Looks terrible.

Well part of the problem might be that I have never heard of this game in my life.

Well the game is ARCO and only available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Also have not heard of it but might look it up.

Just beat the game.

God damn it’s good. The only way I knew about it was because I was checking Steam new releases. Please god understand that this would have sold with better advertising.

We hadn’t heard of the game. It’s not that it won’t sell, it’s that it wasn’t advertised before now.

Steam never showed me this game. It said I have never played a game like it.

I’ve played arpgs, tactical RPGs, and crpgs,

What more do you need steam?

Pixel RPGs? Western RPGs?

I guess steam thinks the target audience is people that played Red Dead Redemption on steam.

it feels like indies are making the same three genres, and AAA are just remastering the same three games over and over

Says dev making an indie pixel game with hand-drawn character portraits. The reviews are glowing he should at least give it some time to breath before going for the, “woe is me” approach.

1. I’m so fucking tired of pixel art games. And I’ve noticed recently that going back and playing actual 16 bit games with real pixels feels so much better. It’s hard to say for sure what it is, but I have a few theories.

First, in old games that actually use pixels, everything has to snap to the grid. For these pixel art games running at 1080p or maybe higher, what is supposed to look like a pixel is actually a square made up of multiple pixels. In 16-bit games, a sprite can only move distances the same size as a pixel, but in these modern ones the “pixels” can move by fractions of their own size. It loses all the neat, discreet, visual appeal and becomes messy looking in my opinion.

Second, the color pallet is too large. Old games had a limited selection of colors, and often in order to make the most of them the colors used would be significantly different from each other, while still all being part of a cohesive pallet. We are used to millions of colors, but consoles like the GameBoy Color and SNES only had ~32,000 to pick from total. The GameBoy Color also has a software limitation to only have 56 colors on-screen at once. Using a full, modern color pallet without those limitations allows for colors that are close to each other to be used. That’s great for 3D models where we are thing to mimic reality, but for pixel art it just makes everything look messy and sloppy. There needs to be a sharp, distinct contrast for pixels to be satisfying.

Third, there’s just too much stuff happening. This I could probably adapt to, but I just have this expectation that pixel games should just be a few moving sprites and maybe a couple of background layers.

2. The name “Arco” tells me absolutely nothing. It’s not memorable. It’s a complete blank slate that gets washed away. I’m not even certain if that’s just a proper noun from the game or if that’s just a different language word.

3. A hybrid turn-based/real time strategy game? My instinct is that sounds like the worst of both worlds. It has been successful before- Transistor and Paper Mario come to mind. But in general, if in playing a turn-based game it’s because I want the chill, low-pressure experience. I probably want to be less than sober. And introducing real-time elements means that those games get pushed into the real-time category when I choose what I want to play and when. And if in playing a tacts game, 99% of the time in going to choose a turn-based one and get lit.

4. As many others here have said, I’ve never heard of this game. I think this is a legitimate problem facing a lot industries, especially digital products. Doing some quick searching I found someone estimating that Spotify sees about 55 days worth of new audio uploaded every day. Everyone is creating and we don’t have enough to line to consume.

Personally, I suspect that if I went through the exercise of looking at my Steam library and trying to project when I would be able to play through all of the games I currently own, it would probably exceed my life expectancy. Definitely if you add in all of my console game collection.

There’s not a great solution. Corporations try to punch through the noise with marketing. One of the most important pieces of Steam as a platform is their ability to promote games. There are whole networks of influencers- streamers, video creators, podcasters, bloggers, magazine writers, etc all trying to help sort out the games worth playing.

But the problem persists - there are too many games being made. And I don’t want to just say to put up more barriers to entry, because indie development is important for getting fresh new talent and ideas into the industry. Some of the best experiences I’ve had have been indie games, and some of the worst offenders for cranking out banal, mediocre time sucks have been huge corporations with giant marketing budgets.

The only solution I can think of is more “platforms” rather than games. Minecraft, GTA V, Skyrim. Especially with mods, you can get a unique and interesting experience without having to invest into learning and understanding a whole new game.

Maybe it’s just too expensive? I don’t see myself pay 18 bucks for a little indie game with quick repetitiv gameplay. Of course it was work to create the game, but I can’t tell how long it is or how long I’d play it, before I get bored by the gameplay. Should’ve gone with 10 bucks.

It hasn’t even been two weeks and no one has heard of it, so maybe advertising might help.