PS1-Era Graphics Have Found New Life Through Indie Horror Games
Over the past several years, the indie horror scene has seen a resurgence in low-poly PlayStation 1-inspired games. The bygone era of muddy textures, polygon jittering, and pixilated JPEG faces that defined PlayStation titles has come back in full force with some truly terrifying gems.
While horror games have been around since the early 1970s, the genre became a sensation on PlayStationthanks to two monumental games: the first Resident Evil (1996) and Silent Hill (1999). The graphical limitations that were once seen as the PlayStation's weakness have been instrumental to many recently developed retro horror games due to their uncanny quality and likely some nostalgia from modern players.
Top 10 Best Retro Horror Games
The distinctive look of PlayStation games were a result of the console's limitations, and artistic decisions to some degree. The low-poly models and low-resolution textures that defined this console generation came from hardware unable to process many polygons per-frame, nor handle textures higher than 256x256 pixels. The PlayStation also had no way to take edges or vertices that didn't fit perfectly into a grid of pixels into account, making them snap to the grid — creating that sensation of «jittering» polygons.
Another common issue of games from this time was rendering depth due to a weak processor that could not draw many polygons without sacrificing frame rate. This led to warped textures, popping and jittering texture mapping, and developers' reliance on fog. The most notable use of fog to compensate for this lack of depth was Silent Hill, however non-horror games such as Spyro the Dragon, Spider-Man, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter also relied on fog.
Today, smaller budgets and the lower stakes of using
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