I enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup played in the terminal with ASCII graphics. I wonder whether there are other hidden gems out there which don’t get attention because they are “ugly”?
Dwarf fortress and RimWorld are both… Pretty ugly
Yeah especially Dwarf Fortress. The gameplay:graphics ratio is over 9000
That’s improved now, though, with the steam release. Before the Steam release I exclusively played DF with Ascii graphics. Honestly, I thought it was pretty.
I LIKE ASCII graphics done well. It tried playing the version of Stone Soup that uses tiles and couldn’t do it.
It does have a certain charm. I never really played that much tbh, my favorite part was reading the sagas of fortresses on the forums. Those were always so unpredictable and hilarious.
I have had some people refuse to even try Baba Is You, because it looks ugly.
I had The Hex a few years even installed, so I have tried it, but only after getting familiar with the style of Daniel Mullins’ games with Inscryption I pushed far enough to get interested. Still very clunky, but worth it.
Baba is… Fuck you, you’re stupid, this game is stupid. Fuck you.
I’m stupid 😔
I have had some people refuse to even try Baba Is You, because it looks ugly.
Oh come on, the art style is charming!
Who is saying that Baba is You is ugly? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that opinion. It’s always just been “charming Flash game aesthetic” for me
Dcss is the greatest game of all time. Everything about it is good.
But Dwarf Fortress is also good with bad graphics.
Factorio is like crack and looks terrible.
I think the Steam release of DF looks nice. They’re simple graphics, but not ugly.
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I’ll have to give it a go. I bought it to support them. I put in many many hours of DF like 10 years ago. I was sending the guys money too… I wish I could find the drawings they sent me.
I’ve just been playing a lot of DCSS lately because it is so easy to just spin up my browser and be killing kobolds and fire giants.
Agreed. I have more hours in DCSS than any other game.
I don’t think it’s totally fair to call it ugly either. It’s a masterpiece of efficiency. The ASCII looks messy to some people, but after a while you just see right through it; purple Y = catlobe gtfo etc. Plus the upside is that it’s extremely clear at a glance what is going on because you don’t have complicated sprites everywhere. And the handmade vaults that get rolled into the procgen are often really nice looking and give the world a lot of character.
does Doom count? Because my friends and I still play the game to this day, all the various community mods and maps.
FTL, it’s not very ugly, but it could be improved
Battle for Wesnoth. Best.Game.Ever (slight exaggeration)
I second Stone Soup and FTL! Both amazing, but ugly. Also:
- The Binding of Isaac
- Slay the Spire
- Mario 64
Slay the spire is kind of a style choice. Dev art mode is bad however and kinda funny lol.
I didn’t expect to find a Stone Soup entry so early in the list. It’s perfect for me because I can just spawn a new window inside my tmux session, type soup, hit enter, and etch-a-sketch my brain for a few minutes.
I would say Kenshi with assests that show it was done by one person and a rough UI, also maybe pathologic 2, although for that game I wouldn’t say it’s the graphics that put people off it’s mostly the gameplay, but the geaphics are weird and really grey/depressive
Tales of Maj’eyal. A free to play open source roguelike that I hate. This game is amazing. Fuck this game. Also definitely recommend. But fuck this game. After numerous 10-12 hour long runs, I have yet to win.
Love me some ToM!
Mindustry. It’s a mix between an RTS and Factorio. It’s pretty nice and Open Source
I wouldn’t call it ugly
It’s not ugly but I find it pretty hard to figure out what’s happening at a glance because it’s really abstract
Open Source
You said it all
I loved this at first but then the complexity of the various mechanics seemed to take a sharp rocket ship upwards through the roof. I got kind of lost and then tried to read the wiki guide and it was like a book, so that was that. I really wanted to like it though! Maybe I should give it another go.
Mindustry has wonderful graphics!? Nice vector objects that scale smoothly. What’s the ugly part??
Kenshi came to mind as that’s a butt ugly game but probably not as “hidden”. Graphics look on par with Empire Earth 1 zoomed in but it’s really unique and original and the low poly look helps it run on my aging PC so no complaints.
Do you know if there is a good lemmy community for discussing Kenshi? I was about to go on a huge tangent about my experience with the game and stopped myself because this comment section probably isn’t the right place. ^^;;
I don’t know I’m new and still finding stuff. Also I’ve only scratched the surface of Kenshi ATM but if you do find one post it and I’ll join too.
Caves of quid.
Unpopular opinion but I thought Return of the Obra Dinn was ugly. However, I really like it and it’s one of those games you can only experience ones.
Bannerlord! Although maybe it could be argued that it’s not “ugly” per se… curious what others think
Seeing a fully armored horse ragdoll across the sky as my Fians melt Imperials is nothing but beautiful.
I always thought Quake was pretty ugly, great fun though. And I guess much of it was probably supposed to be ugly.
I always digged the earthy colour tones. Combined with the level designs it’s a cozy feeling game.
I dunno compared to other games of a similar or younger vintage like UT2004, that I had a ton of fun with at the time but looking back they have aged like milk in terms of aesthetics and core gameplay… I think the quake games actually have aged very well.
UT2004 certainly does have a much more forgettable look. But the look and style of Quake always seemed kinda like a step down from Doom to me, I guess it’s the little color and enemy models. However, you can definitely instantly recognize it’s Quake from any screenshot, that says something too.
But keep in mind the question was “favourite” ugly game, I didn’t mean to say anything bad about Quake. It’s ugly in the same way that some awesome metal genres sound ugly.
