This trick isn't new in any way, but if you're not familiar with how to give your 2D sprites a sense of volume using normal maps, Astral Hearts, the developer of Hellcrown, put together a short tutorial to walk you through the process.

The scene includes a character without any normal maps applied, alongside some test lighting. Astral Hearts is using Unity with the Universal Render Pipeline. For the materials, you can use the standard shader.

Next, generate normal maps using a free tool called Laigter, created by Azagaya Laigter. Start by importing the character atlas. After that, enable the normal map preview and turn on the Pixelated option. From there, you'll need to tweak the settings manually to get the look you want. Below are the approximate values used by Astral Hearts:

After exporting the normal map, they adjusted the texture import settings in the engine. When exporting, make sure to check the Normal Map box. Finally, the texture was assigned to the normal map slot, completing the material setup.

Here's how Astral Hearts set it up in the engine, but you might need to tweak some values depending on your project:

Go back to the character object and assign it to the slot. That's it, you're done.

We've got plenty of tutorials and tips on our site, for example, here's how to set up liquid physics using PhysBones in Unity:

Unity developers may find these recently featured tools useful: Real Fake Interiors by Amplify Creations and Adam Napper's RealTransforms, which helps with placing props using physics.

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