Whoops, I was so inspired by Chris Z’s newest blog post that I went and made my very first Steam Curator page for Low-Poly Throwback games.
I have to tell you that I did not intend to spend an entire working day’s worth of time making a nowhere-near-comprehensive list of low-poly throwback retro 3D games. In fact, I probably should have spent all of that time making content for Winter Heat, whose Kickstarter campaign begins in under a month. But oops, I made the list instead.
Steam Curator has a bad reputation as a kind of scam-heavy dumping ground for worthless memes ChatGPT-written fake recommendations. I’d venture to guess the vast majority of curators are not legitimate and only exist in hopes of getting free keys from developers. But I still assembled this list painstakingly, because I’m a very silly person who is unable to stop once she’s over 25% through with a project that was supposed to last thirty minutes but actually it’s been 2 hours already.
Anyway, I really do love low-poly throwback art styles in games, or in animation, or in any kind of digital art. Something about those old Playstation, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast type games just gets me. It’s nostalgia, mostly, but there’s also just something about the art style…
Anyway, I never realized JUST HOW MANY low-poly throwback games there are. It was totally overwhelming, and even after cutting out most horror, I realized I wasn’t even capturing half the games available on Steam. Let alone on other platforms!
So, I doubt I’ll update this list regularly. But it was a fun adventure to explore literal hundreds of games, some of which I love, some of which I discovered for the first time. It’s very similar to the path I take when assembling absurdly niche Letterboxd lists. Only that site’s made for lists, while Steam very much is not.
I probably should have signed up for Backloggd and made it there. But that one also doesn’t seem like it’ll have the best tools.
Surprisingly, for how massively popular gaming is, lists like these just aren’t. There aren’t many people out there cataloguing movies based on really specific niches like art style and gameplay elements. You can find tons of listicles, lots of Reddit threads, but no database-style lists that make any attempt to be comprehensive. The best list for me is Hella Yuri–I’ve used it for years for recommendations–but there’s not many others, even for something that feels broadly appealing like low-poly throwback retro 3D stuff.
Anyway, I hope I can spark someone’s further interest in building out lists of their own into whatenever niche category they want to explore. For now, I’ll just recommend a few games from the list I found very interesting:
