Red Dead Redemption 2
Riding through the country with big storm clouds rolling in was just something else.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Video Game Art
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Video games are not mere time killers. They are albums of sound, aesthetics, animation and narrative.
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The one common thread should be an eye for the aesthetic. This is not a place to discuss mechanics or stats, but to show off simply the artistic, expressed through the video game medium.
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Outer Wilds. I cried for 30 minutes when I beat it. It's so poignant, sad, and hopeful all at the same time.
Such a wonderful game. I still get chills any time I hear End Times. or when there's a song with the back-and-forth notes, my brain expects to hear the Main Theme
Nier Automata: the music, the way the world permanently changes as you progress through the story, as well as the art style all are all just chiefs kiss
I'm actually getting Nier vibes from Armored Core VI of all games. Each playthrough is subtly different, revealing a little more of the world, with dialogue and missions appearing that just weren't there in the first playthrough...
Nier:Automata was a game I dismissed at first because of the main charachter. The last game I'd played that everyone made such a big deal over the atttactive female charachter was Tomb Raider (the first one on PS1) which I found to be a boring game.
But Nier:Automata showed me I was wrong, it's a stunning game from many different standpoints, and it was all done without playing up 2B as a sex object. She's a normal "person" with goals who has been put in a situation that she needs to figure out, instead of being a pair of boobs or legs that someone handed a couple of guns to.
I am currently playing it and oh boy, it is truly a nice game, sadly I mixed it with BOTW (playing those two at the same time) and that was a mistake on my part, I thought Nier was more hack n slash than open world RPG... Now I'm struggling to finish both 😅
Regardless both are top notch games.
Bastion.
One of the very few video game soundtracks I listen to. I sang Build The Wall to my first kid as a baby to get her to sleep. The choice at the end of the game literally made me walk away from my PC for a while and just kind of stare at nature lol. Not many games have had the kind of impact my first playthrough of Bastion had.
Bastion never managed to catch me, Transistor did it for me tho. I burst into tears when the credits rolled and Paper Boats revealed itself as a duet between Red and her unnamed lover, after her not saying word for the entire game it hits so damn hard.
Bastion and Transistor didn't take for me, but I recommend Hades to everyone who will listen.
All the characters are memorable and it's amazing to find all the interactions. I'm so surprised such a story focused game is so fun to play.
Ah I was just going to ask in the other comment chain about if all Supergiant Games made the same impression as Transistor did for me, but seeing from the discussion here I'm inclined to think that they are all pretty good with something grabbing some people in and other things grabbing other people in the other game.
Transistor is my least favourite of the bunch because I’m far too stupid to understand the combat system, but the theme is excellent. I really enjoyed the voice acting for Royce Bracket too.
Another World really shaped my game preferences.
ICO is still an absolute masterpiece.
"The Long Dark" I never would have thought, simplified graphics could look that realistic. The colours are beautifully on point and the lighting is stunning.
It's one of those games where "every frame is a painting". Journey and Gris come to mind. Games so full of style literally any frame could be frozen, framed, and be worth looking at.
The survival mode is neat because you can tailor it to your liking whether you want colder winter and just bears or lots of supplies and gear that lasts longer.
I really found it was fun to turn everything down and just enjoy exploring and the visuals.
I'll go with a game series, Horizon.
The opening of Forbidden West where Aloy rides past some locations of the first game, leaving the places where the story had taken place so far, had me in tears.
Replaying Zero Dawn and despite the janky animations of the base game before Frozen Wilds, I'm falling in love with the game all over again.
It's hard to separate purely audiovisual appreciation from the overall aesthetic, including the emotional impact. Overall, I would have to say Disco Elysium: the themes paired with the art style, 10/10 VO work (esp. in The Final Cut version), and 100/10 OST by Sea Power. They all come together to create so many human moments, across the spectra of possible life experiences.
If I don't have to discount nostalgia factor, it's got to be Doom (1993). Every line and stroke of that game is etched into my mental happy place.
If I do have to discount nostalgia, and focus in on audiovisuals alone (impossible imho, but we try), then it's Journey.
Visually it's obviously very dated, but I can still whistle Monkey Island's theme any time I want after all these years...
Apart from Bastion, unpopular opinion I suppose, but the 2008 Prince of Persia was one of the most beautiful games I've played. I recently replayed it and the cel shaded graphics still hold up fairly well. The story, especially the ending, is still great. I think most people didn't like it because it was a very different game from the preceding Sands of Time trilogy, but I treated it as its own thing, and loved the fuck out of it.
I loved 2008, it was my first thought when I saw this thread.
THANK YOU. Bastion has its flaws for sure, but I was just talking the other day about what an absolute masterclass it is in art direction. Painted, vibrant, cartoon art style, in a dystopian future where a world flying in the sky is destroyed with mixed futuristic and past technologies, with music that sits somewhere between blues, electronic, and eastern traditional.
I have a saying, "if someone says a movie is great, and the description sounds like crap, it's probably genuinely amazing", I say this because for a movie that sounds on the surface not good (e.g., "a teenager hallucinates a rabbit that tells him to do stuff, then his girlfriend gets murdered on Halloween by the rabbit, but he goes back in time to stop it") it must mean that it has to have been done so expertly, that it has to land every punch to be good. I feel that way about Bastion too, it sort of shouldn't work with all it's influences (especially the soundtrack), but it nails absolutely everything.
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Disco Elysium is the better game probably, but since it is talked about a lot (rightfully so), I'll go with the similar game I played previous to it:
It is the same genre with Disco Elysium (C-RPG or Isometric RPG, whatever you want to call) with also combat on top of it. Set in a bronze-age kind of time. A lot of choices that matter so as much to block whole maps and events completely if one is chosen over the other. A lot of "main paths" that can be gone on. Both positive and negative (favor and wrath) development with factions, faction leaders, companions, etc. that can affect the game and the outcomes. Great main and side cations with quite good stories behind. Combat can take place a lot of time and the game offers deep combat builds, but overall combat is pretty dull imo.
Going beyond the introduction of the game, in my opinion Tyranny has a very rare story in gaming: The evil has already won, and a tyrant-god rules the world now. You are just a lackey with middle-management status (Fatebinder, some kind of an on-field representer of the prophet/primary judge of the tyrant ruler) that judges whether act happen in accord with the will of the tyrant or not.
Real hard decisions to be made in the game. Some Obsidian humor in it. Overall not a feel-good game, like Disco Elysium. Way better soundtrack in my opinion.
The most visually beautiful game I've played recently is Satisfactory. It's a first-person logistics/manufacturing game. The landscapes are almost too beautiful to fill with machinery and black smoke.
In addition to the visuals the sound design is great. Alien creatures hiss or screech or click and the sound makes the hair on your neck stand up. The fuel generators sound just like huge diesels running at full speed against a load. The trucks run by, engines clattering and turbocharger screaming. Each machine you build has it's own noise. Amd every thing done in the game by your charachter feels like it has weight. Switches click and slam shut loudly. Levers sound like they're attached to something. By the time you've got a decent production line set up, it sounds like a mechanical symphony.
Coffee Stain knows their stuff. Thoroughly enjoyed both Sanctum games, too.
Also: H̷̜͌͊̃͛́̈́͝Ȁ̵̧̧̜̮̲̠̭͆͌̊R̷̳̊͛̊͋̆̄͑V̶̡͉̮̮͍̬̻̈̐̿͐̇̓̏Ĕ̵̛̝̪̹̣̱̰̊̃̄̄̃S̷̪͖̪̭̗͚̓̋T̸̳͈̞̄͝ ̶̜̱̣͍͍̽̆̈́̇̃̉͜I̸͔͍͎̺͒̐ͅͅṬ̸͓̃̈́̇̆̀
COMPLY
Haven't seen anyone mention either Jet Set Radio Future, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night yet. Both had amazing soundtracks combined with great gameplay, and solid stories.
Opening mission to Medal of Honor D-Day
The two games in the Ori series. Visual and musical masterpieces.
Journey (2012) was beautiful from start to finish. There's an elegance to it, the separate parts (visuals, music, interface, multi-player etc) all work together so well and the sum is just breathtaking.
Death Stranding (2019) is far from perfect but very occasionally the environment, music and game play would all click and there are these moments of isolated, yearning beauty that I really loved.
In Death Stranding there's a moment near the beginning of the game where the camera zooms out and music starts playing. It just turns the atmosphere up to eleven as you're walking towards your destination.
I was really expecting the game to do that dynamically when you're out walking or driving, but it never happens again.
These two both come to mind for me too. It’s interesting how they share some similar themes and mechanics. I really like this kind of positive multiplayer, and wish there was more stuff like it. I can’t stomach competitive multiplayer anymore, I want games that build communities and feel good.
I agree, I haven't really bothered with competitive multi-player since I tried rocket league.
"There's no way a fun little game about cars playing football could get toxic", I thought to myself. Oh, how wrong I was!
It’s a little sad because I don’t think competition necessarily has to be toxic, and I think in some ways it can be really beautiful and help people form meaningful connections… but I don’t think I have ever seen a game that manages to pull this off.
I’ve really been craving the community lately, though. I want to make friends on online games and have a good time… but I just don’t want to be stressed about competition. But I also don’t really want something that’s a more casual goofing around game, or cooperative (which can be stressful on its own because people can have expectations), or creative where you make things together (which can be great, but I feel too spent to do this most of the time haha). Journey and Death Stranding do a really good job of making me feel more connected to people and that was really important to me during the pandemic (I still feel kind of bitter and resentful about how selfish some people were during that mess, and it’s made it hard for me to want to be around people)… they’re pretty low stress and the interactions are so minimal, but you can pretty much only have a positive impact on somebody else in those games and it just made me feel good and feel like I wanted to be a part of humanity instead of just rejecting it entirely. It’s particularly brilliant in Death Stranding because it made me play the game very differently. In most games I would hoard items and make things harder for myself in case I needed them more later, but in Death Stranding I would think about what would be convenient and helpful for other players and go out of my way to build that nice ladder, or zip line, or whatever… because I wasn’t just building it for me! I was building it to help other people out, and that was just really special and genius. Loved it.
Skye, a small demo made by a team of Dutch students as part of their studies. You fly a small plane around an uncommonly sunny version of the Western Isles of Scotland. They managed to make the whole game look like a living painting. It's delightful. It's very short and there's not a tonne of depth to the gameplay, but the flight mechanics do feel good and there are some fun challenges to take on. Also it's free!
Homeworld.
The music, the voice acting, the graceful gameplay, the elegant story and the fantastic backdrops.
Beautiful.
I AM SO FUCKING EXCITED FOR HOMEWORLD 3, I CAN BARELY BELIEVE IT'S HAPPENING.
Also Deserts of Kharak. The music, the cut-scenes... It might not be set in space, but it screams out the Homeworld aesthetic at the top of its lungs!
I agree, it was amazing, but I feel Homeworld Cataclysm was highly underrated.
It didn't have the same charms as homeworld.
What it had were quite different ones despite the similarities. Really love both of them
Exo One. I think I could post a screenshot from that game here everyday and never run out.
Even with modest hardware I think Hotel Dusk, and its sequel, The Last Window are both pretty beautiful.
Like all the Supergiant Games. They all have amazing art and music. Pyre made me cry so many times but Hades has the best gameplay, they are all amazing though.
I was just going to comment Transistor here! I do love all of their games though :D
Horizon Zero Dawn
The Last of Us (not 2)
Citizen sleeper
Everything from Supergiant Games, Transistor being my favorite. Their combination of narration, art style and soundtrack all working in tandem to tell a story is simply amazing. Darren Korb was my most listened to artist on spotify for the longest time.
Some other games worth mentioning (that I have played) are Portal 2, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and Banner Saga trilogy. All of them featuring beautiful stories, visuals and soundtracks.
Also, what a great thread, I wish I had the time to play even a fraction of the games mentioned here, so thanks everyone :D
I think ico.
In the same vein, the final boss music for shadow of the colossus is amazing. That oboe or whatever it is that has that harmony, fuckin chills playing through that.
I'd have to go with Baten Kaitos, especially back on the GameCube. I know they just ported it to switch. Just visually stunning backgrounds, the story was pretty good once, but I don't think the twist would hold up on future plays.
The intro screen of Secret of Mana will always be hard to one up.
You can see it here (first 1m45s).
The musical piece is one of the best pieces of video game music ever IMO, the art around the heros standing at the base of a world tree - it's just epic fantasy.
The full game itself isn't even in my top 5 SNES games, but the opening is something that still comes to mind from time to time 30 years later.
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