And it isn't like graphical prowess has ever stopped people. Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, and several other games only had ASCII characters for the longest time. And Zork had you use your imagination.

Bad example, as I beat that game without any of those issues. Everything is professionally drawn with a consistent style, things are easily distinguishable, and there's a non-bitmap font option if you really need it. The color palette is unusual, so maybe people with color-blindness issues could have problems, not sure.

I have to agree, and in my opinion, aesthetics and graphics are not its problem. I, too, found them pleasing after getting over the shocking ultra-compressed .gif-style introductory scene. The ceaseless amount of references and allusions, along with boring yet well-voiced dialogues going as deep as a drying-up puddle - "Oh, I feel so naked because I lost my phone on the bus," "Oh, I look forward to the new phone, but...," "Meow, 'Chucky'...", is what makes it fall somewhat short. Perhaps if there was some banter similar to Sam&Max and Gabriel Knight, it would make it work better for me? I'm not sure.

Luckily, there is a setting to turn off automatic dialogue, which at least gives the feeling of interactivity. Imagine having to sit and listen to 50 lines of gossip with only an occasional click to exhaust available dialogue options, and you might as well play a visual novel or one of the Living Books, like Just Grandma and Me

My impression is that there don't seem to be any genuine ideas to make the game stand on its own, instead of having to rely on a slew of references to Monkey Island and other known cultural icons and using cute cats in the hopes that that's enough to capture its audience. I've been playing it for 48 minutes, and based on the impressions, I can't say that I do wish to learn more about the character and story.

Yeah, the backgrounds feel empty and amateur, and not fit well with the characters. But we don't know if this is the final version or not. For me, i will wait to the final release to judge.

Ps: they borrow the Monkey Island music, :)

Ps2: the character runs quickly, Benny Hill's style, that's good.

Oh, definitely.
Somehow I missed that complete scene in the trailer. Nice find!
NGL - I didn't even notice the "Enterprise" there, when I took the screenshot.

https://www.scottwhiskers.com/

"With “Scott Whiskers in: The Search for Mr. Fumbleclaw”, game designer Axel Friedrich has fulfilled a long-standing dream. He has been working in the games industry for quite a while and has already released several smaller and larger projects with his own company Fancy Factory and some other companies. But nothing as complex as “Scott Whiskers” yet. Well, story-wise the game contains everything Axel loves and likes. From his love for animals to his love for Star Trek and other nerdy things – it’s all in the game. All the things he grew up with in the late 70s and 80s. Yes, he really is that old. In fact, he’s SO old that he knows firsthand from the 80s that a C64, a hamster, and a microwave are one hell of a combination."

Well, I'm definitely interested :)
There can never be too many funny point & click adventure games for me. Particularly non-violent, family-friendly ones. Thank you for bringing it here, GOG!

Nice.
Almost backed it on kickstarter, just didn't do so because he only announced a Steam version.
Would backers had the chance to go for GOG ...

... and let's be honest. It looks a lot better than most of the modern pixel art games (I love pixel art but the new ones are usually oversimplified, it was done better in the 90s).

Maybe those games aren't trying to recreate the 90s graphics style, but are going for the 80s style?

Nah, I still play plenty of 80s games, they look nothing like those. Pixel Art and Retro are not the same thing.

The difference is what you try to achieve. In every time people tried to get most out of what they had.
CGA in theory had only 4 colors, but due to Composite signal processing, games had actually 16 colors. And of course they could chose between different palettes This was forgotten once the VGA emulation of CGA hit. people think CGA looks like shit, but that was not the case in the 80s. Modern versions of DOSBox (DOSBox staging, set it to CGA mode) actually emulate CGA composite. If you find a CGA game with vertical lines. try it in composit mode, it's very likely the creators used these lines to get more colors.
Here's an example of a CGA pic in VGA emulation vs. Composit mode. Same game, same graphic output, just interpreted differently.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xL818tN3dRQ/maxresdefault.jpg


The C64? Only black and white, but you could chose a different palette for every 8x8 tile, making images like this one possible:
[url=https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a27d24_4feb8d1627c14ed8add6aa3d80a519d0~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_448,h_280,al_c,lg_1,q_85/a27d24_4feb8d1627c14ed8add6aa3d80a519d0~mv2.png]https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a27d24_4feb8d1627c14ed8add6aa3d80a519d0~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_448,h_280,al_c,lg_1,q_85/a27d24_4feb8d1627c14ed8add6aa3d80a519d0~mv2.png[/url]
Of course games were not that elaborated, but they still used that technique to get more colors.

And make sure to check out Amiga games (running on hardware from 1986). the most common game mode was also only 16 colors, later 32, but the games looked amazing, also this machine allowed certain graphic tricks. It was possible to get all 4096 colors onto one screen.
some of these are later games, but run on the original 1986 hardware
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7a/Lionheart_Amiga.png
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wd1p2UmoE-Y/maxresdefault.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d0C7INydO-M/maxresdefault.jpg
https://openretro.org/image/368587a2e67293168ba11ebb06890e11952230e6?s=2x


The games these days have very reduced color palettes, very often use pastell colros and only one color for faces (which starting with EGA became very uncommon), hardly ever use tricks to make it look as if there were more colors, but instead go for a very flat look. They animate way more than was possible back then due to storage restrictions, but they tend to use very restricted palettes and simple flat surfaces.