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.
Dome-King Cabbage’s protagonist, too, is beset by visions of an alternate world: Mush begins to notice HP bars and other RPG-like elements above others’ heads, a kind of extrasensory perception that suggests they’re cut out for a role as a monster-collecting, psychic power-wielding Dome-King. And so the cloudlike candidate sets off to Crumb Island for the job interview of a lifetime. The curious designs of the oni-like characters you encounter are influenced by Buchholz’s three years in Osaka: “It’s absurd how many good mascots they have. A real embarrassment of riches. Like, a box of potatoes will just have the most well-realised little character on it.” We look forward to meeting their many new, telepathic, monster-taming cousins when Dome-King Cabbage eventually releases on PC.
Originally Dome-King Cabbage featured 2D pixel art and illustrations, but Buchholz “accidentally fell in love with the medium again after dipping my toes into 3D for a segment of the game”