Expectations of indie games should always be fairly low when starting out.  It isn’t fair to judge a small team who is dedicated to a project, mainly in their free time, on the same basis as a full triple A company.  The lower price point also helps with this judgement.  The issue then basically becomes that the game has to do any one thing right, and hopefully very well.  When the title does not do that, every other failure comes into razor sharp focus.

You can watch our stream of The Pit: Infinity below:

The Pit: Infinity, for its attempt, tried to make a first-person-shooter rouge-lite adventure.  In both of those descriptors it fails amazingly.  The first person part feels wrong, as the player character doesn’t feel like they have the right weight to them while enemies swim through the air silently and don’t alert to their presence until they are chewing on a kidney and the damage gauges are lighting up.  The rouge-lite elements feel more like lack of effort into game design than the added value that most attempt to sell it as.

What could have saved The Pit from everything, the blandness, the failure to make it interesting in anyway, would have been any form of well crafted design.  Instead what was left was an overall sense of tastelessness that permeates everything — from the way that the guns look to the basic movement of the enemies.  The game simply begs to be forgotten as it might as well be anything else that could have fallen out of generic FPS #3432

Bad and forgettable indie games are a dime a dozen.  They are literally the majority of both the Steam store and what I have been forced to review as of late.  It can be seen as forgivable, as someone trying to hone some skills before they move onto a project that they might make a name for themselves is when they don’t charge that much.  The problem is that this game is asking for 20 dollars.  So even if a sale hits and this is 75% off, it is still above what it should probably go for.