There was a moment in gaming history when it looked like all games would succumb to the dullest colours imaginable: brown and grey.
Resident Evil 4, Fallout 3, Gears Of War - all bleary examples of a grubby visual style. This peaked in Clive Barker's Jericho, a shooter so desaturated it felt like the colour settings on your monitor were banjaxed.
I have heard this called "the piss filter" and generally lamented in industry circles. But it was always a puposeful choice, intended to add some grittiness to the world.
And there's at least one developer who is reviving "smeared dirt" as an art direction. As Time Surrenders is a very brown stealth game that takes a lot of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid V. "A man journeys through a desolate landscape, carrying a mysterious canister," says the game's website. "He is driven by a purpose only he understands.
Crawl, crouch, sneak and shoot your way through the end of the world in this stealth-action game." What that translates to is something that looks a lot like MGSV: Ground Zeroes.