This interview hurt me to read. I'm glad to hear Fottifoh is still around but I'd always hoped they'd just moved on to greener pastures. I habitually check their website every few years (formerly anynowhere.com, a beautiful real website if I've ever seen one, now 80s.style which is itself a work of art) just to reassure myself it was still out there.

Noctis is of course well-known in certain circles. For good reason I think. It's such a unique piece of art. A completely open-ended galaxy exploration game with evocative low-res graphics, from a time when that was not at all a 'thing.'

But for me what I always come back to is Crystal Pixels. A strange little microcosm to explore, entirely rendered in fuzzy, glowing blue lines. It looks like it was designed for a kind of hardware that never existed.

In design, it's less like a specific experience and more like a place you can try to visit. It's not easy to get around the little solar system inside Crystal Pixels. It takes a lot of patience and determination (and reading the readme) before you'll be able explore at all. It feels to me like a beautiful island you can only reach by swimming. But inside is this forlorn, haunting, and tender little world.

Blessedly it actually has a recent windows port, so if you're really curious about this you should definitely try it. You really do need to read the readme though.

To quote the website: "if you are capable of liking crystal pixels, then you might be very similar to me." Something about it has always felt like a message sent out in the dark in the desperate hope it might, somehow, resonate with someone else who can find the glowing islands in this dark little void and feel 'home'. It genuinely affected the way I think about art and games.