I also hate indie games for the same reasons you give. Most of the time they're never of the quality of a real game, or at least not a good real game. Maybe if my standards were lowered by modern shit I'd feel differently, but I don't play modern shit. But so many games say they're gonna be the next Mega Man or whatever, but they're never as good as Mega Man.
But then I got into ActRaiser, and I couldn't find any other games that really scratched that itch, and someone here told me about Smelter. It's a bit like ActRaiser, with a town building mechanic where you're also playing a top down shooter while you build, and I like that. It's more complex than ActRaiser, given that that was a game from 1991, but it's not super complex here either. I wish it was a bit more complex, but it's good. The platforming sections are like Mega Man X instead of Castlevania. I'm fine with that. I love both those series. The graphics and everything are nice. You play as a scantily-clad lady with big titties, which I like.
But then there's the story and all the stuff related to that. Is it extremely explicitly feminist? No. But does it have all the feminist tropes? Yes. First it's just that you have Adam and Eve, then Adam gets captured by demons so Eve has to save him. I'm fine with that. It's not like they make Adam out to be a bitch or Eve out to be butch. He just happened to be the one captured, and she loves him, so she goes out to save him. She's a silent protagonist, which probably helps. Then she meets this demon thing, Smelter, who fuses with her to fight the other demons. Smelter does the talking, like a Jak & Daxter thing, but boy is he a hell of a lot more annoying than Daxter. I normally think it's stupid when people complain about characters not shutting up in games, but Smelter's humor sucks balls, because it's exactly what you'd expect from soyboys making indie games. Very Whedonesque, if you will. Then of course there's all this stuff with female characters turning out to be good and most male characters turning out to be evil, and given it's current year, and given Smelter's dialogue already being of that soyboy nature, it all just rubs me the wrong way. But that said, since you said "at least not explicitly," then I can say that this game doesn't have anything "explicit" like that. It just has a bit of that style going on. But you do see half-naked titties the entire game, so that goes a long way to helping me ignore it. And the gameplay did scratch that ActRaiser itch for me, certainly a lot more than ActRaiser 2 and ActRaiser Renaissance.
>tl;dr: Smelter has fun ActRaiser mixed with Mega Man X gameplay. The graphics are nice and you play as a half naked hot chick. But the dialogue and story definitely leans toward that tumblresque feminist crowd. It's not so far that they can't have you play as a half-naked hot chick, but it's quite noticeable, at least if you're the type of person who posts here.