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”?
Would Cruelty Squad be cheating?
Wow that art style is… something
It’s like… 2001 shareware shitpost flavored.
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 😔
Some people find Slay the Spire’s art ugly. Personally I find it creative and original, definitely more personality than if it was just another pixel art game. 😁
I don’t find Slay The Spire that ugly artwise, I don’t find it beautiful… but what I do find ugly is how terribly Slay The Spire uses screen space. It has an AWFUL UI in terms of using space intelligently for important bits of gameplay information and I would love to play it on mobile (I play other deckbuilders on mobile a lot) but I will never touch it on mobile for that reason.
Really? Why do you say so? I always found it pretty usable, in mobile some buttons being so near the edges can be pretty uncomfortable tho.
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.
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.
I’ve also been playing since Linley’s! Got my first win way back when Sif channeling was a discrete action and it cost food. I was a mummy so fuck food and I cast summon dragon (also discrete) to fill up the whole screen. Good times.
I always thought Quake was pretty ugly, great fun though. And I guess much of it was probably supposed to be ugly.
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.
Card Quest (Android) has similar dated graphics, but I got kinda into it lately. It’s a card-based roguelike, with a fixed deck that only changes with inventory/skill changes.
Thanks for the recommendation! Spent this evening playing it, and it’s everything I was hoping Slay the Spire would be. Slay the Spire is still great, of course, but deckbuilding has always been my least favorite part of card games.
You’re welcome, glad that someone enjoyed my suggestion!
Yeah with Slay the Spire there is often some slight feeling of “I lost because I didn’t get any good cards”, but in this game I more often feel like I died because I messed up my resource management and priorities haha (still haven’t beat it once yet…)
TradeWars
I know that game, used to play it on BBS in the early 90’s.
