For me Genshin Impact and Hades (including Hades II) are two examples. These games have relatively simple art styles in comparison to e.g. the realistically painted art of certain Blizzard games (WoW, Hearthstone hero portraits), but they are hard to learn even to someone more advanced in art creation.
Probably Enter the Gungeon, since it’s actually rendered in 3D even though it has a 2D presentation.
Devil Daggers
The sheer amount of attention to details that the game has is just pure insanity The game has special sound effect that plays, to let you know that the flying homing skulls are literally right behind you, just so that you don’t have to look behind you all the time to know if they’re near or not The complete lack of a user interface yet the game still communicates extremely well how everything works by just… throwing it at you and letting you experiment
Maybe Gris might fall into this category? The art is watercolor-like. https://kagi.com/proxy/49096932556_9df94050cd_k.jpg?c=ku7SFIUNyzScXcKVCiVtiLt8qp38RhQL-qpVbdZEzLDJAe5oxkuASH4KBlnRxNVbU0-UjMTnFdPJCpJGzapCh641CjuxRLLgJ1LWV6r1hqs%3D
P.S.: Do you agree with me that the art styles of Hades and Genshin Impact are hard to recreate? I may be wrong but since I’m not an artist at all, I may be right too.
I haven’t played Genshin Impact, but from what I recall from trailers, there are many anime game with similar art style. I am currently playing Atelier Ryza, and I believe it has similar art style too.
Even with Hades, I don’t think the art style is difficult, but a lot of effort has gone into visuals of that game. There is lots of detail in everything. So, maybe in that sense it can said to be hard to reproduce.
Genshin has some cool tricks like shell texturing for moss. A very good cell shader and custom vertex normals on the characters, making it a lot of work to recreate. Also it runs on mobile so it is heavily optimised, which also takes more time.
I would put Ori 2 on this list since similar to hades it has a destinct artists style and many 3d layers on top.
But the hardest to recreate by far not just visually but movement wise and ai and procedural animation is Rain world. Just look at the naking of it is insane how much custom tech this game has.
