The Games that Make Us Mad, and Nothing More

La Madriguera released half a decade ago, which normally wouldn't mean much for what amounts to something as simple and, and I don't mean this with malice, unremarkable as this one. But this isn't a kind of game that usually resurfaces of gets a second chance in online spaces. I saw this game as one that had an experation date that had come and gone... but why do I think that?
I find it really interesting how these rage single screen/room type games have cemented themselves as more than just a temporal ''boom'' in the subsets of the indie scene —especially in Jam environments— and they are, in a way, more of the type of stuff QWOP inspired, which is funny to say 'cause most immediately compare this kind of thing with the new wave brought upon by Getting Over It and realizing both were made by the same fucking guy is trippy but also not really.

It's an interesting sphere because it really differentiates itself from the likes of I Wanna be the Guy or Cat Mario, even if both types of games exist to get a reaction out of you; one is self-referential and its challenge and seething comes from the ways Satan decided to fuck with you specifically ( Trees Hate You is the most recent equivalent I can think of, tho they never really stopped either), while La Madriguera fits perfectly in the category of ''controls designed to their own detriment'. Simple problems with simple solutions that have been surgically designed not to get a laugh or surprise out of you, but sheer exasperation, rage, and at the very least a groan or two, and the more time passes, the less surprising the symbiotic these things have with content creation.

Case and point, this is a 2021 game that I played because people re-discovered it and I kept seeing videos on it pop up on my feed, so no, I'm not immune to propaganda, I’ve accepted that, but it worries me that is that ‘’propaganda’’ is the most these games can aspire towards, even if it’s years away. Then again, what kind of point am I trying to make by just saying that? La Madriguera is a small project for a jam that a single animator and dev made it under time constraints, so using it as an escape-goat for a point like this feels disingenuous, doubly so when those are the exact same circumstances behind 99% of the new wave rage games. They are small, cheap, and relatively simple to put together; they are great little novelties, like the kind of meaningless toy you’d find in the gift shop of a tourist trap, its only purpose to catch someone’s eye and hoping more people bite as well, something transitory, something that induces something in someone in just the right ways for long enough. Something that’ll be forgotten.

My biggest worry doesn’t stem from the fact that a five minute game about a mammal that can’t hold a fork right exists, but more-so in the circumstances and environment that compel people to gravitate to ideas like this over and over again; reproducing a concept with another canvas, but not much to say beyond the mere idea of it. Time, tools, and perception dictate the creative process of a pile of voiceless re-iterations, and I don’t think their existence is inherently wrong… but when I see them, I mostly see nothing, I see no face behind it, no reason for it to exist beyond the possibility that maybe, MAYBE it’ll break through in the horrors of the algorithm or the sea of its peers in the jam it was showcased on, that MAYBE the right person will play it and get it out there for just long enough. Once or twice it’s harmless, great even if it leads to something more personal, but I’ve seen a lot of stories of devs that start and end with a type of game they never felt passionate about. Creation not for the sake of art, but for the sake of exposure.

Much is said about of the idealized best outcome that the indie scene can lead to, but few is even suggested when it comes to the Lovecraftian horrors that riddle the way in the way of feeling as much as perceived, and even as much as implying that making games like La Madriguera is a free card is insulting.

La Madriguera did get its glory, and my YT feed can attest it, but it’s already fading, and in the meantime the same dev released Marble Quest , which looks far more interesting and I can only hope it at least garnered the eyes from people that looked deeper after playing the previous project.

I don’t believe that any small-scale game genre or individual game is the root cause of any problem at large in the industry, but they can be micro-cosmos and encapsulations of those very same issues, things I don’t have a proper answer or solution for.

Solutions that no individual person can create.

Thank you so much for reaching this point.