![]() Prodeus may not be winning any awards on its unique premise of a demonic sci-fi abode or sense of having to mow down room after room of inhuman beasties with a wide assortment of pixelated weapons. While they may not be the first to attempt it (and I guarantee they won’t be the last, if this trend continues to prove fruitful), developer Bounding Box Software have nailed the basics on why these kinds of games are, at their most mindless, a joy to invest brief excursions of time into. It surely isn’t as satisfying to do all this back-tracking, bunny-hopping and secret room-hunting now as it was all those years ago, right? Wrong. ![]() Times have changed, advancements have been made. That the blatantly-visible pixels on-screen and a return to a level design philosophy that favored hunting down multi-colored key cards would indeed be a relic of the past. In a way, you can’t help but involuntarily cling to the idea that it won’t work. Liberties with fidelity and artistic direction are common staples of the independent corner of the industry, but up until a few years ago, the idea of a pixel-heavy, low-resolution shooter that something like Prodeus presents would’ve seemed like nostalgic appeasement taken a step too far. If anything, the “less is more” demand in the aesthetic department never went away. In the wake of such effective releases like Dusk in what may be deemed the post-2016 DOOM period, it’s clear that like a lot of old favorites making a remarkable return, the market never died. It’s that same jaggedness, that unapologetically lower poly-count, that ironically makes these types of throwback releases stand out. The particular kind of three-dimensional, ultra-violent antics that spoke to the kind of people whose love for the original DOOM is far from swayed by the limitations of its graphics or the polygonal jaggedness of its visuals. What better proof of formerly-aged archetypes seeing a resurgent return than the 90’s brand of FPS. ![]() Why on Earth would you want to replicate that? Why would you want to take that suggestion of nostalgia that one step further? Well, now that we live in the age of micro-consoles and resurgent arcade cabinets, taking nostalgia to the next level doesn’t seem all that odd nowadays. To think there was once a time in video games where the ability to choose between scan-line and CRT filters would be met with baffled glances.
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