Press Start to Resist: The Indie Devs Hiding Their Manifestos in the Tutorial Screen

You've skipped it. Everyone has. That opening screen with the button prompts and the basic movement instructions — the one that exists, ostensibly, to make sure you know which stick controls the camera. You tap through it. You get to the actual game. You move on.

But here's the thing some indie developers have figured out: the tutorial is the one part of the game where you're required to pay attention. Where the player is, by definition, in a receptive state. Where the game has implicit permission to tell you how to think.

A small but growing number of indie devs have started using that window for something other than control schemes.

The Tutorial as a Loaded Gun

In mainstream game design, the tutorial exists to reduce friction. Get the player functional as fast as possible. Minimize confusion. Maximize the time before they quit. It's a utility — a ramp from zero to playable.

Indie developers, working outside the commercial pressure to optimize every second of the player experience, have started treating the tutorial as something else entirely: a framework. A set of rules that, if written carefully, teaches you how to play and what to think about while you're doing it.

This isn't a new idea in the broadest sense. Games have always communicated values through mechanics — the way a game handles death, resource scarcity, or cooperation tells you something about the worldview baked into its design. But what's happening now is more deliberate. More confrontational. Developers are engineering the tutorial specifically to deliver a secondary message, and they're betting that most players won't consciously register it until they're already inside it.

Accessibility as Argument

One of the clearest examples of this trend lives in how indie games have started handling difficulty settings and accessibility options — specifically, where those options appear and how they're framed.

For decades, difficulty settings were a menu item. Easy, Normal, Hard. Maybe Nightmare. You picked one before you started, and the game adjusted its numbers accordingly. The framing was always the same: difficulty as a measure of skill, with the implicit message that harder equals more legitimate.

Some indie devs have started dismantling that framework from the inside. Celeste is the most cited example — its assist mode doesn't just let players modify the game's challenge, it presents those modifications without shame or asterisk. The game doesn't track whether you used assists. It doesn't grade your run differently. The message embedded in that design choice is legible even if you never consciously decode it: your experience of this game is valid regardless of how you configure it.

That's not a tutorial in the traditional sense. But it functions like one. It teaches you, before you've played a single level, how the game thinks about players — and by extension, how it thinks about the people playing it.

Reading the Instructions Against the Grain

Other developers have gotten more explicit. Undertale uses its opening tutorial to establish a moral framework that the entire game will later interrogate — teaching you combat mechanics while simultaneously planting the seed that combat might not be the right choice. The tutorial isn't just instruction. It's foreshadowing. It's argument.

Disco Elysium barely has a traditional tutorial at all, and that absence is itself a statement. The game drops you into a world that assumes you're capable of figuring things out without being walked through them — a design philosophy that reads as a direct rejection of the hand-holding that defines most AAA onboarding. The message: we respect your intelligence. Pay attention.

On the more overtly political end, games like Papers, Please use their tutorial mechanics to make you complicit in the system you're learning to operate. By the time you understand how to play, you've already participated in something uncomfortable. The tutorial didn't just teach you the rules — it made you internalize them in a way that pure narrative exposition never could.

The Subtext in the Settings Menu

It's worth spending a moment on the settings menu specifically, because it's become a surprisingly active site for this kind of embedded commentary.

When a game includes a robust suite of accessibility options — colorblind modes, text scaling, motion sensitivity adjustments, content warnings with granular controls — it's communicating something about who it was made for. Not just in the practical sense, but in the philosophical one. A developer who builds those options in from the start, rather than patching them in after community pressure, is making an argument about whose experience matters in the design process.

Some developers have made that argument explicit. Hades shipped with a God Mode that scales difficulty reduction the longer you use it — a mechanical acknowledgment that the game's challenge isn't the point, the story is. The framing in the settings menu is direct: this mode exists because we want everyone to be able to experience the narrative. That's a values statement dressed up as a checkbox.

Why It Works (And Why Most Players Miss It)

The reason this strategy is effective is the same reason it mostly goes unnoticed: tutorials and settings menus operate below the level of conscious engagement. Players are in task mode. They're trying to get functional, not trying to receive a message. The subtext lands in a part of the brain that isn't actively filtering it.

This is what makes it such a potent vehicle for commentary. A cutscene that delivers a political message can be skipped, criticized, or dismissed as preachy. A tutorial that embeds the same message in the structure of how you learn to play is harder to separate from the experience itself. By the time you notice what it's doing, you've already absorbed it.

Indie developers — working with smaller teams, tighter budgets, and more direct lines between their beliefs and their design decisions — have figured out that the most persuasive part of a game might be the part everyone assumes is purely functional.

Decode Before You Play

Next time you boot up an indie game, don't skip the tutorial. Don't tab past the settings menu. Read everything.

Ask yourself: what does this game assume about who you are? What does it think about difficulty, about failure, about whose experience is worth accommodating? What is it teaching you before it starts teaching you how to play?

The message is in there. It's always been in there. You just had to know to look.

Level up. Decode everything.