Return To Monkey Island - MI2 sequel from Ron Gilbert

[Alpan]

Look no further than the first vanguard of the Kickstarter-era to find games made without those constraints. They certainly had constraints still, yes, but very different in nature. For the developers of RPGs that had a track-record going back to the late 90s or early 2000s, their liberated-from-publisher-constraints output was... not as good. One way to interpret this is an affirmation of the old "necessity is the mother of invention" saying. It just may be that creative and practical constraints that existed several decades ago were more beneficial to the creative output than anyone could have guessed.

This is a misreading of what actually occurred. Those developers under-delivered not because of a lack of creative constraint, but because they severely underestimated the technical challenge of making the games they thought they were free to make. In effect, they were constrained by their tools this time around -- remember that this was their first time using Unity. In the inevitable compromise that ensued, the creative aspects of the games -- the narrative, the reactivity, the characterization -- took the brunt of the hit. The expansions and sequels to these games -- think Eternity, Shadowrun, Wasteland, Divinity: Original Sin (the relative best, and made using Larian's own engine) -- turned out better than their precedents in most respects for the same reason.

EDIT: To stay on-topic, I do think Gilbert is a sensible fellow who usually (that TP spinoff game...) has good reasons for doing the stuff he does. He's also a good programmer, so I expect him to be rational when it comes to assessing what works for this game. I expect things will be fine.

 

[HoboForEternity]

will it retcon monkey island 3 and onwards?

 

[bertram_tung]

Sure, let's forget about differences in budgets beetween publisher funded games and " first vanguard of the Kickstarter-era "

10000-100000k kickstarter budgets vs 1-10 million publisher budgets

i'm sure pitifull budgets never affected quality of kickstarter games.

budget has v.little to do with bad writing tho

 

[Hobknobling]

Sure, let's forget about differences in budgets beetween publisher funded games and " first vanguard of the Kickstarter-era "

10000-100000k kickstarter budgets vs 1-10 million publisher budgets

i'm sure pitifull budgets never affected quality of kickstarter games.

budget has v.little to do with bad writing tho

That depends. In this context I agree, but there are types of games and other media where you can get so much more done when you have an actual budget and more crucially, people with industry experience that makes them work more efficiently. CRPGs are a good example.

I recall that the golden era Simpsons team used to rewrite some parts of the script 30-40 times before they got greenlighted by the showrunners. You need time (=money) for that.

https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Production

Writing of episodes takes place in a room with sixteen writers who pitch ideas for episodes. The show runners chose a general plot of each of the episodes and a writer is assigned for an specific episode. The main writer of each episode writes the first draft. Group rewriting sessions develop final scripts by adding or removing jokes, inserting scenes, and calling for re-readings of lines by the show's vocal performers.

 

[Great Deceiver]

true, but also a lot to do with things like amount of content and to lesser degree quality of this content, graphics, quality assurance and many others
Gabriel knight 1 which had $1 million budget back in 1993 have vastly more and better content than 99,99999% of indie adventure games made on pitifull budgets . I wonder why.
Blade Runner from 1997 had likely 5+ million and it is blowing indie trash into oblivion
A lot depends of course were you live, 3 world shithole countries are cheaper to live and they allow to make game on lower budget but we still talking about 1+ million to make game on par with Secret of Monkey Island 2
Of course you need both money and talent, and the latter is more and more scarce.

"Talent" is extremely ephemeral and subjective. Creative types need constraints and limitations to figure out solutions. Free reign is anathema to (almost) any productive enterprise.

Plus, it's getting progressively harder to find true "talent", because society as a whole provides incentives for the wrong things. These game creative types have mostly been completely captured by ideological narratives. No amount of money can change that. Ron Gilbert might have had a budget of 500 million dollars, and this new MI would still turn out to be complete shit. The most important aspects of an adventure game are the script and the puzzles. Good writing is truly a lost art and comedy is one of the most difficult things to pull off, especially in the current social climate. You can't find a decent scriptwriter anywhere anymore - not in games, movies or TV shows. It's truly a lost art. Especially so when the entire industry is flooded with dime-a-dozen dangerhair "narrative designers" whose literary exposure consists of young adult novels and whatever activist garbage they were required to read for their overpriced college degrees.

Anyway, I think this recent cult of personality regarding game developers is very bad. Good games are a product of their age, the limitations of the time, and the entire team that worked on the project - including management. It's a very difficult thing to define and capture.

 

[Bigg Boss]

true, but also a lot to do with things like amount of content and to lesser degree quality of this content, graphics, quality assurance and many others
Gabriel knight 1 which had $1 million budget back in 1993 have vastly more and better content than 99,99999% of indie adventure games made on pitifull budgets . I wonder why.
Blade Runner from 1997 had likely 5+ million and it is blowing indie trash into oblivion
A lot depends of course were you live, 3 world shithole countries are cheaper to live and they allow to make game on lower budget but we still talking about 1+ million to make game on par with Secret of Monkey Island 2
Of course you need both money and talent, and the latter is more and more scarce.

Anyway, I think this recent cult of personality regarding game developers is very bad. Good games are a product of their age, the limitations of the time, and the entire team that worked on the project - including management. It's a very difficult thing to define and capture.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

easier explanation:
the people who made these games good aren't the people you thought

 

[MRY]

The most important aspects of an adventure game are the script and the puzzles.

As much as I should be willing to endorse this proposition, I strongly disagree. The puzzles are important, and probably in the top three things in an adventure, but the script is not. Things I would rank above script, setting aside puzzles:

- Premise. This is very different from the actual writing, and it is often what people remember. For instance, the actual writing of QFG is mediocre at best, but the premise is pretty good.
- Flow. This includes stuff like interface, how the character moves (walking speed, availability of fast travel, reliance on "ping-pong" map layouts), whether puzzles are more of the locked box ("you can't get around this, but can't get into it") or locked door ("you can't get out of where you are and into the next area") variety, how lengthy/tedious dialogues and cutscenes are (which has very little to do with writing IMO, except to the degree that too much text is "bad writing"), etc.
- Presentation. I'd much rather play an adventure with beautiful art and mediocre writing than the reverse because ultimately even the best game writing gets in the way of playing the game, while the best graphics facilitate playing the game.

Most of what I remember as great "adventures" in adventure games arose not because of the actual dialogue, but because the combination of premise and flow. QFG has great premise and flow. Same with Loom. Same with Monkey Island 1 and 2. Some of the writing isn't bad, but none of it is particularly good -- what's good is the great premise of a goofy pirate adventure with good flow, excellent presentation and puzzles. CMI probably has more recognizably "good writing," but it achieves that at the expense of worse flow (the game is much more dialogue heavy in order to set up the writing). Almost invariably, adventure games remembered for their script (Grim Fandango has the best script in an adventure game, for sure, others that I don't love but others do would be GK1, GK2, TLJ, and Dreamfall) basically always have bad flow. The puzzles feel more shoehorned in, and the gameplay is bogged down in very long dialogues and cutscenes. The desire for tonal consistency and character depth often moves the gameplay away from the kind of puzzle-solving that is fun and toward extremely simplistic give A to B, tell A about B, use A on B formulas because the narrative constraints screw up the puzzles. (Or you end up with sheer lunacy on top of ludonarrative dissonance as with the puzzles in TLJ.) When narrative-showy adventures strive toward difficulty (e.g., Gabriel Knight, Rise of the Dragon), it is often achieved by having extremely persnickety but not fun puzzle design (show up at exactly the right time at exactly the right place) rather than the goofball fun stuff you see in a comparably finicky but not narrative-showy adventure like Space Quest or QFG.

Obviously, I'm pleading against my own interest here since I am quite proud of the writing I did in Primordia and Strangeland, but ultimately the quality of the writing in those games is at best its own separate enticement and not an element of making them excellent adventures (which they either are, or are not, for other reasons than my writing, though I suppose my writing could've gotten in the way of them being good).

 

[Alpan]

I think when people refer to "script" they implicitly include the premise in it, or they mean premise outright. I don't think the actual quality of the writing attracts much attention either way, unless it's so bad that it interrupts the suspension of disbelief. I know of no adventure game that's been criticized for not being sufficiently literary or whatever, but the rare game that does strive for greatness can draw the occasional plaudit.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

easier explanation:
the people who made these games good aren't the people you thought

Or they aren't the same people anymore. Most people change after 30 years, rarely for the better.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The most important aspects of an adventure game are the script and the puzzles.

As much as I should be willing to endorse this proposition, I strongly disagree. The puzzles are important, and probably in the top three things in an adventure, but the script is not. Things I would rank above script, setting aside puzzles:

- Premise. This is very different from the actual writing, and it is often what people remember. For instance, the actual writing of QFG is mediocre at best, but the premise is pretty good.
- Flow. This includes stuff like interface, how the character moves (walking speed, availability of fast travel, reliance on "ping-pong" map layouts), whether puzzles are more of the locked box ("you can't get around this, but can't get into it") or locked door ("you can't get out of where you are and into the next area") variety, how lengthy/tedious dialogues and cutscenes are (which has very little to do with writing IMO, except to the degree that too much text is "bad writing"), etc.
- Presentation. I'd much rather play an adventure with beautiful art and mediocre writing than the reverse because ultimately even the best game writing gets in the way of playing the game, while the best graphics facilitate playing the game.

Most of what I remember as great "adventures" in adventure games arose not because of the actual dialogue, but because the combination of premise and flow. QFG has great premise and flow. Same with Loom. Same with Monkey Island 1 and 2. Some of the writing isn't bad, but none of it is particularly good -- what's good is the great premise of a goofy pirate adventure with good flow, excellent presentation and puzzles. CMI probably has more recognizably "good writing," but it achieves that at the expense of worse flow (the game is much more dialogue heavy in order to set up the writing). Almost invariably, adventure games remembered for their script (Grim Fandango has the best script in an adventure game, for sure, others that I don't love but others do would be GK1, GK2, TLJ, and Dreamfall) basically always have bad flow. The puzzles feel more shoehorned in, and the gameplay is bogged down in very long dialogues and cutscenes. The desire for tonal consistency and character depth often moves the gameplay away from the kind of puzzle-solving that is fun and toward extremely simplistic give A to B, tell A about B, use A on B formulas because the narrative constraints screw up the puzzles. (Or you end up with sheer lunacy on top of ludonarrative dissonance as with the puzzles in TLJ.) When narrative-showy adventures strive toward difficulty (e.g., Gabriel Knight, Rise of the Dragon), it is often achieved by having extremely persnickety but not fun puzzle design (show up at exactly the right time at exactly the right place) rather than the goofball fun stuff you see in a comparably finicky but not narrative-showy adventure like Space Quest or QFG.

Obviously, I'm pleading against my own interest here since I am quite proud of the writing I did in Primordia and Strangeland, but ultimately the quality of the writing in those games is at best its own separate enticement and not an element of making them excellent adventures (which they either are, or are not, for other reasons than my writing, though I suppose my writing could've gotten in the way of them being good).

I understand your line of reasoning, but some of my favourite adventure games are text-based, either entirely or a parser against static backgrounds (i.e. early Legend). How do you resolve that within your framework? Those games had to be more verbose to set the scene given the limitations of the time, sure, but even stripping off the extra fat they still had strong writing and almost no presentation to speak of. In my view, 'bad' writing can ruin a good or even great premise (for a recent example, see Norco), so I'm not sure that those two things can be split as neatly as you propose.

That being said, I'm also a fan of the more showy style of adventure games - I'm old enough that I remember some of them being used as graphical showcases.

I'm a huge fan of Primordia, by the way. Thank you for making it!

I think when people refer to "script" they implicitly include the premise in it, or they mean premise outright. I don't think the actual quality of the writing attracts much attention either way, unless it's so bad that it interrupts the suspension of disbelief. I know of no adventure game that's been criticized for not being sufficiently literary or whatever, but the rare game that does strive for greatness can draw the occasional plaudit.

I think it would be easier for a game today to be too 'artificially literary', or needlessly verbose with a lot of empty, vacuous writing that only satisfies the writer's aggrandized sense of self-importance rather than serving a purpose in the game. See Disco Elysium (or my previous example, Norco, which clearly draws inspiration from DE). I'm all for conciseness, but that too is an art.

 

[MRY]

I understand your line of reasoning, but some of my favourite adventure games are text-based, either entirely or a parser against static backgrounds (i.e. early Legend). How do you resolve that within your framework?

Of course this to some extent is question-begging about what is good writing, but even in text-only adventure games, the quality of the prose (and certainly the quality of the story) is subordinate to the quality of the interaction. Now, it happens that my favorite text adventures have quite good prose, but excluding Photopia (I'm so sentimental that the game hit me hard even before I had a daughter, and now would be intolerable, I'm sure), what makes them great is not so much the prose as the cool things you are able to do. The language needs to be adequate to explain what's happening clearly, and it is all the better if it does so vividly and beautifully, but in a game like Metamorphoses or Spider & Web, what is amazing are the transformation mechanism (in the first) and the cool spy tools and brilliant interrogation premise (in the second). The clearest example of this for Emily Short is Counterfeit Monkey, where I found the writing actually a bit tiresome but the mechanic extraordinary. And in the older text adventures, I'm not sure that the prose quality of the writing mattered much at all; humor helped and occasionally there was an arresting passage, but like Zork is all about gameplay, the text is just there to facilitate that.

If you had not-very-good writer rewrite every text string in, say, Anchorhead, the game would certainly suffer for it, but I think it would still be a pretty good game. But if you took Anchorhead's writing and just read it as a work of prose, it would be mediocre Lovecraft pastiche of the sort you'd find in a 3-cents-a-word zine (like where I used to publish Lovecraftian pastiche!). That supports my notion that the "script" (which I understood to mean "the strings of text") is not that important compared to other elements.

I'm a huge fan of Primordia, by the way. Thank you for making it!

Thanks. I'm certainly a fan of it, too. And I think it has a loyal following because of the writing. But I guess I think its writing is in a way more like a "feelie" in an old game box -- something that builds a connection with the player, but not necessarily a core part of the game. I think the more compelling thing I put into Primordia is more basic and has to do with the scenario, the actions you can undertake, etc.

I think when people refer to "script" they implicitly include the premise in it, or they mean premise outright. I don't think the actual quality of the writing attracts much attention either way, unless it's so bad that it interrupts the suspension of disbelief. I know of no adventure game that's been criticized for not being sufficiently literary or whatever, but the rare game that does strive for greatness can draw the occasional plaudit.

I think it would be easier for a game today to be too 'artificially literary', or needlessly verbose with a lot of empty, vacuous writing that only satisfies the writer's aggrandized sense of self-importance rather than serving a purpose in the game. See Disco Elysium (or my previous example, Norco, which clearly draws inspiration from DE). I'm all for conciseness, but that too is an art.

It is much easier for writing to make a game worse than better because writing inherently disrupts the gameplay. It's like a footnote in an article or brief or book. If you're going to ask the reader to stop mid-paragraph and go to the bottom of the page, what's there better be good. If the writing is really good, it adds something, but it starts as a distraction and detraction.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

While waiting for this im having great time playing Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure.

 

[Darkozric]

It's amusing to see that when I'm trying to troll MRY for his bullshit it's always the same butthurts that are offended and press the butthurt button. Hey butthurt fags I'm just a reminder of the reality.

The reality is that MRY's team has made 2 adventures, one average and one atrocious and he thinks he can give paragraphs of advises to old pops while he can't make a decent adventure. Actually he can't do shit.

You can defend this pretentious dude as much as you want but personally I'm not a bootlicker.

And hey infinitron, you would make a great couple in real life with MRY.

Lovers in decline.

 

[Darkozric]

While waiting for this im having great time playing Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure.

I remember this, I gave it a go and I uninstalled it after 1 hour. Terrible characters, irritating dialogues and dumb gameplay. A very bad adventure game and most important not funny at all.

 

[Darkozric]

And to move on, here is another interview with red flags.



talan said that Ron got it all out of his system with the making of Thimbleweed Park and I think he's right.

 

[El Presidente]

It's amusing to see that when I'm trying to troll MRY for his bullshit it's always the same butthurts that are offended and press the butthurt button. Hey butthurt fags I'm just a reminder of the reality.

The reality is that MRY's team has made 2 adventures, one average and one atrocious and he thinks he can give paragraphs of advises to old pops while he can't make a decent adventure. Actually he can't do shit.

You can defend this pretentious dude as much as you want but personally I'm not a bootlicker.

And hey infinitron, you would make a great couple in real life with MRY.

Lovers in decline.

That's just rude, man.

 

[Darkozric]

That's just rude, man.

You'll see more rude stuff in the front page of shoutbox. Believe me, this is casual and nothing by comparison.

 

[Manny]

What MRY has proposed is quite interesting and I agree with him partially, at least regarding "flow", although I prefer to speak of "rhythm". But the way I see it, that's also part of puzzle design. In other words, from my point of view, puzzle design includes those aspects around the proposed problem-solution. For example, if you pose certain types of puzzles, you have to make sure that the chosen interface works for those puzzles. I recently played Companions of Xanth, and while there were several very good pun-based puzzles, most of them ended up being solved largely due to the chosen interface. This made the adventure lose strength. The impression I got is that if they had chosen the parser, typical of previous Legend games, instead of the new point and click interface, the puzzles would have been perfect. Similarly, the narrative, to work in an adventure, must be "mounted" on the design of puzzles, I think. That is to say, what is narrated in itself is less important (we can think of more purely exploratory adventures, for example, like Adventure or the first Zork) than the way in which that narrated is built in relation to the background puzzles. For me, an indicator that an adventure is excellent is when I return to it not because I want to know what is going to happen next from a narrative point of view, but because I want to find a way to overcome the obstacle posed. I have felt this confirmed a lot of times, the most recent when I played Discworld for the first time a few months ago and, unlike what happened with several modern adventures (whether they have retro graphics or not) which I finished only because I had already started them, I felt the need to return to the game to find out how to get all the tools Rincewind needs to be a hero, for example. That said, of course an adventure with a good story, good art design, excellent dialogue, premise, and story will be better than one that has those elements to a lesser extent. But, if the puzzle design is average or bad, the adventure will not be more than average or mediocre, at least for my tastes.

Now, what I do disagree with is that in Gabriel Knight, or similar games, difficult puzzles (I would say complex) lead to "not fun puzzle design". The problem I have is with the expression "fun". For me, the puzzle design of the first two Gabriel Knights is quite good and a lot of fun. It is true that we can criticize some puzzle here and there, but, in general, it is the best (and most fun) that the genre has given. My impression is that now (or maybe always, although perhaps in fewer people) the way to approach adventures is to see them as stories in the first place. For this reason, they demand a verisimilitude similar to that required of movies or books. Even now I approach them as games. Therefore, I do not care that certain solutions are not so plausible from a realistic point of view, even in realistic adventures. I remember, for example, some discussion in a thread here in the codex in which someone criticized that in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis at some point Indy must go up a duct and to do so he must stick chewing gum to the soles of his boots precisely because that solution isn´t realistic. However, these types of issues have never been problematic for me, because we are facing a game. In other words, I think looking for narrative and fictional world plausibility over puzzle design mechanics is one of the problems with modern adventures. And, again, of course, the ideal is to achieve that balance in which plausibility is not broken —at least not too much— by the puzzles used.

 

[MRY]

I think the puzzles in GK would have been more fun (and more interesting) if the game had been less serious and literary. For instance, the infamous GK3 puzzle is actually pretty classic fun adventure design (and would’ve worked in most Sierra games) but didn’t work because of the setting. Overall, GK has the least satisfying puzzles of the core Sierra franchises (to my taste).

I’m not advocating easy puzzles, just saying the way other script-oriented adventures approach this is through push-button-to-advance tier puzzles (Dreamfall, Unavowed, late Tell Tale). My point was that this dichotomy between persnickety but not very fun puzzles (GK) and super easy ones seems to be a product of script orientation. Adventures that care less about the script can do more interesting things puzzle-wise.

(That was always Andrew Plotkin’s basis for despising third-person narrative adventures and praising first-person Myst-likes; I prefer third-person narrative adventures but the risk of the script choking other elements is much greater.)

 

[Manny]

Ok, MRY, now I understand your point better. And yes: I agree with you that "adventures that care less about the script can do more interesting things puzzle-wise". That was kind of what I wanted to meant when I mentioned that privileging narrative or the plausibility of a realistic world over puzzles led to less interesting puzzle design.

The point that I wanted to emphasize (and that goes beyond your post) is that stopping to say if a puzzle is "fun", without explaining the reasons, leads us to not go beyond "well, this is fun for me and not for you", and that's it. Instead, it would be more interesting to see why a puzzle is fun.

For example, if I remember correctly, one of the GK puzzles that you have once commented that you thought was bad was the one about the drum code. I thought that puzzle was excellent and fun. The reasons is that it meets the requirements that I expect from a good puzzle: the solution was not explicit and there were enough elements that suggested what to write. The interesting thing —and fun— of the puzzle was precisely putting that information together in order to form the message. Rather, a puzzle for me that was quite critical —and not very funny— was that of Gabriel's grandfather clock. Although its resolution was not explicit and there were several elements that could lead to solving it, from my point of view, some more suggestion was missing to better guide the solution. Finding any book with a dragon poem and then a clock with similar images is seems insufficient to me to unite both elements . Perhaps, if the book had had some mark indicating that it was special to Grandpa, it would have improved the puzzle.

This, in addition to avoiding being left alone in the subjective perception of "fun", I think it would allow us to see why for several players the puzzle design of, let's say, technobabylon is good and for me it was, with some exceptions, quite mediocre.

 

[MRY]

The point that I wanted to emphasize (and that goes beyond your post) is that stopping to say if a puzzle is "fun", without explaining the reasons, leads us to not go beyond "well, this is fun for me and not for you", and that's it. Instead, it would be more interesting to see why a puzzle is fun.

Agree; I've always thought the best thing about the Codex is that it is one of the few places where analytical rigor is applied to such issues.

For example, if I remember correctly, one of the GK puzzles that you have once commented that you thought was bad was the one about the drum code. I thought that puzzle was excellent and fun. The reasons is that it meets the requirements that I expect from a good puzzle: the solution was not explicit and there were enough elements that suggested what to write. The interesting thing —and fun— of the puzzle was precisely putting that information together in order to form the message.

It's been many years since I played, and I believe others have said that my objection to this puzzle is wrong, but here's what I recall.

- It was fairly easy to figure out what you wanted to do, but not easy to figure out exactly how to express the message. In other words, it's a puzzle that I could've solved very easily in a P&P roleplaying I game, "I use the drum code to write that I want them to bring the idol" or whatever, but expressing it as an exact quote "I use the the drum code to write 'DJ BRING SEKEY MADOULE'" was something I couldn't quite articulate right.

- Because of the structure of the puzzle, there was no feedback what you were doing right/wrong (as in a Wordle puzzle, say) and even the feedback that you had failed was significantly delayed, so I wasn't really interested in experimenting. My favorite "hard" puzzles are ones where you mistakes/failures slowly teach you how to do it right.

- I would contrast it with the letter-substitution puzzle in Resonance, which has similar basic principles but is much more fun because of immediate feedback and because you don't have to feed back in a specific phrase.

Rather, a puzzle for me that was quite critical —and not very funny— was that of Gabriel's grandfather clock. Although its resolution was not explicit and there were several elements that could lead to solving it, from my point of view, some more suggestion was missing to better guide the solution. Finding any book with a dragon poem and then a clock with similar images is seems insufficient to me to unite both elements . Perhaps, if the book had had some mark indicating that it was special to Grandpa, it would have improved the puzzle.

I don't remember that puzzle, alas.

I guess I would just add what I've said elsewhere that "fun" puzzles should be challenging; ultimately puzzles that are "fun" simply because you easily conquer them don't give lasting satisfaction; they're like junk food.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

The comparison between the drum puzzle and the clock one is interesting because I found the clock puzzle extremely easy on my first playthrough whereas the drum puzzle makes me tear my hair out every time I think about it (my criticisms largely mirror MRY’s: it’s pretty obvious what you need to do, but the game requires a very specific interpretation in order to progress and it doesn’t let you know if you’ve succeeded or failed until later on). Could your problem with the clock puzzle possibly be an ESL issue Manny? Not trying to be insulting I just know many adventure puzzles fall into a trap of poor localization that makes them unnecessarily obtuse.

 

[ciox]

What the hell is even this?

Spoiler

 

[JarlFrank]

The cool thing is that the preview screenshots include an area that was in MI1 so we can make a direct comparison:

Funny how the game from 2022 running at HD resolution looks way blockier than the pixelated game from 1990.
There is a lot more vibrant detail in the original, a lot more play with the lighting, contrast between the dark blue of the night-bathed city and the warm glow coming from the windows. The color palette is very consistent and pleasant... you might even say it predicted the trend of teal & orange a decade in advance, ha! All the colors, both dark and light, pop out and are vibrant like in a nice painting.
Every surface has a texture to it. The streets are tiny cobblestones, the houses have half-timber frames, the roofs have shingles that look rounded and shiny despite the low res pixelated look.

The new artstyle looks extremely flat in comparison. There is no texture to anything. The street is just flat with some splotches of... puddles, I guess? The color palette isn't half as consistent as in the original, it mixes different shades of yellow and orange light in the same fucking building (the light coming out of the jail is a particularly bad offender: it's a nice warm orange in the windows, but a really weak greenish yellow in the door). In the original you also have slightly different shades of orange for the light... but never mixed in the same building. The jail's lights are more orange while the shopkeeper's house is more yellow, but they both stay consistent within their own coloring. Not so here. The coloring is all over the place. Same with the facades of buildings: the church is a deep blue while the jail is more of a muddy green, and the sidewalks are grey. The palette is all over the place. Also, faraway lights shine just as brightly as close ones in the original, but in the new one you have distant houses with windows that are clearly lit (because why else would they be colored orange), yet don't have any shine to them at all. Look at the windows of the house in the background between the alley. What is that supposed to be? Judging by the color there should be light, but it's way too faint and dark.
The lack of texture is the worst though. In the original, the street had cobbles... where have they gone? Why is it completely flat? Same with the jail, in the original it had clearly visible brickwork, now it's just a flat surface.

The only thing I like is that the seagull in the foreground is cute. Other than that... complete shit compared to the original. Low quality, low effort, lacks all the charm the original's visuals had. And it's not about pixel art vs smooth art, it's about detail, color, and atmosphere. The modern art fails at all of those.