Not particularly niche, but the Danganronpa series! It’s amazing to me how consistently good all three of those games are, especially since each one keeps upping the narrative ante.

I personally have no preference regarding art style. As long as the style is “competently done” then I don’t think I’d have a problem with a game’s look.

I do think that some art styles can work better with different genres. Pixel art might work better with a retro-inspired game and hand drawn art might go well with something more narrative driven.

For me a game’s art style doesn’t affect my judgement of the game’s value. I think some people perceive pixel art to be “cheap” but when well executed it’s gorgeous and difficult to make.

Here’s a video that perfectly breaks it all down but the TLDW is this:

The game has difficulty modifiers that can be added (enemies get more shields, you can’t heal, etc.). No one had ever beaten the game on max heat (all modifiers) mostly because of a modifier that restricts your time to complete the game. The problem isn’t killing everything - it’s killing everything fast enough to beat the clock. There’s basically only one build in the game to get the DPS needed but you need a series of exceptionally lucky events to happen to make it possible. This run was thought impossible not because it’s literally impossible but because it was unlikely for someone to put in the mind-numbing effort to grind for hundreds or even thousands of hours just to get potential runs. The crazy thing is that Angel got the insane luck needed for a run after just like an hour of serious attempts.

Hilariously this happened barely more than a week after popular Hades YouTuber Haelian made a video about how max heat would never be broken.