The video game industry is at an interesting place right now. There are a lot of cool things happening, like the rise of indie games, visuals being better than ever, unique online games keeping friends connected, and story-driven games getting the player immersed more than ever before. That being said, there has been a bit of a problem occurring within the gaming industry for a handful of years now.

That issue is that the art direction of the vast majority of AAA games has shifted almost entirely to focusing on hyper-realistic, theatrical gaming experiences. While it’s never a bad thing when a game looks good, especially when most of these games are also made well and fun to play, it’s a downer that it’s what’s primarily being released. The releases of colorful, imaginative, and aesthetically unique have become fewer and farther between. 

Just a couple of decades ago, it seemed like colorful and whimsical video games were being released rapidly. Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Banjo-Kazooie, Blinx the Time Sweeper, Psychonauts, Okami, Team Fortress 2, and many, many others were hitting store shelves left and right. They were all different visually and all played differently. The variety was great for the world of video games because there was always something new and different, and if something wasn’t your thing, something else probably was.

Now, it seems like the bigger video game developers want to suck the color and personality out of as many games as possible. Everything has to be as realistic as possible. They’ve even been focusing more on Hollywood actors playing characters identical to them instead of designing unique characters. Many mainstream games have become aesthetically boring, with indie games pulling the wait of uniqueness and creativity.

A lot of these hyper-realistic games often play the same and use the same combat system. Everything is all meshing together and they’re all becoming dull. It doesn’t make these games bad on an individual level by any means, but not everything needs to be a Soulslike, a generic military shooter, or a playable movie.

Sure, characters like Mario and Sonic haven’t gone anywhere, and Spyro and Rayman are making comebacks, but that’s not enough to stop this homogenization of video games.

There’s certainly room for all of the above. I love Uncharted and Until Dawn and The Last of Us, but it’s exhausting to see hyper realists game after hyper realistic game get announced at showcases like Summer Game Fest, including a dozen samurai games that look identical, when there are a tiny handful of aesthetically interesting games with unique playstyles revealed. That variety needs to make a comeback. Hopefully we’re on the verge of that comeback, and we’ll see it start to take shape in the near future.

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