Dread Delusion : Lo-Fi RPG
Sometimes all it takes is a single image to make you want a project more than you should. What we see speaks to us or intrigues us in particular, and that’s the effect Dread Delusion had on me. Like the games we chose for their key art as children, I chose Dread Delusion for a simple screenshot. It was the promise of an old-school fantasy universe added to that striking art direction that captivated me from the first glance. It’s not alone in embracing low poly; lately, several projects taking up this PS1 aesthetic have seen the light of day: Threshold, Sorry We’re Closed, Signalis and Mouthwashing. One publisher, Critical Reflex, has become almost synonymous with eye-popping 3D. By taking a closer look at today’s independent video games, we can easily understand why this comeback is happening, and more importantly, why it’s working so well.
Mémoire Polygones
For any gamer born before the mid-90s, the aesthetics of the PS1, with its large polygons and vibrant assets, is a vector of deep nostalgia. For us, with the PS1 in 1994, it was the discovery of the famous 3D so fantasized about at home. Since the end of the 70s and Cinematronics’ Space Wars, numerous attempts have been made to achieve the holy grail of the real-time 3D videogame experience. At first, it was done in monochrome wireframe, without any texture, until the early 90s. It was with Alone in the Dark in 1992, followed by Wolfenstein 3D, that 3D video gaming really marked the start of a technological boom on PCs, with the arrival of 3dfx and more powerful graphics cards. It wasn’t until the arrival of the Nintendo 64 and, above all, Sony’s PlayStation, that 3D became a reality in every living room.
Numerous game genres would seize on 3D and create a new grammar specific to this type of display. Platform games, racing games, FPS, etc. They all began to move towards the third dimension. They are setting new standards in a flourishing industry that has everything to reimagine. Spaces are being reinvented for 3D exploration, camera shots and angles are being played with to give a more cinematic feel, gameplay is being rethought to make use of this newly available depth, and a whole host of other elements are being adapted and born.
It’s the nostalgic spirit of that era that lies at the heart of Dread Delusion, and the passion of James Wragg, solo dev at work through the studio he founded, Lovely Hellplace (between you and me, it’s a name that perfectly suits the universe of his game). In an interview, he says that developing Dread Delusion stems from a certain weariness felt in modern RPGs. They tend to want to be bigger and bigger, abandoning quality writing for quantity, and delivering experiences that are ever more focused on action and combat. To put this in context, it was shortly after Bethesda’s announcement with great fanfare of the famous thousand planets in Starfield – I couldn’t agree more. He wanted to return to a more minimalist game, focusing on the essentials of the experience. His inspiration is to be found in Bethesda’s older productions such as The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and FromSoftware’s forgotten Kingsfield license. Speaking of FromSoftware, he says it was their work that inspired him to become a developer. He’s still marked by the philosophy of Dark Souls, of being able to do so much with so little. Of realizing that with good level design and a few clever narrative elements, you can achieve a lot. It’s in the search for this refinement of a few key mechanics that he finds the desire to create.
De l’Acide aux Cendres
For the visual aspect of the title, the choice of low-poly 3D was almost self-evident, firstly because of his influences, and then because of his desire to emulate a bygone era in video games. He wanted to recapture the distinctive style and identity of the PS1 characters, which had been lost with the arrival of the HD era. He says, for example, that he was bowled over by the graphic style of Vagrant Story, and wanted to recapture this same sense of detail in his own assets to perpetuate this unique style. Another lesser-known game, Crypt World, stimulated his creative sense and his desire to go low poly. Crypt World is a fantasy game with an N64-like aesthetic. James Wragg describes its visual rendering as “cursed”; the game gives a strange feeling of unease through the visual grammar of its world, described as “between nightmare and deranged humor”.
Another major inspiration for the title’s art direction is the work of Mike Mignola. The artist is renowned for his vision of Hellboy comics and his distinctive graphic style. Here, he borrows neither the sensational chiaroscuro nor the masses of black characteristic of the artist’s work, but his way of drawing towards abstraction. Over the years, his line has become less detailed; he works with more abstract, flat shapes, concentrating more on the emotion and tone conveyed by the image than on the representation of reality. Low poly appears to be the ideal technique for reducing elements to their simple form.
The overall atmosphere of the game is psychedelic. This is due to the use of color to represent the dreamlike islands. The explorable world takes the form of a multitude of islands suspended in the air after a cataclysm has reached Earth. Each scenery is drowned in the sparkling magenta of the sky. Contrasting with this sky, nature takes on an acid green finery that creates striking scenes. More generally, Dread Delusion’s color palettes are reminiscent of those used by Moebius in his works; he is a clear inspiration for James Wragg. Other signs of this inspiration can be found in the colors and clothing styles of the characters who populate the dreamlike islands. To accentuate the zany, psychedelic aspect of the title, we come across forests of giant mushrooms in an almost electric purple, houses and architecture that have no physical rationality, creatures with no head or tail, and boats that sail the skies. Wandering through these dreamlike islands is like taking a trip on acid.
Dreamlike islands provoke wonder and unease in equal measure. They seem to float peacefully in the air, unperturbed, while the rest of the world is plunged into chaos. This star that seems on the verge of exploding into a supernova is a constant reminder that hovers over our heads, like the blade of Damocles ready to fall. The chromatic palette that brings these places to life gives us a strange feeling of unease that’s hard to ignore. The omnipresent green gives the impression that the air is corrosive, that it will literally attack our flesh. We suffocate at the sight of this magenta, almost infernal canopy of sky, which adds to the irrespirable aspect of the place. The sky gives us a sense of urgency, of oppression, like being trapped on the side of a volcano threatening to erupt. At night, the mood is quite different, with colors giving way to shadow play that dances all around us, a more direct reference to the abstract forms of Mignola’s influence. The islands, so majestic by day, become shapeless spectres wandering among the stars at night.
The entire aesthetic of Dread Delusion oscillates between fascination and discomfort. In this world where the apostolic empire reigns supreme, there seems to be no salvation to be hoped for. To achieve this striking result, the developers have taken on board the codes and techniques of the period.
The aesthetics of Technique
Designing a video game that reproduces the look and feel of PS1 games also means reflecting on their nature, what made them special, and understanding how to reproduce them today. As is often the case in video games, most of the design choices were based on the technical limitations of the machines of the time. With limited RAM and low GPU power, we had to use subterfuges to get around these limitations and get the best out of the machines. Sometimes, technical limitations even became a strength, as Silent Hill’s fog is a perfect example. To get as close as possible to the look and feel of the games of the time, developers had to identify the elements that made up their identity, then carefully choose the elements they would use to design their game.
Low poly means adapting 3D models and integrating low-resolution textures. The Nintendo 64, as its name suggests, was limited to 64×64 pixel textures, while the PS1 had the luxury of offering 256×256 pixel textures. This is a far cry from the 4K texture packs found in today’s games. To achieve this rendering, there are several techniques available to developers. They can simply design textures at the right resolution from the outset, or lower it manually at a later stage. There’s also a whole host of shaders that can be applied to 3D models to give them a rendering typical of the era. They are more or less configurable and more or less adapted to the desired final visual rendering. Finally, there are the engine libraries, which are packed with low-poly assets, the tools for creating which are now very accessible.
The second characteristic marker of the PS1 is its famous jittering, that trembling of the image and 3D models with each of their movements, you know that effect that killed our eyes in our youth. Sony has almost become your optician’s best ally. Jittering comes from a technical limitation of the Japanese manufacturer’s console. To accurately calculate the movement of a 3D model in space, the console must be able to decode displacement vectors in decimal values; the PS1 was unable to process them. In this case, movement was point-by-point. 3D models, instead of simply gliding smoothly and progressively from one point to another, moved from one point to another instantaneously. It’s this abrupt transition from one point to another that we perceive in the form of repeated tremors.
Another big part of the work is focused on interfaces and menus. With HD games, we’ve become accustomed to information-packed menus and interfaces, with lots of panes, sub-menus, floating windows… Sometimes there are entire glossaries, logs, lore; in short, the amount of text has increased tenfold over the years. On PS1, text needs to be shorter for technical reasons. Games were displayed in low resolution, so text characters had to be large to be readable. This meant adapting interfaces, menus, texts and dialogues to this constraint. Game writing had to adapt to this short format, and managing to offer more direct texts while retaining narrative richness was a complicated task. Particularly when you’re aiming for a game rich in lore and narrative, as James Wragg imagines for Dread Delusion. He wants to create a deep world, with an extensive story and a variety of choices to be made. In fact, the menus remain very simple, concentrating on the essentials and favoring icons, which are much easier to read at low resolutions, rather than an abundance of text. The whole in-game interface was also very different: it was reduced to the bare minimum – a life, armor, shield or stamina gauge, ammunition in the case of an FPS, and that was about it. Some games featured an extremely basic minimap or a sentence to summarize the objective, and that was it. In terms of development, these are the constraints that need to be taken into account to give the PS1 visual patina we’re looking for.
And that’s not all: there are still a myriad of details that I haven’t touched on in terms of the technical side of things, but which also make up the identity of this era: shadows, loading times, camera management, display distance, sounds, physics… Getting close to the experience of PS1 games also means adopting the codes and ideas of game design that are strong markers for a whole generation of video games and gamers.
Playing the Past
Playing Dread Delusion is in part a plunge into the past, a kind of pixel archaeology. The interesting thing about this kind of retro experience is that certain standards have gone by the wayside, while others tend to come back like a breath of fresh air.
If we look back 30 years, what used to be a standard, such as the absence of a map or markers, is now pointed out as a flaw or, at the very least, a questionable choice. Searching, getting lost, getting frustrated, getting to know and recognize environments were all part of the videogame experience. And don’t think we were going blind, the games were adapted to this experience. They multiplied the use of diegetic and extradiegetic devices to orientate us and give us bearings.
Elements such as directional signs, roads, castle dungeons or mountains that can be seen in the distance are all markers that become part of the game’s diegesis. They allow the developers to orientate the player with a few simple indications, which can be summed up in a visible shape on the horizon or a few written words. In Dread Delusion, we’re surveying celestial islands, each of which is a likely indicator, visible from virtually every corner of the map. We become accustomed to their shape, to identifying the buildings they house, to recognizing ruins close to an important place – we inhabit this world.
Then come the extra-diegetic tools, sounds and lights, which confirm that something is actually happening between the game and the player. These sounds or graphic effects do not serve to immerse the player in the game world per se, but rather to help him or her interact with the game. Taking Dread Delusion as an example, the interactive scenery elements are always easy to spot, thanks to the low density of objects in the scenery. A light halo around the object is more than enough to make them stand out. The same goes for sounds, with a slight feedback signal telling the player that he has reached his destination or that his last action has been taken into account. They are a confirmation of the player’s adventure.
For everything we’ve seen above to work, it needs to be accompanied by a certain form of minimalism. We can’t give clear indications if we add too many elements that would hinder observation. Nor does the play area need to be overflowing with activities and ancillary content, since searching, wandering and discovering are sufficient in themselves. I wouldn’t call it design by subtraction, but the idea is to focus on the essentials of the gaming experience. A good level design to provide a satisfying sense of exploration and give extra credibility to the world you’re walking through. Then writing and narration that involve the player in this universe, while suggesting that there are places and stories just waiting to be discovered. This is what Dread Delusion brilliantly achieves: each suspended island is an invitation to adventure. Finding out how to reach them is already a game in itself, so masterful is the verticality of the world, then once reached, each will be the vector of new discoveries: lore, NPCs, quests, shortcuts; but also sometimes new accesses leading to new islands. Interactions are also kept fairly simple, so that players always understand what they need to do to move forward. Inputs also remain very basic: one interaction button, one action button and one jump button – that’s 95% of Dread Delusion’s gameplay.
These game design rules work because they require real involvement on the part of the player. The game isn’t made in the way of today’s popcorn games, which are designed to be nibbled on for a few dozen minutes in the evening after work and provide immediate gaming pleasure. You have to fall into Dread Delusion, grasp its codes and rules, and gradually discover the specifics of its world and level design. The heart of the game’s proposition only makes sense through roleplay. We are not assaulted by an epileptic rhythm of random encounters, mercenary camps to empty and monster battles of all kinds. The game leaves room to breathe, to contemplate the world, controlling its pace to let us reflect on our motivations, the meaning of our adventure and our quest. It gives us time to imagine our own stories, to anticipate what kind of encounters we can expect on this floating island in the misty distance. Fully immersed in the work, we move forward with pleasure.
Again, I don’t claim to be exhaustive, but you get the idea. If the initial motivation for creating Dread Delusion came from nostalgia, James Wragg’s aim was not to create a copy-and-paste of a video game from that era. He, like other developers interested in this style, uses all these codes as a veritable laboratory for experimentation.
Ludique Laboratory
Technical resources are making 3D development more accessible.
The indie of the 2000s was pixel art, the next generation will be low poly. Making 3D available to as many developers as possible is a guarantee that they will take it up, as they did when it first emerged. It comes with codes and a heritage with which today’s developers have grown up and dreamed. It’s these past dreams and fantasies that fuel the incredible creativity we see today.
Realizing your fantasies is something that video games and technological progress have made possible. There are projects that are the fruit of the overflowing imaginations we might have had as children. Dread Delusion is one of them. While it takes up most of the codes we’ve seen above, it abandons others to add contemporary design elements. Loading times, for example: in the 90s, it would have been impossible to see a game of this scale in the open world. We’d all have gone mad in front of our screens at such a large, freely explorable area with this level of interactivity. At the time, the term “open world” didn’t exist – we were just talking GTA-like – yet it was a fantasy for many of us. Just look at the success of a game like Driver when it came out in 1999: the promise of free driving in a 3D-modelled city was revolutionary. It’s interesting to note that the open world, a video game standard since the 2010s, is the element that seems anachronistic in the game, when it’s the whole experience that really is.
We no longer have opaque fog to avoid saturating RAM with too many on-screen elements. The Oniriques islands can be viewed almost in their entire expanse, providing striking panoramas. I see it as a fine tribute to one of the whims of the developers of the time, to stage objects modeled in 3D. In each menu, we had the 3D object rotating, so that we could observe it from every angle, and become aware of its depth. These floating islands, criss-crossing each other at unequal distances and altitudes, like a ballet dance, are the best possible demonstration of that long-sought third dimension.
At the height of fantasy for its time, the end of the game places us in command of a flying ship, allowing us to explore the world freely from the air. Flying has always been one of mankind’s dreams, and it has logically carried over into the world of video games. The ship, in turn, revitalizes exploration and provides access to even more hidden islands.
Experimentation continues through pure graphic research. The aim is to create emotion. Adopting this style of play and rendering isn’t done by chance or simply because it’s accessible, there’s a desire to integrate it fully into the game universe and experience. Dread Delusion is not alone. I’m thinking of Julien Éveillé’s Threshold, released at the end of 2024, a short, disturbing experience that uses its art direction to place the player in a space on the edge of reality. It’s figurative enough for us to recognize the place and the elements of our reality, but at the same time everything is too imperfect, like the image we might have of a dream. The result is a sense of discomfort, a need to be on the alert at all times, as if this virtual world could play tricks on us or collapse at any moment. The game succeeds brilliantly in making us feel tension through its simple graphic style.
The world of Dread Delusion seems to be plagued by a curse, a sort of slow agony, as if atoms and molecules can no longer hold things together. The earth, buildings and beings seem to be crumbling before our eyes, pixel by pixel. Reality itself is eroded. Everything seems sad, out of place or not fully alive. As we observe the world and characters of Dread Delusion, we’re not really seeing, but perceiving. Our brain completes these pixelated models, trying to detect some semblance of emotion, expression or soul in these ghostly faces. They are each a kind of visage.exe that opens onto a page of our own imaginary world.
James Wragg also experiments with the absence of the usual map, once again integrating it into the game’s diegesis. As the islands are in perpetual motion, we can only find maps that are already obsolete, until we meet a mage. He explains that he has created a magical map process that would allow us to follow the movement of the islands. You don’t need to say much more to understand that mapping the entire region will be one of your main objectives. Like Elden Ring or, more recently, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the map is only revealed and enlarged as your journey progresses. Dread Delusion’s unique feature is that it doesn’t follow our movements step by step, but rather our discoveries of important places. This system is an invitation to explore, while leaving the sense of discovery to the player. You don’t know how far you can go, or how many places there are to discover.
Efficiency Constraint
As we all know, releasing a video game is a miracle. Between long development periods, hard work, financial difficulties and ever more advanced tools. Making a game in low poly means ensuring a certain production efficiency that would not be possible with more advanced graphics and more complex mechanics. This style of rendering and game design also means that the scope of the project can be limited. Developers aren’t burdened with complex systems and subsystems to manage, and artists don’t have to create photorealistic assets. Video game development is iterative, sometimes requiring elements of the game to be made and remade to fully match the intention. As you can see, it’s easier in terms of time and resources to remake low-poly elements than ultra-detailed assets. Whether for characters or environments, the greater the detail and effects, the more work it takes to adapt them.
I’d like to share a little anecdote with you to illustrate this point. It concerns the very first Dread Delusion demo. The game was presented at PAX 2022 with a playable demo on the show floor. A little surprise awaited testers: in the demo, players embodied a kind of clown whose heart was a clock, which exploded after 15 minutes, signifying the end of the demo. It may seem trivial when you put it like that, but this production efficiency enabled a solo developer to create a gimmick for his demo, to think of a way of integrating the end of the demo in a more organic way, and all this while continuing to ensure the production of the game and the setting up of its early access, which will arrive on June 15, 2022.
Creative lung
To conclude, I’d like to say a word about what these projects represent in the eyes of today’s industry. They are a different facet, a different way for thousands of developers, whether alone or in teams, to deliver original experiences. They shake up production codes in an industry that for years swore by blockbusters and AAAA, boasting colossal budgets and huge development teams often spread across the globe. They bring a little rationality back to the medium, while offering more personal and intimate stories and experiences. They reveal a video game that is less focused on value production, that tries to buck all trends and expectations, and that puts creativity and art back in their rightful place.
Sources et documentations
DreadXP – Dreadful Dev Diaries – 2022 – (39 vidéos de dev logs)
https://youtu.be/ZCy7LOamp2M?si=QRaaXIfk6jQjp-4b
Chris Wallace – Dread Delusion’ developer James Wragg on designing a lo-fi ‘Morrowind’ – NME.com – 18 juillet 2022
‘Dread Delusion’ developer James Wragg on designing a lo-fi ‘Morrowind’
Game Next Door – Le Retour de la 3D Moche – 2024 – (39.36 min)
Le RETOUR de la 3D MOCHE
Crypt World
Crypt Worlds: Your Darkest Desires, Come True -GOLD- by Lilith Zone