Faster than Light comes to my mind, regarding quality (As those you've listed there). Although I don't know if you like strategy games.

Super Meat Boy is awesome too.

Limbo is good, though it is painfully short. What about Braid?

Haven't played Faster than Light, but I'm pretty bad at strategy games, haha.

I found Super Meat Boy pretty lacklustre myself, it seemed really cheap at times. Braid and Limbo were decent, but I certainly didn't find them to be the second coming like everyone told me.

Perhaps it is because you were too much hyped? I remember playing Braid without much knowledge of it except for a 9.5 in Gamespot. And sweet! I loved every second of it. I never though that a 2D platformer could get as puzzled as that one.

Give Faster than Light a go. I am bad at strategy games too, but that games makes you feel like Captain Kirk from the Enterprise. Seriously, it's a very complex game. You play from a strange perspective; you see the interior of your ship when you engage in combat and gives orders to your crew. It's just more than that, but until you try it you won't know.

I agree 1000000%!

you know what is more annoying than indie games? Indie developers!
And I noticed this recently at GDC and the months before.

They basically don't know anything at all about new hardware (before PS4 reveal and now with Xbox 720).
MS and Sony offer them a platform to release their games on and widen their audience beyond iOS / Android / WP as "App no. 457393830" and they are still pissing on Sonys and MS next platform for not being that supportive for them... at least they used to with the PS3.

Indie games are niche and 99,5% of the audience does not even care about you guys.

Fez creator whining on Twitter, because it took MS 2 months to tell him how his game did?! THAT is not professional at all.

"Microsofts next Xbox allows more entertainment and its architecture shows this" Okay, the smartphone you plan to release your game on is not a core gaming machine either! And guess what, the 8 GB RAM and Jaguar CPU will be powerful enough to run your freaking 8-bit retro game!!!

These guys are so vocal and so unimportant at the same time. And the gaming media actually picks it up and makes news out of this.

I liked Braid, but it got boring after a while and I never finished it. Team Meat made one decent plattformer, but that is not an excuse to talk that much about corporations that have more talent than these guys could dream of.

Keep making your games and start to thank Steam, Sony and Microsoft for offering you a userbase to sell it to. If these guys were just mad at you, they would just kick you out of their ecosystem. The ecosystem they created and you benefit from. And the amount of consoles sold thanks to Braid or Fez is soo tiny, they could easily get away with that.

You're comparing indie games to some of the best made games of the generation? Yeah, that is elitest.

But you're wrong about the definition....that elitism is having high standards.
Elitism is about dropping a steaming load on anything that doesn't match your tastes.

You're looking at 20m$ budget games, comparing them to 300k$ games, whose price tags are a sixth less, and calling them trash.

Journey is an indie game, and sells more than big budget games, and has won more awards than some of the games you've listed.
Just because people have a different taste than you, doesn't mean the games they enjoy are trash. You just like blockbusters.

Counterstrike is one of the most played games of all time. It was a mod made by a user.

There are lots of games that are great for what they are. Frog Fractions, Octodad, Recettear, Atom Zombie Smasher, The Last Guy, Machinarium, Mount & Blade, Fl0w.

Good ideas aren't dependent on budget, there's no reason Indie devs can't make a game as good as something like Mass Effect. (World of Goo is) Indie devs aren't held back from creating greatness by money or manpower, just their own talent, or lack thereof.

I'm not holding them to the same graphical standards. Graphics and production values don't determine a game's value, enjoyable gameplay does, and that's where the poverty excuse just doesn't fly.

I don't really care if they win awards, or sell more, or if others like them. They're entitled to their opinion, just as I'm entitled to my opinion that they are 98% faecal matter.

It also features permadeath. Something pretty absent this generation, except for XCOM or Fire Emblem.

I've found you win far more friends by being accepting than by being critical. It's always good to have high standards, but the fact that you use the words "high standards" is as much of the problem as you having them. It is not 'high standards' that you have, it's that you enjoy a highly polished, mainstream, involved kind of game. That has nothing to do with standards.

Standards would involve reaching a certain level of excellence, and unfortunately for your argument, awards do prove that.

I'm tired of avoiding conflictand only saying nice things, honestly. Criticism is not inherently bad. If we only ever talked about the things we liked and approved of, this forum would get awfully boring.

It's high standards not because I consider them better than anyone else's, but because I find I reject the vast majority of games as undesirable to me. High as in only the games that rate the highest with me get my time. That doesn't make me elitist, it simply means I have different set of requirements of games to the majority.

Awards only prove a game is popular with one organization or group of people. Game quality is subjective, it cannot be proven.

If it's high standards according to your own metric, then surely you must admit that trash is only subjective to you.
I know you will agree with that, because that seems to be your current argument- that this is all opinion piece.

However, mocking these games and gamers with 'trendy to love', and 'shallow affairs', and 'indie games get a pass for being indie'.....while those words certainly can be described as your opinion, let me share with you an opinion of my own.

You have a specific direction here. The wording you use implies that these games, and the people who play them, are superficial, trite, meandering, and boring. In your insistence to acknowledge outside criticism of your rubrick, you hold fast to the concept that these ideas are indelible by virtue of opinion. ie; you are not wrong because that is what you believe. Intransigence is not an entertaining quality, nor is it realistic - it is a sign of insecurity, highlighted by your own expression of being 'tired' read: "frustrated". 

Have you been spurned somehow, for lack of attention? Not able to understand why your tastes aren't being agreed with? Or perhaps too many people are enjoying games you find beneath you.

Your attitude is certainly one that can be described as elitest, and my advice to you would be to give in to the things you mock. Play ios games, play indie games, play what you see people playing on the train. Keep playing them until you like them. Get lost in the indie world because the independants aren't just moving games right now...they're moving a vast majority of software on EVERY platform. Hell, teach yourself how to program. Don't condemn indie for being popular. Become indie, because the indie of today is the corp of tomorrow.

Even Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were indie developers.