When most people say their game is retro, they mean a particular era of game ranging from the NES to the PlayStation. That timespan encompasses the heyday of pixel-art gameplay and the burgeoning 3D revolution. It’s not common for games to look even further back for their inspirations, to the earliest days of home console gaming. But that’s exactly what Adventure of Samsara does, and it makes for a curious blend of motifs and mechanics.
Adventure of Samsara itself has a relatively long history. The game was pitched as a Kickstarter project in 2016, under the name Tower of Samsara. It had set a modest (and very precise, numerically) goal of $48,561, but failed to achieve a third of that number. That may have been the end of the story, as just another indie game that never got off the ground. But Brazilian studio Ilex Games continued to pitch it until landing at Atari, where it morphed into a sci-fi offshoot of the classic Atari 2600 game Adventure. Adventure of Samsara is a marriage of the two, an Atari spokesperson told me–the game is as Ilex originally envisioned it, but it has weaved in story elements from Adventure to make it part of that universe.
That blend of inspirations means that it carries visual similarities to an Atari 2600 game. The pixel art is large and blocky and visual elements carry a flat layer of color that looks reminiscent of those early video games, while also looking much more advanced and modern than anything the original Atari could have produced. This is a retro pixel-art throwback, but the look is striking by being modeled after and modernizing such an early version of pixel art.
