I originally pirated this game on release, but my PC back then couldn't run it reliably. I played it a couple hours and for some reason I can't remember, I just dropped it and never came back.
Picked it up for really cheap recently on Steam because I wanted to give it a second chance with better hardware, and holy fucking shit, how is this game six years old?
Playing in 2025 a game originally released in 2019 really shows me that there's a certain degree of diminishing returns in the games industry, not necessarily in a bad way, but in the sense that I think we've pretty much reached kind of a peak in game development, in terms of tech. As long as you can provide a solid experience, games will still feel great for much longer than they used to.
I might be mistaken and I don't have any handy examples to back this argument, but I feel like ten years ago, a six-year-old game would definitely feel much more dated than this does. Does that make sense? I don't think games used to age this gracefully 10+ years ago.
I can't think of any modern game that just feels this good. Everything is incredibly responsive, the graphics and art style are stunning, the sound design is top notch, the lore is really captivating and it just overall feels like an incredibly polished experience that's leagues ahead of most recent games.
If it were not for the Hiss and all the nightmarish SCP shit going on in The Oldest House, I'd want to live there. I want to touch these gorgeous brutalist slabs of concrete.
Super Mario 3 was released in 1990, Super Mario 64 was released in 1996
I can remember my whole family--non-gamer parents included--just standing there marveling at Mario64's graphics. Mario was visibly breathing instead of just being a sprite. That kind of jump in less than ten years was incredible, and it really does highlight how much the pace of improvement has slowed. If I showed my parents a game that came out in 2019 and one that came out yesterday, I doubt they'd even be able to tell which was which.