Apart from Bastion, unpopular opinion I suppose, but the 2008 Prince of Persia was one of the most beautiful games I've played. I recently replayed it and the cel shaded graphics still hold up fairly well. The story, especially the ending, is still great. I think most people didn't like it because it was a very different game from the preceding Sands of Time trilogy, but I treated it as its own thing, and loved the fuck out of it.
THANK YOU. Bastion has its flaws for sure, but I was just talking the other day about what an absolute masterclass it is in art direction. Painted, vibrant, cartoon art style, in a dystopian future where a world flying in the sky is destroyed with mixed futuristic and past technologies, with music that sits somewhere between blues, electronic, and eastern traditional.
I have a saying, "if someone says a movie is great, and the description sounds like crap, it's probably genuinely amazing", I say this because for a movie that sounds on the surface not good (e.g., "a teenager hallucinates a rabbit that tells him to do stuff, then his girlfriend gets murdered on Halloween by the rabbit, but he goes back in time to stop it") it must mean that it has to have been done so expertly, that it has to land every punch to be good. I feel that way about Bastion too, it sort of shouldn't work with all it's influences (especially the soundtrack), but it nails absolutely everything.
Bastion is fantastic and I’ve loved all of Supergiant’s stuff. I’m a bit sad that Hades is the game that has REALLY taken off and apparently all of their other games are relatively niche. Don’t get me wrong, I think Hades is great and it’s certainly the one I’ve played the most because it’s sort of designed to be replayed… but in some ways it’s their most normal game, and I’ve loved the weird experimentation they’ve done. All of their games are at first like “ew, I dunno, fantasy basketball? Not really my jam…” and then it’s TOTALLY my jam and it’s great.