On Stylization and Games I Like

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There have always been great games. We find plenty of old, obscure titles and appreciate their design today. Not just that—they’re fun. Nostalgia is hitting our culture big time. It has been for a while now. That’s another topic. I spent some time wondering about all that, then tried to figure out why I’m more interested in games now than I’ve ever been.

The itch for style—

So, there’s one thing about today’s games that grabbed me in particular. Stylization. Most things online drift toward enshittification, but the indie scene keeps growing. Stylization—the deliberate crafting of games as art—has entered the mainstream, even among large companies. Stylized games move more freely between indie and mainstream spaces. Retro graphics, animated art, visual novels, painted worlds, unusual interfaces, old things returning in altered forms; all of it reaches broader audiences than it used to. Tiny teams can find real audiences with highly personal projects. And big studios do spend millions, but not only on worlds that look like reality with better lighting. In recent years, we’ve seen more games show what the medium could always do: direct attention, shape perception, and create experiences other media can’t quite offer in the same way. We’re also seeing manga and game-adjacent animation become mainstream: there’s Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix. And I’m glad it’s there. The crowd seems more open to style, pulp and fantasy. And maybe fewer kids will be called weird for reading manga, watching anime and collecting game magazines today. It never should’ve been weird in the first place. But we know that stuff by heart, don’t we? In the ’80s, some folks were after Dungeons & Dragons. 2000s, it was shooters and computer games. I’m drifting, but, look, that’s a win I can recognize.

ghost paper on Ariel Sym

On Stylization and Games I Like

The itch for style—