6th November
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. We held the article back because it didn’t make much sense without comments, so now that I’m publishing it, it means, yes, we have comments again. Thank you for patience surrounding the prolonged outage, and thank you for your continued patience with any teething problems we may have.
But more to the point: What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Mouthwashing, Steam Deck
The PS1* aesthetic becoming a legitimate stylistic choice makes me feel about 40,000 years old, because I can vividly remember the eras in which it looked shockingly real – being absolutely blown away by the TV spots for Gran Turismo 2, for example – and in which it looked bloody awful (the second the Dreamcast arrived).
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There was a general critical consensus some time ago that the reason why loads of games tried to mimic the 16-bit era was that it was timelessly beautiful, and that there wasn’t the equivalent nostalgia for the 32-bit look because it was cack. For my part, I regarded the fifth gen as an era of stifled artistic expression, where the look of everything was dictated ultimately by hardware limitations and little else. Ineffective at conveying ideas. Polygonal compromise.I was talking rubbish, obviously. To be honest, I’ve come to regard the endless crusade for photorealism as a millstone around the entire medium’s neck. Would it be so bad if graphical fidelity plateaued at the current level? The economics of video game production are already completely broken. We need to go back. Mouthwashing is a showcase of what is possible within the loosely-defined limits of the PS1 aesthetic. It’s deeply unsettling, and so persuasively atmospheric that it fully engrossed me on a rickety GWR train to Paddington last weekend (for that games expo thing in London, can’t remember the name of it). A small but brilliantly drawn cast of distinctive characters and effective writing really pull you along its relatively short, grim, surreal narrative. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in places too, as I’m sure my fellow GWR passengers can attest. All the best horrors are.