Often, you’ll see games with such beautiful, crisp art that it makes what you can do personally feel underwhelming, but I want you to know that not every game is a flawless masterclass in artwork.
Plenty of older releases on flawed hardware or modern indie releases that take after their ancestors' release in simplistic or, frankly, amateurish art styles, and no one seems to mind due to the quality of the title.
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I feel old, having played Cave Story for my entire life.
As long as you’ve got a good game that people find fun, anything else can be expendable. You don’t need to make perfect art—as long as it’s art made by hand by a real person, it’ll be far nicer to see than AI slop on Google Images.
All you need to do to stand out is have some vision and some soul behind your art. It doesn’t matter if it looks like an MS Paint drawing you made when you were 8, as long as the game is still a great time.
These are 10 titles that prove your overall art quality can take a bit of a backseat as long as the game is awesome.
10Cruelty Squad
Visual Vomit
Cruelty Squad
Cruelty Squad belongs on this list, but it’s also got such massive dedication to its purposefully terrible, hard-to-look-at style that I think it might loop back around to looking excellent, somehow.
All the textures are a mashup of weird stock photos, scrawled out mashes of colors, random gradients, and Kid Pix-looking assets, and it all coalesces into the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Everything in this game looks awful, and I kinda love it. I don’t think you should take this as an example of what you should attempt to do in a game, but it sure is an example of a game being fun and interesting even when it looks like that.
It’s impressive how this game can still be captivating with its surreal combat, boomer shooter gameplay, and massive freedom of choice, all while looking like I chose a random file from my images folder for every single wall.
Consistently Inconsistent
I’m a massive fan ofTerraria, but even I have to acknowledge that the game follows absolutely zero principles of pixel art design and instead relies entirely on the Rule of Cool, and damn, it does work.
There are so many mixels, nothing is ever consistently sized, there’s a ton of things that don’t align to the pixel grid—the backgrounds are way higher quality than the foreground, and more stuff that makes the game look off-putting.
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That said, many of the sprites in this game are incredible, though they don’t exactly mesh well with the sprites that haven’t seen a glow-up for a decade. It’s still pretty charming to see the evolving style, though, even if it’s inconsistent.
The game is simply fun, and I can’t care how many pixels go way off where they legally should be, considering how cool itfeels to swing a massive swordand have it shoot out a laser slash that does not look pixelated in the slightest.
8Baba Is You
Superbly Simplistic
Baba Is You
If we’re talking games thatlook simplistic yet still look great, thenBaba is Youis an incredible example. It’s entirely made up of sprites that look like they could be drawn in one minute, and are charming all the same.
Firstly, the title is an inventive take on a puzzle game that takes the conditionals that are so important to coding and makes them a main mechanic, and the simple art conveys that concept perfectly.
Colors are used to accentuate different puzzle elements, and every sprite is monochrome, making every unique thing stand out and every connection easy to point out within seconds of seeing them.
It’s pure proof that you can make a game very simply, with backgrounds that are primarily black and sprites that lack detail, and it’ll still stand the test of time as agreat puzzle gameand a memorable experience.
7Half-Life
Always Crusty
When Valve tried to remake the originalHalf-Life, it turned out so terribly that everyone just plays the original, despite how poorly it’s aged, especially in comparison to the sequel that still holds up to this day.
It’suniquely full of bugs and glitches, all the textures are pretty low resolution and grungy, and you can count the tris on every single model just by looking at them. It all feels like it’s from a 1998 game.
Yet every aspect of this game is still fun, and you’ll see hundreds of people on Steam playing it every single day. It’s a classic, and even if it’s showing its age, the gameplay holds everything together.
This game is simply fun, tells an interesting story, has tons of unique and enjoyable mechanics that laid the groundwork for every future Valve title, and is a monument to good game design going above all else.
Red In Your Ledger
You’ve probably seenSUPERHOT, but you probably have never thought about those weirdly detailed segments outside the simulation; you always think about the simplistic white and red time-based shooter.
Everything in this game is simple to make on a base, artistic level, then made extremely polished and engaging through the technical implementation, something you can do if you suck at art and excel with programming.
Every shader, every detail, like the way your enemies shatter, and every little bit of polish turn overtly simple, polygonal models into an engaging part of the game that sells you on the concept of time only moving when you do.
Sure, technical implementation isn’t easy, but if you’re smart enough about it, you can have simplistic models and environments come to life as long as you commit hard to polishing them up nicely.
5The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
64 Entire Bits
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
While a ton of older games released during the 8 and 16-bit eras still look and play pretty good nowadays, the first set of 3D consoles goes to show how much of a learning period this was for the industry, especially withOcarina of Time.
This game is still #1 on Metacritic and is frequently brought up as one of the best games of all time, even if it looks like all the textures got microwaved and half the environments are comprised of compressed stock images.
People often get on indie developers for making “asset flip” games, where they just buy stock assets off a marketplace and use those to make a whole game, but most old Nintendo 64 games also do this, especially Ocarina of Time.
This game barely commits to a proper style, but manages to convey great atmosphere, tell an incredible story, and be a fun adventure because all the focus was on making the game fun, and almost nothing else got the same amount of attention.
4Lethal Company
Indescribable Atmosphere
Lethal Company
If you’ve booted upLethal Companyand taken a look at the models, you can probably tell the creator started their career by making ROBLOX games with how blocky and amateur the models can look.
The textures are grainy or simplistic, the UI is pretty much made entirely with the line tool and a texture overlay, and all of that is thrown together with a cel shader—and it somehow looks genuinely great.
Purely artistically speaking though, this game looks kind of bad, but it’s such an iconic style that’s easy enough to match, leading to an incredible modding scene and a game that is unmistakably its own.
It’s part of the appeal of the game; it adds to the feeling of getting lost in the labyrinthian structures, and even if the Giants look like clay dolls with LOD enabled, they remain asterrifying as they should be.
Scribbled ‘Nauts
Going for a hand-drawn style may sound like an intimidating task, but just look atAmong Us—especially how it looked around 2020 when it had its biggest spike in popularity—and you’ll find something rather appealing and easy to replicate.
Coming from a background in Flash games and previously having made the Henry Stickmin series, it’s easy to see why Among Us has that charming, MS Paint doodle style to it, and I love it.
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All you need to do is boot up the art program that comes with your computer, make simplistic bean characters that have a handful of animation frames, and you can make something that becomes a global phenomenon.
Among Us is so popular that even my mother knows about it. These character designs are incredibly simple and easy to draw, which is a huge part of their appeal and a big reason why this game was a success.
2Old School RuneScape
Still Going Strong
Old School RuneScape
I have never seen a single person play New SchoolRunescape. Instead, I exclusively see people playing Old School with janky textures, tiny text, awful models, and people selling anything from armor to girlfriends in Lumbridge.
This game shows its age as an incredibly dated MMO, and yet no one hasever wanted it to change. There’s a fully 3D, polished-to-death version of Runescape, and it pales in popularity to this version, because it’s just so damn charming.
If you grew up on a terrible laptop that could only run browser games and 10 FPS Minecraft, then Runescape brings back the same essence as that era, and is a great revisit to the art of developing on horribly underpowered hardware.
Even if it’d be rather easy to make models like this, have a simplistic lighting system, and UI that looks like it was made in a day by some dude running Windows XP, the game can be charming enough to make you never stop coming back.
1Undertale
He Still Uses MS Paint, By The Way
Toby Fox is best known for makingUndertale, and given that he made most everything in it, something had to give. Aside from his godawful programming skills, Toby’s art contributions to perhaps the defining game of the 2010s are not the best.
If you saw this entry and wanted to refute it, thinking of the great backgrounds, character sprites, and whatnot, almost all of those were made by Temmie Chang. Toby made things like the overworld sprites and rooms.
He can sure hit a good vibe sometimes, namely with places like Waterfall, but if you’ve ever actually taken a close look at Frisk, you’ll see they have the most messed-up sprite ever put in a video game, and are somehow still taken seriously.
The iconic heart sprite has inconsistent pixel sizes, there are so many slightly off colors throughout the entire game, there are stray pixels everywhere, but who cares? It’s Undertale, of course, it’s great.
