"Retraux" 3D games that actually look good

[rusty_shackleford]

I've been looking at the artstyle of various 3D games made in a "retro" style and nearly all of them look like, quite frankly, poop.


Prodeus

AMID EVIL

I refuse to believe there are people who think this is aesthetically pleasing and not just doing some performative form of hipsterism where they pretend it looks good to impress people.

---

Of the few I've found that actually look good:


Ion Fury
Good spritework and textures, very little pixel-puke, no abuse of post-processing. Hey, it's almost like they had a talent artist(s) working on it and you can't just hide a bad artstyle with layers of filters.


You guys know of any more?

[wndrbr]

Wrath Aeon of Ruin looks pretty decent. It uses a modified Quake 1 source port, and .

Blasphemous looks good.

Signalis has a pretty stylish presentation.

[rusty_shackleford]

Blasphemous looks good.

Signalis has a pretty stylish presentation.

Forgot to specify that I meant 3D

[edit]
Wait, I did!

[Jason Bright]

Northern Journey is basically 'retraux' although 'low-poly' would be more accurate and it looks great.



A very atmospheric rendition of the Norwegian landscape.

[Cipher]

Yes. I have never understood this situation. Is nostalgia so powerful that people will do anything chasing that dragon?

Sprite work, good sprite work is timeless. It's not nostalgia. Stuff like Megaman X4 and Symphony of the Night looks great even by today's standards and so Blasphemous and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound do too. I can't understand people actually claiming to be nostalgic for "PS1 blocky low-poly" graphics and genuinely wanting it in new games. It looks bad, even back then. But, it was the new thing, it was the best thing we had in 3D.

If Unreal Engine 5 "hyper realistic" slop should have taught those brainless idiots anything, is that a great artistic design trumps any attempts at photorealistic graphics. That's why good sprite work is timeless and even mediocre sprite work holds up considerably better, in comparison to 3D graphics. It's also why even normiefags agree that games look better in the PS3/360 era, because even though they didn't have godrays and other photorealistic stuff, they had a clear artistic vision and design that fit with the intended experience.

[wndrbr]

Blasphemous looks good.

Signalis has a pretty stylish presentation.

Forgot to specify that I meant 3D

[edit]
Wait, I did!

Signalis is 3D

[DecadeRiptide]

I've been looking at the artstyle of various 3D games made in a "retro" style and nearly all of them look like, quite frankly, poop.


Prodeus

AMID EVIL

I refuse to believe there are people who think this is aesthetically pleasing and not just doing some performative form of hipsterism where they pretend it looks good to impress people.

---

Of the few I've found that actually look good:


Ion Fury
Good spritework and textures, very little pixel-puke, no abuse of post-processing. Hey, it's almost like they had a talent artist(s) working on it and you can't just hide a bad artstyle with layers of filters.


You guys know of any more?

How do you rate ion fury out of 10? Worth playing?

[sheet]

Nothing will **** me off faster than when devs do "retro style pixel art" and have either of "varied pixel sizes" or "pixels can turn diagonally".
They don't understand what the limitations of the style are, and think you can just make a 1080p game mimicking 240p of old.

[ghardy]

How do you rate ion fury out of 10? Worth playing?

I wrote earlier about Ion Fury:

It's alright. Not quite at the level of the old Build engine games.

The protagonist needed a lot more edge, sass, more personality.

The level design is good. Weapons are decent. Soundtrack is fine.
Enemies are good enough. Vehicle sections are... eh.

Even so, Ion Fury and its expansion Aftershock is one of best of the "Boomer Shooter" revival games.

(The sequel, Phantom Fury, was horrible however.)

7/10 would be too low, but 9/10 would be to high. I'd say 7.5 - 8.5 out of 10.

[rusty_shackleford]

Selaco looks pretty good from its screenshots, some of them have a lot of postprocessing tho

[rusty_shackleford]

Tangentially related, but for some reason 3D Realms killed their devblog page? Something like two dozen devblog articles were nuked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230923001 ... om/devblog

I thought some of them were pretty cool…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230325105 ... on-maiden/