D-Pad Studio · PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One · 2016 · Inspired by: Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, 16-bit sprite art
Nine years in development for a small Norwegian team, producing pixel art detailed enough that the delay became the game's defining fact.
D-Pad Studio began Owlboy in 2007 and released it in November 2016. The nine-year gap is the first thing said about the game in nearly every account of it, and for good reason: it is an extreme case of what happens when a small team commits to hand-crafted pixel art at a level of detail the 16-bit era never actually achieved, and then refuses to lower the standard as the years pass. The art is the argument. Owlboy's sprites carry more frames, more colours and more incidental animation than the hardware it evokes could have driven, and the backgrounds are painted with a depth of parallax that reads as a 16-bit game imagined rather than reproduced. This is a different proposition from Shovel Knight's disciplined adherence to NES constraints — Owlboy is not simulating a machine, it is rendering the way those machines are remembered, which is always more vivid than what they output. The game underneath is a flight-based action adventure. Otus, a mute owl, cannot fight directly; he carries companions, each with a different weapon, and swaps between them, so combat is a matter of ferrying the right ally into position. The story is built around Otus's inability to speak and his standing as a disappointment to those around him, and it is unusually willing to sit with that rather than resolve it early.
The long development is usually reported as a hardship story, and it was one — D-Pad Studio spent most of a decade on a game with no guarantee of an audience, through a period in which the indie market went from barely existing to saturated. But the duration is also legible in the finished product in a way that most delayed games' is not. Hand-animated pixel art scales linearly with time: there is no technique that makes a frame cheaper, and the only way to get more of them is for someone to draw more of them. Nine years of that is visible on screen.
The trap is that the art outpaced everything else. Owlboy is frequently described as a game whose visuals are ahead of its design, and the criticism has substance — the carry-and-swap combat is a good idea that the game does not push especially hard, and the pacing shows the seams of a project reworked repeatedly across a decade. That gap is itself instructive about the retro revival's economics. Sprite art is the most labour-intensive and most immediately impressive part of these games, which makes it the easiest thing for a small team to over-invest in relative to the systems it wraps.
Owlboy belongs to a distinct strand of the revival. Mega Man 9 and Shovel Knight work under self-imposed hardware rules, and part of their pleasure is verifying that the rules held. Owlboy accepts no such constraint. Its colour counts, sprite sizes and animation budgets would have been impossible on a Super Nintendo, and the game is uninterested in pretending otherwise.
What it reproduces instead is the impression those games left. Nobody remembers a 16-bit adventure as a limited palette and a tight sprite budget; they remember it as expansive, painterly and full of movement, because memory fills in what the hardware could not draw. Owlboy renders the memory directly, and that is why it looks simultaneously period-accurate and impossible — it is faithful to an experience rather than to a specification. The approach has become common since, but Owlboy spent nine years arriving at it, and got there before most of the games that made it standard.