Pretentious indie games- worst of the worst?

[Gameguy]

Yes. All games are (some form of) Art. I'm glad we can agree on that.

While games can be art, that doesn't automatically make all games art. It's like saying Troll 2 is art because it's a movie.

Also, this is pure ignorance. Anyone who knows anything about art assets in video games knows 2D sprites (and especially stylistically lower res looking sprites) are harder to work with then Polygons. Once you have a 3D model you can put it at any angle you want and scipt its rigging to give you your movement cycles. With a sprites, you have to draw every angle, and every movement from scratch. PS. If you played FEZ for any period of time, you'd know it does actually use 3D models for all world geometry. Its viewing angle just makes everything look 2D. You know... since that's the premise behind all its gameplay.

So Fez is lazy after all?

I've played a ton of indie games, and I can't think of one that was actually bad.

Battleblock Theater
Cave Story
FEZ
Guacamelee!
LIMBO
Mark of the Ninja
Rouge Legacy
Shovel Knight
Splunky
Super Meat Boy
They Bleed Pixels
Volgarr the Viking
Gemini Rue
Gone Home
Machinarium
Primordia
To the Moon
Awesomenaughts
Skullgirls
League of Legends
Bastion
Cthulhu Saves the World
Legend of Grimrock
Shadowrun Returns
FTL: Faster the Light
Papers, Please
World of Goo

All legit radical.

Of the ones from your list I've played Machinarium. It's not bad, but there are flaws with it. It is pretty short(which is a weakness), but what I noticed is that it's run in Flash. If you accidentally right click while playing, up pops a Flash menu like right clicking on a Flash cartoon in a web browser. It completely disrupted any immersion I had going with the game.