In my mid-30s but didn’t grow up with video games.
When I started playing them on my own PC, it was NFS, Half Life, Rise of Nations, and Call of Duty that got me hooked.
Now that I’m looking for games to play on my Deck, most of the games perfect for portable gaming appear to be with pixel art aesthetic.
Just why? Is this nostalgia? In the 90s, deveopers were using every trick possible to squeeze performance out of hardware (been watching videos about old games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Prince of Persia, Doom etc) and I can’t even get indie games with some eye candy?
Never have I been so disappointed to find out that Balatro and Vampire Survivors are pixel art games. My interest disappeared faster than a Lamborghini.
Whatever happened to other art styles? Why don’t we see games with vector or pseudo-3D (or 2.5D) art?
Anyway, that’s my unpopular opinion I guess.
Balatro is, as far as I know, a single person dev team and this is their first game as far as I know.
Hades was made by an established studio that has been around for 17 years and has 25 employees.
Again, a lot of people pick pixel art because they can make all the assets look unified relatively easily. If you’ve ever come across a game with lots of storebought assets made by different artists you’ll know how jarring it is to have wildly inconsistent assets.
They could pick something else, but if it has an extra layer of complexity to getting the assets looking right and unified they may choose not to. You might think “Oh how much art can there be.” and the answer for a solo dev is “Oh no too much.” especially when they are also designing and programming.
And if you don’t care for pixel art there’s tons and tons and tons of games without it, so you can go play them instead without it affecting you.