You might want to consider stylizing your game

 This goes for indie games especially. Indie companies just simply don't have the same amount of people working, and definitely not the same budget AAA game companies have. Some of the time, also the skill levels of the developers might also be lacking. 

Whether a game has a good art style can be debated and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. There are games that are visually very pleasing, then there are games that some might call butt ugly, but that just might be their exact charm. 

But. Let's not forget that games are much more than just their art style. Having good graphics won't save an otherwise shitty game. The most important factor after all for a game is good and/or fun gameplay and graphics is roughly speaking sort of a sprinkling on top. For an indie game though, it's easier to attract customers with those sweet, sweeeet looking graphics. And as an indie developer, you need people to notice your game. Also, your game will age way better. I mean, just look at the games that in the beginning of the 3D era tried to be as realistic as possible. Some of them look quite... funky.

For this post, I've gathered some examples of games that simply strike my fancy with their art style! 

Othercide (Lightbulb Crew)

How can you not take notice of the red contrasting beautifully from the otherwise black and white environment? And the developers' choice with the art style here isn't just mere coincidence either. In a behind the scenes video the game's art director, Alexandre Chaudret says: 

"Our Daughters [playable characters] are the only beings able to bring color in the game, this last hue of color, this last glimmer of hope in a sea of darkness and these Daughters represent that."

To me, that's an excellently beautiful way of adding visual storytelling into the actual art style. I also like the fact that the long scarfs the Daughters are wearing, also represent how much health they have left. That's a very neat idea of visualizing a health bar.

Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall)

Despite having an art style one might consider cute, Night in the Woods tackles some hard real life topics behind the faces of animal characters. For many people it seems to be a lot easier to relate to a heavily stylized character, and that just might be the reason this game has gotten so much praise among the people who have played it. It wouldn't have the same emotional impact if the characters looked hyper realistic.

"I think one of the things is that like this kind of like you can have an opera with 16 pixel high characters and sell it. --- No matter how many facial polygons you have, you're never going to suddenly happen upon emotion or human drama as like a hardware feature, you know? No matter how good the facial capture is, how many polygons are in your face, that's not going to create emotion. You have to do that with the actual characters and the story."

- Scott Benson, co-creator of Night in the Woods in his GDC talk

Ōkami (Clover Studio)

With Ōkami, the art style couldn't really be any better. Since you’re using brush strokes and ink as your attacks and to restore the world to its beautiful state from the corruption, it’s more than fitting for the whole game to have this very strong ink brush style going on. Again, an excellent way to make the art style and gameplay mechanics work in harmony. I also have very soft spot for inked works, so...

And from what I found out trying to dive a bit deeper on the art style, the developers actually studied traditional Japanese art for this, and ukiyo-e as well as sumi-e paintings were a great inspiration for the art style. Sadly I wasn't able to find many interviews from the developers, since the original game came out in 2006.
 

Hollow Knight (Team Cherry)

Probably anyone who has seen even a little bit of Hollow Knight, will immediately recognize it. This is yet again a good example why you don't necessarily need super high detailed characters for your designs to be effective. Here, the silhouette is much more important, and if you start breaking them down, the shapes are actually quite simple. Also the use of colors in this game is just absolutely stunning. With a small team, like Team Cherry had, just three people working on the game, the emphasis on the art style is even more prominent. When you have a clear vision of what you're going to do, with stylized art it's much easier to make your team (hopefully) much more efficient. 

In an article about concepting the game, the artist and designer, Ari Gibson said:

"Most of these sketches are produced on Thursday nights at a cafe meet-up of local artists. The sketches produced during that event tend to cover about a weeks worth of final work."

Looking at the sketches, you can already imagine them in the game. Those already seem to do a lot of the heavy lifting with the art of the game.

Final thoughts

There are so, so many more games that could be mentioned here because of their art style, but then this post would never end. Some examples of games with simple graphics that have done extremely well, are of course Minecraft (which almost everyone knows by now), Journey and Limbo. And as the most recent ones to mention, Fall Guys and Among Us. 

I also noticed a little pattern with my choices... All of them have a lot of contrast in their colors. I personally don't mind though, after all I chose them on the basis of me really liking their style.