Indie games have resurrected a fair few nostalgic aesthetics over the years. In hindsight, it was inevitable that gorgeous 16-bit-styled pixel art would make a comeback with the rise of indie gaming in the early 2010s, though maybe fewer people were expecting the warbly low-poly look of 3D PS1 graphics to have reemerged with something of an 'arthouse' status today. Now, it's apparently the turn of early 2000s RTS games, as playing a few hours of Renaissance: Kingdom Wars takes me back to late bloodshot nights in front of a CRT screen shuffling units around in Warhammer: Dark Omen and Shogun: Total War.
And that doesn't just come down to the rustic 3D modelling. Clearly this was an economic consideration to an extent, but the two-person dev team at Reverie World Studios has fully leaned into it. Clicking kings and lords on the campaign map brings up basic animated 3D avatars that stare at you with white-eyed intensity, units on the battlefield are disproportionately huge next to buildings, the UIs are bold and weighty, and the spritey building icons have little animations with a dithered effect historically used to offset bit depth limitations. It's a style this studio has deployed for all its grand-strategy-RTS hybrid games since its debut in 2013, but now in 2024 it's looking more pointedly nostalgic than ever.
