Back in 1995

[Towns Car Marty]

Back in 1995 is an upcoming game by indie dev Ichijou Takaaki. First unveiled earlier this year at Bitsummit, Back... is unique in that it's a survival horror game made in the style of the genre's PS1 forebears. Blocky characters, low polygons, short draw distance...and yet it all looks pretty charming. Yesterday, Siliconera have reported that the game is due out on Steam in all territories this winter.

(it also looks quite a bit better than 1995-era 3D, but that's neither here nor there)

Obviously this won't appeal to everyone, but as somebody who adores mid-90s Japanese survival horror, I'm pretty excited about this one. It harkens back to an earlier time when horror games were slightly more abstract and mysterious, requiring the player to use their imagination to fill in the blanks.

Perhaps this will inspire a new age of PS1-style indie games. That might not be so bad.

[Nilson]

YEAH. I'm with you on the graphics. Every few months I try to learn Unity to make something like this...

Have you ever heard of this: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ecstatica/ecstatica.htm

Graphics like a nightmare. So cool.

[MeshGearFox]

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I like how PSX/Saturn/N64 era games look. I miss the graininess.

For survival horror games I thought that made stuff look MORE disturbing though. Especially with the way textures tended to warp on the PSX.

[Fei]

Word on the street is that low-poly 3D graphics is the new pixel-art, in that simply using it in your game automatically gives it indie cred and is now appealing, like Fez or whatever.  All that means is that you might see a lot of that graphics style in the hands of trendy successful developers who are smart enough to take advantage.

With how easy it is to make 3D graphics like that right in Unity, it might be a reasonable goal for you to reach for, especially if you still have passion, or a soul, or whatever.

Alone in the Dark on PC, scarier than Resident Evil on PS1 which I had already quit for being too scary. There is a George Washington ghost in a chair that slowly stands up, puts his arms up and the mansion begins to shake as he turns into an ethereal tornado and spirals around the room... to my mind, the tornado was still representative of creepy ghost George Washington, his abstract vortex somehow composed of hatred and anger, the fear accented by having to avoid it or die.  I don't know what I'm talking about, but those bad graphics were scary.

If it had realistic PS4 graphics, it'd look ridiculous.

[MeshGearFox]

I like how if you make a PSX-ish looking game in Unity it'll still require a modern GPU and high-end processor to run.