What’s a game that made a visual or musical impression on you? Or maybe it had a story that has stayed with you for years.
Share your favourites, maybe post a screenshot to the community? Generate some engagement :D
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Final Fantasy XIII. That game released in 2009, yet from the looks of it seems like a next gen game. The amount of work that went into graphics and environment design is astounding.
Every location is unique and a joy to look at. From a futuristic sprawl to a lake that crystalized while still in motion, to a synthetic forest to a wild ravine full of flora and fauna. I spent so many hours just looking at things and enjoying the scenery and the music.
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
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.
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…
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.
Exo One. I think I could post a screenshot from that game here everyday and never run out.
Osmos, also available for mobile.
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.
Another World really shaped my game preferences.
ICO is still an absolute masterpiece.
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
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“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.
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.
Horizon Zero Dawn
The Last of Us (not 2)
Citizen sleeper
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
Red Dead Redemption 2
Riding through the country with big storm clouds rolling in was just something else.
