Cobysoft Co’s monster-collecting visual novel is a glimpse into a gorgeous, chimerical 3D world inspired by ’90s game box clay dioramas - but made purely with software

Seeing the world through a different lens is always refreshing. Joe Buchholz can relate: he admired the handmade promotional art that often featured on the videogame boxes of the ’90s. “It was a time period when you couldn’t just render a dude standing in the middle of a box with a gun slung over his back,” he says, “and companies would sometimes get really creative by creating little clay dioramas.” Alongside manga artists such as Akira Toriyama and Taiyo Matsumoto, Froach Club artist Minipete, and 3D creators such as Jordan Speer and Jeron Braxton, that unexpected mix of “uncanny and grounded” has been key to the visual identity of Dome-King Cabbage. And, though its toylike locales might appear to be arrangements of real items (“One of the biggest compliments I get about Dome-King Cabbage is when people ask if it’s stop-motion”), Buchholz authors it all using free open-source modelling software Blender.