Beyond pixel art

On the Fours page that i recently added to this site, i list my four favourite-slash-best video games which at the time of this writing are brogue, towerfall ascension, cave story, and apotris. The latter three of those four games use pixel art. The latter two of those three i can forgive, because the latter one of those two is a gba game, and the former was released when resolutions were noticeably lower, and does in fact have higher resolution re-releases which i don’t play simply because they involve paying money to a company i don’t particularly like. Not all games use pixel art, but a lot of indie games do, because there is a belief that it is easier on simpler than non-pixel art. In some ways that’s true. In other ways it’s not, and the end result is a lot of games that suffer purely from having mediocre pixel art when they could have stylised themselves in some other way. The first game on my list of favourite games, for example, is brogue, an excellent small roguelike which,…