10 Great Video Games That Are Ugly On Purpose

Ultra-violent top-down shooter Hotline Miami is a game that few are playing for the visuals.

Sure, its pixel art throwback style emerged at just the right time in the indie game boom, before players had again become tired of it, but there's still little escaping the fact that this is not a pleasant game to look at. At all.

For starters, the environments are largely incredibly bland and thrown-together, the animations are rudimentary, and the fleeting glimpses of people's actual faces look like they were drawn by somebody's kid brother. And yet, it's all entirely in step with the '80s throwback vibe the game is going for.

Most importantly, though, the moment-to-moment combat is so brilliantly done, and so fiendishly tense, that the aggressively rough-edged visuals can't hurt it. Hell, you might even end up charmed by those horrid, detail-devoid textures.