar company (currently getting purchased by another multi-billion dollar company for the low low price of $69 billion dollars) doesn’t prevent it from landing on the same virtual shelves.
