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Agony

Back in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Psygnosis had a reputation for publishing games that squeezed the Amiga hardware like no other. Agony was a perfect fit and saw its release under the Psygnosis banner in 1992. The game was developed by the Belgian studio Art & Magic which had previously worked on the Amiga title Unreal. Unreal already featured some graphical trickery, but it was with Agony that the team would truly create a technical masterpiece. The name Agony was chosen because it sounded cool, and also because its initial letter ‘A’ would ensure it being featured at the top of alphabetically ordered games lists in magazines. This was a lesson the team had learned from Unreal which had always ended up at the bottom.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World began as a comic by Bryan Scott O’ Malley, first published in 2004, about the titular 20-something young man falling in love with a punky girl named Ramona Flowers. However, to win her heart, he needs to face off against her seven evil exes. It communicated this aspect of the story through retro video game metaphors (the fights against the evil exes representing the baggage that comes with life and relationships) along with numerous other visual references. Most notable, whenever Scott defeated one of the evil exes, they’d drop a bit of changes, much like in River City Ransom. While a cult classic at first, it attracted the attention of Hollywood executives, leading to a 2010 live action movie. Created to tie-in with it was a video game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. While much of the actual story of the comic (and movie) is communicated through good old fashioned dialogue, the game tosses away that pretense and reimagines the whole thing as a 2D beat-em-up, most heavily influenced by (of course) River City Ransom.

Cuphead

The most easily noticeable thing about Cuphead is that it looks like an old cartoon. Indeed, the game has been heavily inspired by classic animation: early Disney, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry – but especially the slightly less recognizable Talkartoons series of cinematic shorts by Fleischer Studios. This isn’t just some passing resemblance or lazy name-dropping: a lot of effort has been put into making every detail of the game look like something straight out of a 1930s animated film (with a notable exception of the whole game being in color as opposed to the mostly black-and-white early cartoons). The watercolor-like backgrounds stand out from sharper but differently colored and more exaggerated moving sprites (which in old cartoons was the result of them being created at different times by different artists), the characters have simple but extremely expressive designs and everyone’s arms and legs act weirdly stretchy, as if there were no bones under the skin. The game is even animated at 30 frames per second, despite the fact that from a gameplay perspective, the game is running at 60 fps. One of the coolest details has to be typography: when choosing the level, a difficulty selection screen will look like a short film’s title card (complete with a fake ‘1930’ release date). The huge text which appears on screen to announce the beginning and the end of a fight is also heavily stylized and uses interwar-style fonts.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Ori and the Blind Forest, the first game developed by Moon Studios, an Austriac third-party developer of Microsoft, asks the question: “What would a game be like you mixed the freedom and design of a Metroidvania with the art style of the modern Rayman games?” In fact, those two series were the main inspirations of the developers in the process of making this beautiful hand-drawn platformer. Hard, but still very approachable, the game is a journey to the beautiful but deadly Nibel Forest.

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