Is that a parody? Castlevania: Symphony of the Night famously have a god awful menu screen that was literally a placeholder and they forgot or didn't have time to change it. Not that it is a bad game, I point it out to say that even back them AAA not always is the Pinnacle or effort and polish, and how can they be, they are subject of so many constraints, like release date to fall into marketing strategies and such, specifically with physical media production. So if a game was to be released for the Christmas shopping season it would not be postponed because a lack of a menu design.

I too was there 3000 years ago and there was a lot of shit AAA games even back them. For one there was a lot of bad habits from the arcade time that made a lot of gameplay suboptimal. I think that it is just survivorship bias because the 90% not great is forgotten with time and we only remember the great games.

But all of that is beside the point, how can you put Fez and Slenderman in the same group? Fez is a great game, there is no lower quality in any aspect of it. In fact in modern games I see more experimentation and innovation in Indie titles and almost none in AAA because they are so expensive they have to always play it safe (same shit happening with the film industry by the way).