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I've always had dreams about RuneScape, it's one of those games with a mysterious and intriguing aura around it, everyone who has played back in the day always feels a certain way about it, it brings forth many different kinds of emotions, especially nostalgic ones, emotions of an era that has since passed. There's a few games that capture this feeling and it almost always seems to be retro ones but it's not due to what some would call "nostalgia goggles", for example I first played Nights into Dreams in 2017 and was completely captured by the mood of the game, it lured me in and has that mystical feeling RuneScape does despite me having not played NiGHTs before that year. An example of a few modern games that have this feeling would be the alpha / beta versions of MC (name shortened due to reasons as of 8/16/25) and to a lesser extent, Undertale.
I can't really put this feeling into words so I will describe it like this, these games feel as though they have more to them than what meets the eye, as if you could stumble across something nobody has found before, unknown knowledge. Older games were often more colorful, vibrant, but some were also dark and gritty, most modern games that aren't indie ones go for a "realistic" aesthetic with many asset clashes, it feels entirely soulless, the characters and world look as though they are made of plastic, the look, feel, and design of the world itself in these soulless modern games are not made for exploration and discovery, there's no places, caves, or rooms with no content in them that make the players simply look at objects in said places, caves, and rooms, in lazy modern games everything must have a purpose, there is no role playing aspect to them or immersion.
Old MC, despite having randomly generated worlds, has this feeling of discovery, mystery and is more immersive to be in it's world than almost every modern game on the market currently. It helps that it was made by one developer, Notch, having one developer means the direction of the game is consistent and has true and full meaning instead of it being designed by a full team of developers with different memories, souls, ideals, experiences, and so on. To be fair I feel the game lost it's charm while he was still working on it in later years,at one point the game lost the feeling of mystery, if I had to give a range of when this happened it would be around the time when hunger and enchanting was added and the game looked more "clean". I don't have an answer on why the games I mentioned have this "mystic" appeal, I can try to explain it but there's no true answer for it. Some games just feel like magic, it's what I strive for when working on Crescent Quest, for the game to have this feeling.
Anyway, about the dream I had, it was of this oddly specific spot behind the wall of Yanille near the willow tree in RS2. I wonder what the dream means?
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