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Essays 05 July 2022, 16:00

author: Marek Jura

15 Indie Games With Best Graphics

Indie games are customarily developed by relatively small teams, so they rarely bring "vast, open world" and complex decision systems. Nevertheless, some of them simply can dazzle you with their audiovisual design!

Table of Contents

Journey

  1. Genre: adventure game
  2. Engine: PhyreEngine
  3. Music: Austin Wintory

Journey was one of the first such extensive productions in which the creators decided to almost give up things like equipment, experience points, quests or a clear story, which are characteristic of most video games. The title from Thatgamecompany and Santa Monica Studio is more of an experience, a walk through a virtual world during which you don't have to do pretty much anything.

The creators encourage idleness. Of course, you can set yourself goals such as reaching certain places or visiting all the ruins, but the player will also have fun just walking around.

Huge thanks go to the extremely refined graphics. The game was programmed on the original PhyreEngine engine. Although it may lack what we could consider as aesthetic bells and whistles in 2022, thanks to the drawing style, the whole thing has practically not aged a bit. And even after so many years, although we already know this convention well, we can easily relax while playing Journey.

FLOWER

Before Journey was released, fans of "gameplay-lite" games had to be content with Flower. We play the role of... the wind, thus controlling the petal of one of the flowers. If you wait a moment, others will soon join it, and thanks to these relaxing and undemanding activities, the world prepared by the game's developers will enliven and evolve.

  1. Journey in our encyclopedia

Marek Jura

Marek Jura

In 2016, he graduated in philology at UAM. Since then, he has been reviewing prose, poetry, movies, series, and video games for GRYOnline.pl. He took his first steps in the journalism industry as a newsman in a local tabloid. He ran his own company - he designed, created, tested, and sold board games. He published several short stories and is also preparing his debut volume of poetry. Trains martial arts. A feminist, vegan, fan of pineapple on pizza, cat lover, dislikes Bethesda and Amazon, likes Lovecraft, Agents of SHIELD, P:T, BeksiƄski, Hollow Knight, performance, abstract art, game mods and dumplings.

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