Urshee

I much prefer the original logo. I feel like the new one emphasizes the game's blockiness unnecessarily, has a distracting amount of detail, and actually makes it hard to read what the name of the game is, since it overlays the gears in the background. Vintage Story is a block game, but I don't feel that it being blocky is the point, or something that needs to be conveyed in its logo. I feel like the game's blockiness is important when you're playing it because it lets the player easily interact with the world of the game in a way that's consistent with the game's visual style and logic. The game remains beautifully expressive because the player can easily understand that something represented in a grid of blocks and sub-block voxels is just a metaphor for something real or imagined that isn't necessarily blocky itself. But the reworked logo depicts a tree with blocks poking out of it at odd angles, and everything has a bold outline. That's not even consistent with the game's visual style; it's blocky for the sake of it. I feel like it just screams 'I'm made of blocks' when there are much more important messages about the game to be communicated in a logo. And I feel like it's actually less expressive of what it's like to play the game than the original logo. When I'm playing, and the wind is rustling the leaves and making them wave around, the trees feel natural--the blurred foliage in the original logo captures that. The game makes you feel like you're in nature, and I feel like its logo should get that message across. That the world is made of blocks will be obvious to anyone who sees a screenshot--the game's voxel-ness isn't some cartoonish novelty that needs to be pointed out, especially when other voxel games exist and are growing in popularity. And I like the inclusion of the temporal gear's blue, but all the pipes, smaller clocks, and other techy doodads just feel like clutter. I don't think it needs to be made so obvious that the game contains clockwork contraptions, because the gears, pipe, and clock in the original logo already hint at that, while also leaving their purpose ambiguous. Why are those gears underground? Why is there a clock on that tree, and why is it connected to the ground by a pipe? The original logo tells me that nature and clockwork--or whatever it represents--are intertwined somehow. I feel like using so much space to show the fine details of a complex clockwork contraption, as the reworked logo does, would only be necessary if you were trying to either communicate that complex contraptions can be made or to communicate the precise nature and function of the contraption. I don't think either of those things is appropriate for the logo. Gears, a clock, and the tree are the core symbols. The reworked logo's depiction of clockwork seems too literal, like the tree-gear-clock mechanism is a real thing somewhere that's doing something, with a lot of important moving parts worth considering individually. It doesn't feel mysterious to me like the original does, and I think it should. A few more things: I think I prefer the more muted color palette of the original logo, but I do like the shading in the reworked logo, under the tree, and that there's at least some vibrant green. The game can be grim, but it's also beautifully, vibrantly colorful sometimes. I like the idea of showing that in the logo. And lastly, I really don't think that the 'Vintage Story' text should be positioned right over the gears in the background. If the logo's going to have text, it should be legible, and I personally didn't have the easiest possible time reading that.