Thoughts about Knytt Classic and game difficulty

I sat down and plowed through Knytt Classic in a single sitting. While I was doing it, I had a lot of thoughts about why this game was so influential to me and others, and what it was like to be "in" the "scene" of indie game enjoyers who were talking about this game, and others like it, in the late 2000s. I think the biggest thing I have to remind myself about games like this is that they were enjoyed primarily by people who were in a shared "scene", and that this scene was largely young people and children, and that most of us had no significant formal schooling in How To Think Or Talk About Art. So a lot of the very early brain-expanding indie games I played were influential because they demonstrated very painfully obvious artistic opportunities within games. Back then, they just weren't obvious to a lot of us kids! The opportunity Knytt demonstrated to me was simplicity, or minimalism - and part of its simplicity is easiness. Knytt showed me that even small and subtle and modest…