Chasing Nostalgia: "Environmental Station Alpha" and "Tunic".by Mischief Maker 05/07/2022, 5:06pm PDT
Been playing a couple games that really call back to the NES classics. Namely Metroid (Environmental Station Alpha) and The Legend of Zelda (Tunic)
I really don't have any nostalgia for NES graphics or the NES color palate, with the one exception of Metroid. Some have argued that dark and shadowy horror films like "Alien" work better on VHS than 4K because with all the dancing artifacts ANYTHING could be lurking in the darkness on VHS whereas in 4K you can see clearly that nothing is there. Likewise, I think Metroid benefited from the limitations of NES graphics, leaving vague details to the imagination and really creating a sense of being in an alien world that really got lost for me with the clearer 16-bit graphics of Super Metroid and Metroid Zero.
Enter Environmental Station Alpha, taking metroid all the way back to the commodore 64:
Then we have Tunic, with modern graphics, but gameplay very much in the vein of Zelda 1 where any tile could be hiding an entire adventure. A nifty wrinkle is as you explore the world you uncover pages from a nintendo-style manual mostly written in gibberish but with enough maps and hints to ease the player into new playstyles. People compare the game to Dark Souls and while I can see the comparison, the combat to me feels more like an overhead isometric version of Zelda 64 combat:
Chasing Nostalgia: "Environmental Station Alpha" and "Tunic".by Mischief Maker 05/07/2022, 5:06pm PDT
