I have a confession to make: pixel art just doesn’t do it for me anymore. It’s a fantastic medium, and when done right, it can deliver on character and environment in a way that other styles simply couldn’t. For all of the transcendent examples of the form, however, there are a dozen others just trying to cash in on my lingering nostalgia for a bygone age of gaming. Maybe it’s just the kind of jaded edge that comes with growing old, but whenever I see 2D pixel art in games, I feel as though someone is trying to sneak something by me?like half-hearted platforming can become something more if the characters are cute and a little blocky.
For that reason, I approached Owlboy‘s port to the PS4 with a lot of skepticism. Before me lay the exact thing I’d become so cautious toward, gesturing toward its retro wares with some kind of weird feathered wing-hand. I picked up the controller. I moved Otus around the house he starts within, crashing clumsily into some books on a shelf before opening the door and entering the world outside. And, despite all my convictions about nostalgia being a cheap sell, I immediately fell in love. Owlboy is a wonderful little platformer, perfectly suited to the PS4 and its controller. Everybody Got the Game Figured Out All Wrong

The first thing that jumps off the screen in Owlboy is the sheer fluidity of the world around Otus. Despite its graphics?and we’ll get to that?the game environment has this sense of...