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.
I was saying the same thing about dishonored (2012/3) the other day. Graphics look dated - low-res mainly - but the art direction makes them still very okay. I remember back in the early-mid 2000s graphics were absolutely progressing every year, with every new game being able to offer a higher fidelity experience as well as bigger worlds, more npcs on screen etc. by which I mean very quantifiable technical achievements. When they started introducing ragdolls to npc bodies the whole world screamed at the sight of what had become possible on consumer hardware.
I can barely tell the difference between a 2019 and 2025 game, aside from there's more animations and they look smoother. They're doing ray tracing and HDR now but if your graphics card can't even do it (which is most of them currently in use I'd wager) you're never going to interact with that. I think they're also doing stuff with sound, but I can't really think of a breakthrough technical achievement that becomes commonplace. I guess if I had to think of one, it's how many NPCs the new hitman games are able to simulate at once... but the reboots started in 2016, 9 years ago.
Everything Viktor Antonov touches as an art director immediatly looks good forever, dude has been touched by the god of art. Half Life 2, CSS, Wolfenstein TNO, DOOM (new one), Prey (also new one) to name a few. Even the games that aren't that good, Kingpin: Life of Crime and Falllout 4 for example, you still can't really fault them for looking bad