Ordinary Is Enough: The Indie Games That Finally Let You Just Exist
Photo by Photo by David Mao on Unsplash on Unsplash
Somewhere along the way, video games decided that you — the person holding the controller — were always the chosen one. The last hope. The reluctant hero who would, against all odds, rise up and save everything worth saving. It's a formula so baked into the medium that we barely notice it anymore. You load up a game, and within twenty minutes someone is telling you that you're special, that the fate of the world rests on your shoulders, that ordinary people don't do what you're about to do.
A handful of indie developers have quietly decided that's exhausting. And honestly? They're right.
The Radical Act of Doing Nothing Remarkable
There's a moment in Unpacking — the 2021 puzzle game from Witch Beam — where you're arranging someone's belongings into a new apartment and you notice a framed photo, a worn stuffed animal, a collection of books that tells you something about who this person is without a single word of dialogue. Nobody is saving the world. Nobody is leveling up. You're just... unpacking boxes. And somehow it lands harder than most boss fights you've ever survived.
That's not an accident. It's a design philosophy. Unpacking made the deliberate choice to tell a life story through objects and placement, trusting players to fill in the emotional gaps themselves. The protagonist never speaks. You never see her face. And yet by the end, you feel like you know her — maybe even recognize a little of yourself in the quiet arc of her life.
This is what mundane-forward game design actually does at its best. It doesn't just slow things down. It shifts the entire frame of what counts as meaningful.
Small Worlds, Big Breathing Room
A Short Hike does something similar with its pacing. You play as a small bird named Claire visiting her aunt at a provincial park, and the loose goal is to reach the top of a mountain to get cell service. That's it. That's the whole premise. Along the way you can chat with other hikers, collect little golden feathers, fish, race, or just wander the trails without any particular purpose.
What makes it remarkable is how unhurried it feels. There's no timer. There's no punishment for taking the long way around. The game is genuinely comfortable with you doing nothing that matters in a conventional sense. You can spend twenty minutes watching the light change over the water and the game will not nudge you, guilt you, or remind you that you have somewhere more important to be.
For a lot of players — especially those of us grinding through jobs, responsibilities, and the general low-level hum of adult American life — that kind of permission feels almost transgressive. You're allowed to just be here. Not productive. Not heroic. Just present.
The Unremarkable Protagonist as a Design Choice
It's worth pausing on what it actually takes to build a game around an ordinary character. The instinct in mainstream development is to make protagonists aspirational — give them skills, a backstory soaked in tragedy, a reason to be the one person who can do what no one else can. That template exists because it works. Players want to feel capable. They want agency.
But there's a different kind of agency in playing someone who is just figuring things out at a normal human pace. Coffee Talk, for instance, puts you behind the counter of a late-night café in a fantastical version of Seattle. You're a barista. You make drinks. You listen to people talk about their problems. The stakes are almost never life-or-death, and the game leans fully into that. Your power isn't combat or strategy — it's attention. You pay attention to what people say, you try to make the right drink, and sometimes that's enough to make someone feel a little less alone.
That's a kind of heroism, sure, but it's the kind most of us actually practice on our best days. The small, unglamorous heroism of just showing up and caring.
Why This Resonates Right Now
It would be easy to frame this as a niche preference — games for people who want to chill out. But there's something more specific happening here, especially for players in their twenties and thirties who came up on games that told them they were destined for greatness, then graduated into a world that very much did not agree.
The pressure to be exceptional is genuinely exhausting in a way that's hard to articulate. Hustle culture, social media highlight reels, the sense that you're always supposed to be optimizing something — it creates a background noise that doesn't really turn off. Games that celebrate the ordinary aren't just offering escapism from that noise. They're offering a counter-argument. They're saying: a life of small moments and quiet routines and unremarkable afternoons is still a life worth telling stories about.
Stardew Valley built an entire empire on that premise. Yes, you're technically running a farm, which involves tasks and progress. But the emotional core of the game is about slowing down enough to notice things — the changing seasons, the rhythms of a small community, the satisfaction of a routine that's yours and nobody else's.
What These Games Are Actually Teaching
Here's the thing about games that let you be boring: they're not actually about boredom. They're about attention. They're asking you to look more carefully at the things you'd usually skip past on the way to something more exciting.
When Unpacking makes you consider where a person would put their diploma — tucked in a drawer, hung prominently on the wall, left in a box — it's asking you to think about pride and ambivalence and the complicated feelings we have about our own accomplishments. That's not a mundane question. It just arrives in a mundane wrapper.
And maybe that's the real argument for this style of game. Life doesn't usually announce its important moments with dramatic music and a camera pull-back. Most of the things that shape us happen quietly, in ordinary rooms, during unremarkable afternoons. A game that's built to honor that isn't settling for less. It's paying attention to more.
If you've been feeling like games haven't quite been speaking your language lately — if the endless cycle of saving worlds and unlocking power fantasies has started to feel more hollow than exciting — it might be worth picking up something small and unhurried. Something that doesn't need you to be extraordinary.
Sometimes the most human thing a game can do is let you just exist for a while.
