Mind-bending game looks 3D but is actually 2D

We're seeing a bit of a trend for new games that mess with traditional game art styles – and with our heads. I recently wrote about World War V: Last Call, where retro 2D pixel art transforms into 3D voxels before the player's eyes. Now here's another game that blends two normally distinct approaches to game art.

Brass Below appears to present 3D characters in a 3D game world, but a change in the camera angle reveals a perplexing magic trick afoot. The characters are flat 2D sprites (see our pick of the best game development software if you want to experiment with mind-bending graphics yourself).

Golden Turnip Games' Brass Below is described as an open-world, boat-building, RPG life sim in which you build a boat, battle pirates, and set out on an adventure across the wide open sea! Side challenges will include activities as diverse as gardening, cooking, photography, smithing and alchemy.

But what's most got people's attention is the mind-bending art style. In a recent post on X, the developer shows that what appears to be 3D is sometimes flat 2D graphics viewed straight on.

It looks like an optical illusion, and people are scratching their heads over how the developer has achieved rendering a 3D model into a 2D viewport in a 3D world. Here's another example: this chicken is also a 2D sprite.

Are they pre-rendered? Live rendering of a 3D object in 2D? A 3D mesh flattened using a material or shader? Or is it just very good 2D animation?

“This is beyond trippy. How the hell are you pulling that off?,” one person asks on X. “I feel like I'm being bamboozled somehow,” another person responded. Another developer wrote that they had been struggling to do something similar for a pixelised 3D world.

You can wishlist Brass Below on Steam

For more inspiration, see our feature on the importance of game art and our interviews with indie game developers.