I always loved retro-style games, long before I learned that they’re considered retro. I’m not sure what makes them so fun but they completely dominate my gaming nowadays.
Naturally, I became curious about the games that had inspired my favorite titles. I tried many of them, and eventually came to a conclusion: most of the time, retro games are nothing but a historical curiosity.
Ultima 4 has fairly unique concept but falls flat with its roleplaying feeling forced, its bland gameplay and its setting with no originality whatsoever.
Compare this to Moonring. Gameplay rivals many modern roguelikes (the classic definition, so Brogue, not Isaac), great setting that sucks you in immediately, and so so many mysteries.
Ambermoon pretends to be an open world RPG but is actually a linear RPG-lite with combat feeling more like a puzzle (and a wrong solution punishes you by 15 mins of you and your opponents missing each other every turn).
That’s not to say that retro games aren’t important - the modern indies are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yet I can’t say that retro games worth the trouble of getting into them, compared to the polished modern indie titles.
I think that’s probably a fairly uncontroversial opinion. In the city-builder genre, Lethis: Path of Progress aimed to be the definitive city-building game of its time, hoping to match the peaks of Caesar and Pharaoh in the city-builder heyday. Instead, Lethis ended up being a huge flop, precisely because it slavishly copied the mechanics of Caesar without understanding that games as a whole have evolved since then.
Lethis lacked certain quality of life features that now feel obvious and baseline. What’s sad is that these features had already evolved towards the tail end of the city-builder heyday, in games such as Children of the Nile, and now feel glaringly obvious by their omission. Other city-builders that haven’t been so tied to the classics have seen more success (although there’s been no true breakout hits, sadly, no great renaissance in the genre).