I don’t mean, like, in terms of tone. I mean in terms of visibility.

Why’s it so dark in so many areas of these levels.

It looks like someone cranked the gamma way down.

The Banjo games don’t have this problem!

My best guess is that they had new lighting tech they wanted to show off? And to be fair the lighting IS impressive for an N64 game

But I bet that this is an underrated factor in the game’s reception

Backtracking is annoying, but backtracking when you can’t see shit is way worse

I have literally wondered this for years

iirc the lighting is one of the big things it uses the expansion pak for

My understanding was that it didn’t use the expansion pack at all, except that it also had a massive memory leak that would cause the game to crash after an hour or two of gameplay, and adding the expansion pack increased that time to like ten hours

that turned out to be false

a dev misremembered and conflated two separate issues

Huh, I thought the video that came from confirmed it by bypassing the expansion pack check and having the game run fine