What's in a look: the comic appeal of Hi-Fi Rush

Have you noticed something about Hi-Fi Rush? Beyond it being a lot of colourful fun, that is. It’s to do with the look of it, those lines and dots you see applied to environments around you. It’s a bit like shading but oversized and deliberate, and layered on almost like a filter.

Hi-Fi Rush is not the first game to do it. XCOM: Chimera Squad did it a couple of years ago, and 3DS game Code Name: STEAM did it a few years before that. Superfuse, which comes out today (in early access), does it too. And if you cast the, um, web a little wider, you’ll see it in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – and what a wonderful film that was.

But why – why are they all doing it? Well, the obvious answer is that they want to look like an old-fashioned comic strip. That’s absolutely the case for Spider-Man and it’s probably not far from the thinking behind the games too.