I’ve been playing a lot of Infini:
It’s neat! I’ve really been drawn recently to games that do One Thing Really Well rather than Lots of Cool Things. Something about these kinds of games is suiting my quarantine/lockdown mental state, keeping my brain uncluttered and focused. Infini does it’s specific style of puzzle really really well, and in spite of the simplicity apparent in the trailer, the way it rolls out mechanics and puzzle styles is very fluid and challenging in the same way that The Witness was. I’m a few hours in, maybe halfway through the levels I can see. The music is also really really cool, very beautiful.
However the thing I’m most occupied by is the really ugly, gross (compelling??) art style which, to me, is really reminiscent of early online hand-drawn Flash animation and games, and it got me thinking about what level of the nostalgia cycle we’re on.
It seems that (if it’s not already happening) we will eventually see a tonne of smaller games coming out that are deliberately and intentionally reminiscent of that wave, in the same way we got waves of 16-bit games, and then jaggedly polygonal games, as the nostalgia for those things met the overlap of people of an age to be creating new works.
So, is this a thing already and I’m missing it? Are there any other interesting games out there that are dedicated to this “look”? I suppose also, probably, there have ALWAYS been things that look like this, but it occurs to me that it might not have been as purposeful as Infini seems.