LogFAQs > #970705901

Natalie posted...

I mean yeah, obviously it's not just trying to look bad, but that doesn't mean there's no room for critique of its visuals. Axiom Verge 1 was very much Metroid by way of Amiga, which wasn't my favourite style but certainly worked alright. From what I've seen of AV2, its use of textures feels like a major callback to shareware and early indie games, and that does tend to evoke a "cheap" feeling.

you can critique visuals all you want but most of the "critique" in this topic is just equating an art style being objectively bad on some sort of "good art" metric

Like I'm not actually familiar enough with AV and AV2. But Golden Idol I have no problem with calling "ugly" because it is very deliberately a grotesque version of classic adventure games and like SCUMM stuff. That is way, way different from saying "graphics don't matter," it is actually the exact opposite.

Likewise a game looking "cheap" really doesn't bother me much because the reason indie games look cheap is because they...often are? Like Calico I've seen played and it looks fine, even good! It's a 3d indie game, they look like that. But it doesn't have "bad graphics," the effort is going into the visual design and color pallette rather than sheer graphical fidelity. Is it MY preferred aesthetic? No but who gives a shit. It accomplishes the goals it sets out to do.

Games can miss the mark with this all the time (Octopath, for example, has a neat style with a lot of visual effects that end up muddying the look in an unfortunate way) but it's unclear to me what people think the mark even is