Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

So at time of writing, the night before this publishes, I have just beaten the penultimate case of The Case of the Golden Idol. Ideally I’ll start and wrap up the epilogue before this launches and do the DLC on my own time. Definitely get the sequel before the year’s out. I was really excited to play this for that winter project, and although I could take it slow, it’s just so exciting to complete each case.

There’s a lot to love about Golden Idol, from its storytelling to its puzzles to basically everything else, but I keep coming back to its art style. Because it’s crazy. While most uses of pixel art seem to be nostalgic for the Eighties and Nineties eras of gaming, this is designed to set your mind a bit further. By about two hundred years, specifically. The plot of Golden Idol spans a large swath of the 18th Century, and the graphics add to that in a way that’s somewhat surprising. Normally, we use chunky pixels to recreate the aesthetics of the arcade, or the NES. Here, though, it’s used to create something both grandiose and broken. Bodies contort in ways more reminiscent of Dick Tracy comics than contemporary art. Lighting is harsh from each line and dot, but it’s also spectacular (this screenshot really doesn’t do justice to how far it goes). You really do feel at all times like an intruder in a world of wealth, order, rules, and a chaos that’s slowly ripping all of it apart. The game could use any number of graphics to depict its story, but I can’t imagine a single one working nearly as well.

As with last year’s Animal Well, Golden Idol has gotten me thinking about atypical pixel art. Anyone hanging out in the Games Thread is gonna know about plenty of pixel art types, and most of you have played plenty of pixel art games both from the time where they were the standard and from now, with 3D being the standard. Most types are meant to recreate the feelings of games from yesteryear, and that’s entirely fine. Pixel art’s a fine art. But these kinds are especially interesting to me because they’re charting a new path for the medium. These games don’t just look unlike other games with big chunky rectangles; they don’t really look like much of anything else. Animal Well more so, as Golden Idol does have some cultural touchstones (which it largely surpasses in graphical ambition, but hey, who’s counting).

My question to you for this week is to ask what your experience is with these kinds of pixel art, ones that go in wildly different directions than the standard. What are your favorites? Which games would you like to have seen in one of these styles? And what kinds of pixel art would you like to see in the future?

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?