cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/28095114
Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.
But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.
I’d rather see the “bad” things than Ai.
Honestly if the rest of the game is good, I would rather have some napkin sketches, or a computer based paint software.
I’m 100% with you. Bad art with genuine effort put into it has a charm of its own. I understand the team’s mistake, but it’s still a mistake.
Do you genuinely believe this is true for even just 10% of gamers? 10% of people? I’m not saying I disagree, I just don’t believe any relevant amount of people give a damn about the purity of art for most things.
Most art the average person interacts with is mainly utilitarian. Marketing and porn is probably like a good 80% by mass. As long as the art does it’s job, I just don’t believe most people give a fucking damn.
You’d honestly be hard for us to find even 1% of the population gives any real f*** about the source of art. They pretty much only ever care about the actual final result and maybe at most a name attached to it because it’s of value in some nebulous fashion. Not the reason why that value is there. Just that it has it.
Hell honestly, most art is utilitarian. You’re entirely right on that. It’s made to serve a purpose either for the artist themselves or for the person consuming it. Most communal forms of art are made as a way to do something more efficiently or as part of a ceremony to accomplish something.
Art for Art’s sake is kind of an extreme rarity.
No you wouldnt. 4 decades of whining and bitching by gamers have proved that. There is no winning with this lot.
I wonder, what would be examples of games with badly done art that is overlooked because the game itself is good.
And I think stuff like Minecraft doesn’t count, because with that style, the uglyness is a choice, not a result of not being able to make things look a certain way.
“Sentinels of the Multiverse” is a fairly popular board game (within those circles) and it looks pretty rough. Pokemon S/V got rightfully dunked on for looking like shit but it still made a bunch of money. “The Case of the Golden Idol” is highly regarded. Runescape.
No one really gave pokémon any s*** for the art. They gave s*** for the performance such as like the pop-in and reused assets.
But the actual art is fine. No one really had issue with that. It’s pokémon for heaven’s sakes. Not crisis.
That’s why people got mad. It’s basic 3D models in really simple backgrounds and it ran like s***. There’s no reason for something that looks like pokémon to run poorly.
I think pokemon was so heavily criticized partly because it’s developed by a veteran studio that really should be able to do better. And the way it looked bad wasn’t so much the art style, but how it was loaded into the game.
You had a lot of pop-ins, things not being animated in the distance, and every npc using the exact same animation at the exact same time, as well as some truly uninspired textures out in the wild.
Gamefreak is clearly capable of better when you look at Beast of Reincarnation or Little Town Hero, they just don’t seem to care about pokemon anymore.
Effort, talent, technology, taste, there’s lots of reasons for something to look bad.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is popular if nothing else, but the art in the early games isn’t bad on purpose.
Most obvious example I can think of is Cruelty Squad, the art style is intentionally eye-searing there though.