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> I can spot a unity or unreal game from miles away. They have a smell if you will that is very hard to escape.

Confirmation bias. Are you saying Hollow Knight, Cities: Skylines and Escape from Tarkov have the same kind of "smell"?

It's as ridiculous as saying that you can spot a SaaS written in Rust from miles away.

For 2D games I can usually tell if it is made in Unity, and I don’t even develop with Unity. Hollow Knight for instance does not get me immersed like I do for Celeste or Bolatro. When I look at Hallow Knight I see moving animated sprites instead of characters, and it’s like that for the majority of 2D Unity games for me.

When you look at Super Mario World, do you see moving animated sprites?

I would say yes, but only because I have played that game to death since childhood and would really only play it now with a more analytical/developer mindset, so the illusion is no longer present.

Yeah, there are some unreal "slop" games, even big ones, that just look like UE5 looks with kinda default settings, but there are also games made with these engines that look nothing like that.

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