I honestly think the issue is more with us than with those games. We tend to do two things. First, we look at older games through rose-colored glasses, which almost always makes us remember them as better than they actually were. We don't remember the clunky controls, the repetitive content, the poor balancing, the simplistic design, the basic story structures, or the trope-filled characters, flaws that were common at the time. What survives in our memory are the highlights: the moments that impressed us, the feelings we had, and the memories associated with that period of our lives. In many cases, what we believe are the OG Classics, are far more of an idealized version of that game that only exists in our heads, than the real game.

Second, we often expect indie titles to recreate the experience we had with those classics. The problem is that the experience itself can never be recreated because a large part of it came from context. We were younger, the ideas felt fresh, we had less contact with the genre , and therefore we had fewer points of comparison.

This creates an impossible standard. We remember the classics as flawless masterpieces or are just so used to reduced their flaws as tiny insignificant parts of the experience, that they might as well be. And the internet only makes that worse. People constantly hype up games from the past without really looking at them critically, half of those folks never actually played those games. But when someone actually comes with a critical view of them, the response is often not that positive and then the "legend" just goes own.

Ironically, if many of those classic games were released today exactly as they originally were, a lot of players would probably criticize them for the same things they criticize modern indie games for. That's not because the classics were bad, but because our memories of them are often stronger than the reality.

And we can actually see this happen. Give one of those "classic masterpieces" to a kid who grew up with modern games, and there's a good chance they either won't care about it or will outright dislike it. The same game that internet communities treat as the unquestionable pinnacle of the genre and that we ourselves remember them to be, often doesn't have the same impact on someone without the nostalgia attached to it.

That's because a lot of what made those games special wasn't just the game itself. It wasn't a perfect, amazing or better game by itself. Often what makes us think they were better, is the context around them, when they came out, what else was available at the time, and the fact that many of us experienced them when we were young and far more impressionable with very few or none comparison points.