nightcraw1er.488: It’s a very good looking game.
The art has high technical quality, but the screenshots just look soulless to me... like a higher-detail cousin to the million games that have that "mobile asset look".
I think it's four things:
1. The art style is high-detail, but generic.
2. They cheaped out on the lighting, and that's what makes everything shout "cut-together assets" rather than "unified world".
3. I don't know how it'll look in motion, but the non-player sprites for things like trees have borders that are too sharply defined, so it drives home that they're separate from the layer behind them.
4. Again, I don't know how it looks in motion, but the stills scream "no depth". Everything is either on the foreground or background plane with no signs which suggest parallax when in motion. That'd be fine for pixel art but, at that level of detail, it's harder to get away with.
Compare a GOG store page screenshot of Dust: An Elysian Tale:
1. The more painterly art style encourages the player to overlook minor realism goofs under the aegis of artistic license.
2. When sprites are meant to stand out, they have defined dark/light edges or outlines to separate them from the scene like a cel-painted cartoon. When they aren't, they blend in as if the entire scene was painted as a set of layers in a single Photoshop document and then split up for use as resources.
3. Not only is the lighting unified, the furthest background layer has blur to simulate limited focal depth.
4. Each scene has three or four apparent layers (usually four) that are painted to emphasize the illusion of depth within a layer and things on the player layer, like random animals, have their depth noticeably staggered to further accent that sense of a fixed view into a 3D setting that just happens to be painted.
