Many times you can see games with beautiful and vivid art so that you can personally feel overwhelming, but I want you to know that not all games are the perfect masterclass of artwork.
There are a lot of old releases about flawed hardware and modern indie releases that take place in simplified or frankly amateur art style releases after the release of their ancestors, and no one seems to care about it because of the quality of the title.
As long as you have a good game where people find fun, others can become consumables. You don’t need to create the perfect art. As long as it’s art made by hand by real people, it’s much better than the AI slops in Google Images.
All you need to stand out is to have the vision and soul behind your art. As long as the game is still a great time, it doesn’t matter if it looks like the MS Paint drawing you made when you were 8 years old.
These are 10 titles that prove that the overall artistic quality can take a bit of the back seat as long as the game is great.
10 Cruel squadron
Visual vomiting
The cruel team belongs to this list, but it also has a huge dedication to the intentionally awful and hard-to-see style.
All the textures are odd stock photo mashups, running around assets that look like mash of colours, random gradients and kid-pics.
Everything about this game looks terrible and I kinda love it. I don’t think you should take this as an example of what you should try to do in a game, but that’s certainly an example of how fun and interesting the game is, even when it looks like that.
It is impressive how glamorous the game is, with surreal combat, boomer shooting gameplay, and the freedom of choice on a large scale.
9 Terraria
Consistently contradictory
I’m a huge terraria fan, but I have to admit that the game follows the absolute zero principle of pixel art design and instead relies entirely on cool rules.
There are a lot of mix sleeks and consistently sized. There are many that don’t follow the pixel grid. The background is much higher quality than the foreground, and is often used to off-put the game.
That said, while many of the sprites in this game are incredible, they don’t exactly work with sprites that have never seen shine in ten years. But even if it’s inconsistent, it’s still quite appealing to see the evolving style.
The game is simply fun. I don’t care how many pixels are away from where the pixels should be legally located. How cool it is and let me take a picture of a laser slash with no pixels slightly.
8 Baba is you
It’s superbly simple
If we’re talking about games, Baba is an incredible example of you. It consists of sprites that seem to be drawn in a perfect minute, and is just as appealing.
First, this title is an ingenious take on puzzle games that takes conditions that are very important for coding and make them the main mechanics, with simple art fully conveying the concept.
Colors are used to highlight various puzzle elements, and all sprites are monochrome. It makes all the unique things stand out and makes it easier for every connection to point out within seconds of seeing them.
It is pure evidence that you can make a game with a background with a largely black and sprite background missing in detail, and it will still stand the test of time as a great puzzle game and memorable experience.
7 half life
Always unfriendly
When Valve tried to remake the original half-life, it got so bad that everyone played the original, despite how unmatured it was, especially compared to the sequels that remained to this day.
It’s because all the textures are dirty at a fairly low resolution, you can count TRIs on all models just by looking at them. I feel it’s all from the 1998 game.
But every aspect of this game is still fun and you’ll see hundreds of people playing it every day. It’s a classic, and even if it shows its age, the gameplay keeps everything together.
This game is simply a fun, interesting storytelling and has many unique and fun mechanics that lay the foundation for all future valve titles, and is a monument to game design, above all.
6 Super hot
Red ledger
You’ve probably seen Super Hot, but you’ve never thought about the strangely detailed segments outside the simulation. You’re always thinking about simple white and red time-based shooters.
Everything about this game can be easily created on the artistic level of the base and then became very refined and attractive through technical implementation. This is something you can do if you’re good at smoking art and programming.
Every shader, like the way enemies are shattered, is just too simple in every detail, and every aspect of Polish, making the polygonal model a fascinating part of the game, and the appealing part of the game that sells you with the concept of moving only when you move.
Certainly technical implementation is not easy, but if you’re smart enough about it, as long as you commit hard to hone them well, you can achieve simple models and environments.
5 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
64-bit whole
The tons of old games released in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras still look quite good these days, and the first set of 3D consoles shows how much of the learning period for the industry, especially the Ocarina time.
The game is still number one in Metallic and is frequently grown as one of the greatest games of all time, even when all the textures win a microwave and half of the environment appears to be made up of compressed stock images.
Often people join indie developers to create “Asset Flip” games. There you buy stock assets from the market and use them to create an entire game, but most old Nintendo 64 games, especially Ocarina, do this too.
The game barely commits to the right style, but it focused on conveying a great atmosphere, telling an incredible story, making it a fun adventure, and making the game fun, so little is equally attention.
4 A fatal company
An atmosphere that cannot be described in words
Starting a deadly company and looking at the models, you can probably tell the creators started their careers by making Roblox games how models look blocky and amateur.
The textures are granular or simplified, and the UI is made entirely with line tools and texture overlays, all of which are thrown along with the cel shader.
Purely artistically speaking, the game looks a bit bad, but it’s an iconic style that’s easy enough to match, leading to incredible mods and undoubtedly its own game.
That’s part of the appeal of the game. It adds to the feeling of getting lost in the maze structure, and even if the giants activate LOD and look like clay dolls, they remain intact.
3 Between us
Scribed ‘nauts
Going to a hand-drawn style may sound like an intimidating task, but take a look at the ways we saw it around 2020 when there were the biggest popularity spikes.
I’ve come from the background of Flash games and have made the Henry Stickmin series before, so why have an attractive MS Paint Doodle style among us, I love it.
All you need is to launch the art program that comes with your computer, create simple bean characters with just a handful of animation frames, and create what will become a global phenomenon.
Even my mother knows it because it’s so popular among us. These character designs are very simple and easy to draw. This is a big part of their appeal and a big reason why this game was successful.
2 Old school runescape
I’m still strong
I have never seen one runoscape for a new school. Instead, I play an old school exclusively with people selling everything from yanki textures, small texts, awful models and Rumbridge girlfriends.
The game shows its age as an incredibly outdated MMO, but no one has it. There is a completely 3D refined version of Runescape, and this version is different in popularity.
If you grow up on a terrible laptop that can only run browser games and 10 FPS Minecraft, Runescape brings back the same essence as it was in its era and revisits a great revisiting technology that develops with horribly inadequate hardware.
Whether it’s fairly easy to create such a model, or even with a simple lighting system in place, the UI that appears to have been made in a day by a guy running Windows XP is so appealing that the game never stops coming back.
1 Undertail
Incidentally, he still uses MS Paint
Toby Fox is best known for making undertails and given that he made almost everything in it, he had to give something. Aside from his sacred programming skills, Toby’s artistic contribution to the decisive game of the 2010s is probably not the best.
If you want to see this entry and refute it, think of great backgrounds, character sprites, and more, almost all of them were made by Temmy Chan. Toby has created something like an Overworld sprite or room.
He can sometimes hit a good vibe. So there are places like Waterfall, but if you’ve actually seen Frisk a lot, you’ll see that they have the most messed up sprites ever in video games.
The iconic Heart Sprite has inconsistent pixel sizes, a lot of slightly off-colors throughout the game, and annoying pixels everywhere, but who cares? Of course, it’s the best, it’s great.
