I’ve been working with Unreal Engine since 1999, and if someone had told me back then that in 2025, I’d be deliberately crafting lo-fi visuals for a horror game, I would have laughed. Back in those early days, we were wrestling with BSP (Binary Space Partition) approaches for level design, fighting tooth and nail to squeeze every polygon we could out of the engine. The goal was always crystal clear: push toward photorealism, make it look as real as possible.

But here I am, developing The Echo for Xbox, and I’m intentionally pulling back from those ultra-realistic graphics we spent decades perfecting. There’s something deliciously ironic about this, despite achieving realism graphics levels that would have blown our minds in the late 90s, there’s an undeniable thirst for retro aesthetics among today’s gamers.

The Echo drops you into the boots of a neuro-salvager diving into dangerous neural networks while rent looms overhead, a bit cliché for a cyberpunk nightmare wrapped in deliberately pixelated visuals but hey, “if it works don’t touch it” is our philosophy as indie developers, not only for coding but also for narrative design. The premise itself is cyberpunk to its core, but the visual approach is pure nostalgia bait, and I’m not ashamed to admit it works beautifully.

Realism vs. Nostalgia

From the early 2000s until around 2010, Unreal Engine’s primary focus remained stubbornly realistic. We were obsessed with better lighting, higher polygon counts, and more detailed textures. But something fascinating has happened, especially in the last five years the engine has embraced stylistic diversity in ways I never anticipated. Now we can focus on narrative and nostalgia aspects while maintaining low-poly visuals, and there’s genuine room for these aesthetic choices among gamers.

Why this shift? I think newer generations are experiencing a strange sense of nostalgia for eras they never actually lived through. They’re drawn to the lo-fi aesthetic not because it reminds them of their childhood, but because it represents a kind of digital authenticity, perhaps.

The lo-fi approach serves our horror narrative perfectly. When you’re diving into corrupted neural networks, the visual glitches and low-resolution textures feel organic to the experience. Players aren’t pulled out of the immersion by thinking “this looks dated”, instead, they’re thinking “this system is breaking down,” which is exactly what we want.

What strikes me most about this trend is how it reflects gaming’s maturation as an artistic medium. We’ve proven we can create photorealistic worlds, now we’re choosing not to, and that choice carries weight. It’s similar to how indie films might choose 16mm black and white cinematography not because they can’t afford color, but because monochrome serves their story better.

Focusing on Atmosphere

The cyberpunk elements in The Echo feel particularly suited to this treatment. The genre has always been about the intersection of high tech and low life, about systems breaking down despite their sophistication. Our lo-fi visuals embody that themes like “advanced neural diving technology” rendered through deliberately primitive graphics creates a fascinating tension that supports the narrative.

As I work on The Echo, I’m constantly amazed by how much atmosphere we can generate with relatively simple visual elements. A flickering neon sign needs only a few pixels to feel ominous. A corrupted data stream becomes genuinely unsettling when rendered through chunky, glitched textures.

Perhaps the real appeal of retro graphics lies in their honesty. They don’t pretend to be something they’re not. In an age of ray tracing and 8K textures, there’s something refreshing about visuals that embrace their digital nature rather than trying to fool the eye into believing they’re real.

The Echo isn’t just a horror game with retro visuals, it’s an exploration of how constraint can enhance creativity, and how sometimes the most effective way forward is to deliberately look back. When your rent is due and dangerous neural networks await, maybe lo-fi horror is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Pick up The Echo today and plunge yourself into a decaying cyberpunk world where tech meets terror, on Xbox today.