The marketing isn’t being designed to try and communicate the “atmosphere of the game”, it’s being designed to shout “Oddworld is back!” from the rooftops.
Look at the difference between the in-game assets we’ve seen — screenshots, trailers, etc — and the atmosphere they communicate. Now compare that to the marketing materials we’ve seen; the poster, the logo and the boxart.
The logo and poster are very obviously designed with the corny-ass Glukkon marketing schtick in mind – bright colors, bold typography, saccharine cartoon graphics (the poster is a direct remake of a poster we saw in-game, for christ’s sake).
Does that communicate the atmosphere of the game? Of course it doesn’t, but it’s recognizable to fans of the original games! They already know what the game’s atmosphere will be like, and the screenshots and trailers confirm that to them!
Now look at the boxart. We have the big ol’ colorful Glukkon-style logo up front, but in the background we see an environment much more evocative of the atmosphere we’re familiar with. This is because the boxart is both a marketing item and a game asset – it needs to do the work of both. They use the logo they already have because anyone who’s seen their marketing will already be familiar with it, and they include the atmospheric matte painting to communicate that yes, this is an Oddworld game just like the original Oddysee that people remember.
Yes, we’ve talked about how the logo isn’t perfect. Yes, it has a lot of problems in the finer details that let it down. Yes, seeing the flawed logo being used so much is disheartening. But for god’s sake, shut up about how the marketing doesn’t “communicate the atmosphere”, because that’s not its purpose. And I am so fucking sick of seeing people bitch over something that has no real effect on how the game will play.
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