Try the demo of this retro-style point and click adventure and embrace the rainbow

I mentioned this in a What Are We Playing? and the podcast last week, but I've been playing a point and click puzzle game called Twilight Oracle, which is out at the end of the month. It's cool! It reminds me a lot of Legends Of Kyrandia, in that it doesn't need to explain why stuff in the world is like it is, it just is. Big talking fish? Sure. Skull floating in space? You betcha.

Twilight Oracle isn't immune to the kind of counter-intuitive puzzle solves that are sort of inherent to the genre (use pineapple on wallet, etc.), but there's a demo to see for yourself, and I thought it'd be just as well to make more of you aware of it before it comes out on the 30th of January. Also because I wanted to point out that one of the reasons I have been enjoying Twilight Oracle is the colour.

Graham makes fun of me sometimes, as I have mentioned before, for the extent of my soft spot for "chintzy fantasy that takes big swings" (citing Immortals Of Aveum, Godfall, etc.). He's right! I am increasingly not a fan of games trying to perfect realism as an art style, especially the big studios, because that makes it more likely I have to spend hours of every year looking at grey rocks (you can't prove this is about Starfield). Maybe I'm imagining it, but a lot of the Western AAA developers can't seem to separate the two.

Perhaps I'm in a small camp here as well, but I really want to see a lot of colour maximalism in 2024, and specifically with bright colours, too. All the colours, everywhere, on everything on screen! You can do it in a thoughtful way - just look at something like Mediterranea Inferno, which is an incredibly striking game, and uses its contrasting colours to reinforce its themes. There's more of it about, and I'm a fan.

I think the use of colour in Twilight Oracle - which serves to make the world vivid, heightened, magical - is a great example of maximum colour complementing a game's form, too. I especially love how most things are shadowed or higlighted in a colour you might not expect. Big cherries with a flash of bright blue, that sort of thing. Some of the earliest games were high contrast because of a more limited colour palette, so when I see that extremely acid-bright turquoise or green I get nostalgic, so that colour-clashing giant squid is really making me think "yeah, this pixel art game is pulling off the retro look, alright".

Plus it's just fun to look at! It makes me happy! I'm sure there are actual artists reading this who are furious and will tell me I've misunderstood things, which is fine, but I still want less grey, more toddler throwing up Skittles. Make the next Spider-man game in neon, you cowards. Twilight Oracle is out at the end of the month from Steam, and you can give the demo a go now. The trailer makes the main character seem more obnoxious than he actually is.