Decline So, amateur game designers and difficulty...

[Awor Szurkrarz]

No. Sorry bro but when the difference between completing the game in 10 minutes and 10 hours is that it kills you every 50m for not pushing the button at the right time and nothing else - it's a shit design.

Shitty devs make a short game with almost no varied mechanics that can last and then artificially extend the game time by making it nintendo-hard - this can't be excused, sorry.

I'm talking about beat em ups, not stuff like Ghosts 'n Goblins now. You already have a pretty generous replenishable health bar, you have various attack types, different types of enemies with various attack types and varying vulnerability to different attack types, etc.
Then various combinations of enemies interact with each other and influence which attack you can use against them, depending on their position on screen which changes in real time.

 

[Avian Mosquito]

Okay, maybe it's because I always make sure to at least read a review before playing a game, but I don't see this. Shovel Knight was hard-ish, Warframe jumps all over the damn place, Audiosurf (a very, very casual game) can be really hard to get a good score on, Caster was medium-low difficulty but had a few surprising spikes later on that make me really wish they actually finished the game, Minecraft is fucking HELL on hardcore mode (so of course I love it), Terraria can make you rip your hair out in some places (shit interface might be a part of that) and the others I'd have to go through my game list to remember aren't far off. I can't remember ever actually playing an insultingly easy indie game. Now, insultingly easy AAA games, that I see a lot of. (And a big FUCK YOU to Peter Molyneux for Fable III.)

I guess if you're having this issue, check for reviews on these games before you acquire them. It seems to have fixed the problem for me before I ever realized it existed.

 

[Destroid]

Digital Extremes (Warframe) sold themselves to a Chinese company.

 

[DraQ]

reviews

You don't even know what you don't know.

 

[TheGreatOne]

Another thing is that in most of these indie games, I didn't win because I was good. I won because the authors failed to provide challenge or made them too forgiving.
When I play C64 arcade games, they start dishing out punishment first 30 seconds into game. Not to mention stuff like Ghosts 'N Goblins where you just get killed and killed again until you learn how to do play perfectly.

Back then developers had an incentive to make games harder, as it meant more money (as long as the challenge was fair and content enjoyable), which in turn influenced computer and console game development as well since many developers were just aping what was popular at the time (boy how things haven't changed at all in three decades, souls likes are now their very own genre). As arcade influence started to diminish and cinematic influence increased, game development became more intrested in providing the player an "experience" rather than a challenge.

That being said, if you're still looking for a challenging indy game, pick any dojin game (japanese indy bullet hell shoot em ups). Super Meat Boy is excellent, very challenging and well designed game as well. Volgarr the viking is apparently also a really tough if you're looking for a beat em up, but it's more of a platformer with beat em up elements than a straigth up beat em up as far as I know. Most of the indy game movement has been hijacked by SJWs so of course most games are as shallow as puddle and feature no challenge what so ever.