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Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? is a PC game from 1993 by Bro/derfund Software that seems to be about finding the wanted outlaw Carmen Sandiego. This game uses a comic style with realistic backgrounds (photographs) and less realistic characters with similarly matching colour palettes that appear in the corner widget on the interface. The backgrounds aren't incredibly saturated and use a lot of mutated oranges, greens, and greys, similar to what you would find in a city, while the characters in the webcam widget are a bit more saturated, though not overly outlandish in their colour schemes. I imagine this is to make the characters stand out. The title character, Carmen Sandiego, particularly is particularly easy to spot due to her iconic red dress and hat, which stick out a lot in the cityscape of the introductory scene in which she appears.

This game's art direction isn't incredibly consistant, but it fits the premise of a detective looking for carmen sandiego well enough. The game doesn't try to be serious and embraces it's cartoony sort of style and logic in both it's writing and it's style. However, I believe that it would have fitted better if the backgrounds where drawn in the same style as the interactive characters instead of real life pictures, the real life people and background with cartoony characters pasted on top is a bit too silly for this game. However, this game seems to be educational, which sort of justifies the real life pictures used.

Overall, the aesthetics of the game work for what the game wants to be, which is an educational game with puzzles and a mistery included, but the style is still quite incoherent and could have done better by including the educational elements but using drawn pictures instead of photos (just drawings of the places and people rather and the actual places and people).

Loom is a Lucasfilm adventure game released in 1990 that follows the story of a young Bobbit, a member of the weavers guild. This game adopts a dark aesthetic from the get-go, opting to use a complementary colour palette of dark blues and orange, with the former being the most dominant. The artistic approach taken leans towards the realistic as strongly as one can when working with the limitations of the 1990s hardware: The lineart, when used, is subtle and only accentuates the shadows or form of the object or creature represented, creating a lot of artificial detail. Furthermore, shadows and light seem to be favoured over solid colouring.

The game itself has a typical fantasy setting with guilds and magic; however, its writing is rather casual and somewhat comedic for most of it (with the exception of certain characters who are more serious in nature, like the elders). In this way, the game's direction rather contradicts its initially dark aesthetic. However, I would say that the art direction works pretty well as, in conjunction with the lighthearted writing, it juxtaposes an unserious character with a pretty serious world, which creates an element of charm for the game as a whole, which makes it more memorable and unique. It reminds me of Undertale if Undertale had a dark, serious aesthetic.

Some recurrent motifs in this game include the melodies that are used as spells (which are revealed through context and can then be used whenever the opportunity arises) and strings (which represent the guild of the main character).