lo-fi artstyles encourage imagination- different pespectives!
Lately, I've been playing one of my favorite games, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. It's a trick-style game like Tony Hawk, but it's about hip hop- the culture, the music, the life. The music in this game is absolutely banger, but I do love the lo-fi artstyle too. Which reminds me about something someone said about the art, saying that it was so "low res" and blocky. I mean yeah, it is, but I feel like when someone says something like this, it's due to not understanding what the artstyle is supposed to convey.
For me, the low poly, lo-fi, artstyle of games coming out in recent years are such a nostalgic dream. Not only do the looks remind you of the ps1 era, but it invokes a different "way of thinking" that was done a lot back then- imagination. When you look at a low-poly apple, your mind kind of fills in the blanks of where curves should be because all of us know what an apple "should" look like. It's the same with pixel art- techniques like clustering and dithering are used to properly smooth out surfaces, letting your mind fill in the blanks.
Playing triple-A titles these days that look so realistic is breathtaking, don't get me wrong, especially with what Unreal Engine does. But with how easy it is to work with, giving players freedom to imagine how the characters "should" look like in their heads, and opening up more time for the developer to work on the game mechanics itself to "compensate" for the graphics are reasons why this artstyle is so popular with indie devs.
Idk, I was thinking of the olden days where speech seemed to be so imaginative, like, "Oh, her hair flows as magnificent as the cosmic river in the late evening!" Back then, there were no kinds of media that explicitly show the reader how to think. Like a short video with lots of information or even an image with lots of detail. Back then, they just had text, still photos, and talking to each other. Every person had to do their own exploration of the text in order to find out what the text means to them. That's why I feel it's so interesting to look at historical texts (and by texts, I mean books, and even images, song, poetry, anything to consume) because it's a different time, with text that requires you to think a certain way. Put a different lens on. See things from a different perspective than you see now. You just might discover something grand!
So yeah, the next game I'll make will definitely be something low-poly. I'm hyped to explore so many different perspectives.