The first game that wowed me with its graphics was “Myst”. Since then, I’ve been blown away by more impressive titles as the technology improved. Some significant releases that stand out are “Beyond Good and Evil”, “Shadow of the Colossus” and the aforementioned “Okami”. I recall the wonder of the jeep ride through the African jungle that started “Far Cry 2”. As modern games go, “Ghost of Tsushima”, “Horizon: Zero Dawn” and “Persona 5” are the prettiest that I’ve played.
I will agree that Myst blew me away, but I remember standing in an Egghead Software store looking at the back of the box of King’s Quest VI and being blown away by how beautiful it looked. Our computer could not run KQ6, so I had to wait to be able to play it.
I am not at all impressed with Skyrim’s graphics. It’s a very ugly, dark, brown/grey game.
I guess maybe my idea of “beautiful” is different from the consensus here. Most of the games cited so far have (or had, at time of release) realistic, cutting-edge graphics. While that’s cool, a game - like Skyrim - can be on the edge of graphics tech but still be UGLY.
I was watching my daughter play “Pokemon Shield” the other day. It’s a truly beautiful game at times. It’s not especially realistic or cutting edge; it’s not meant to be realistic, and the Nintendo Switch is not a cutting edge graphics machine. But the graphics are beautiful. They are really, really well conceived and artistically done. In movie terms, one would say the art and set design was excellent.
That’s true. On the other hand, I’ve seen so many games I’d describe as “Indie pleasant” that I’ve grown a bit blase with lovingly hand-drawn or faux-watercolor or cartoonish art schemes. I’ll still happily admit that they look perfectly nice or pop colorfully and whimsically or otherwise convey a mood but it’s harder for me to really say “Wow” when I see them.
Bioshock Infinite is gorgeous. And runs the gamut from vibrant to grimdark.
I agree in general, and won’t play Fallout games because of their deeply depressing color palette, even though the gameplay is right up my alley. But with Skyrim, I thought there was a fair amount of vibrant beauty in some places. Maybe I’m misremembering, or maybe I’m comparing to Fallout and by that standard any other game will seem vibrant.
Skyrim is nice to look at, but is very grey and black. Breath of the Wild and Witcher 3 are much more beautiful.
Fallout 4 had some color to it. Greens in the woodlands and blues and reds in Boston. It wasn’t a riot of color but it was a hell of a lot better than FO3’s grey and grey or FO:NV’s brown and brown palettes.
It honestly amazes me when people say Breath of the Wild is beautiful. I can appreciate the fact with the hardware limitations they were never going to get realistic graphics, and the had to do something else to get an open world to happen at all with anything resembling smooth action. But whenever I see videos of it all I can think is cheap Bakshi Era cartoons, that appear seems to have had some clumsy 3D-ifiying processing.
Planet Zoo has a wonderful lighting and shading system. The plants and terrain and skybox and critters are all rendered beautifully. Whether the game is beautiful depends on what you build though 
In relative terms, nothing has ever made my jaw drop the way that Axelay and Starfox/Starwing did on the SNES. Axelay because of its giant, realistic bosses, and Starfox because it was the first game I ever saw that did a passable impression of a 3D world. I guess the original Doom gets an honorable mention, as well as the arcade version of Ridge Racer.
When I see games today, I’m never really impressed by the graphics because everything has great graphics nowadays.
It still happens, though. I played Breath of the Wild on the Wii U and when link walked out as he does at the beginning, I was impressed. When I got off the initial location and realized this whole world was travel-able, my jaw began to drop. As I went around the world and saw the sights, I was blown away. It’s gorgeous, diverse, and amazing.
The Elder Scrolls games have always blown me away as well. Morrowind the most since it was such an upgrade from Daggerfall. Skyrim second most because it looked like an early PS4 game in 2011.
I haven’t played Red Dead Redemption 2, but I often hear this listed as another impressive modern game graphically.
I never got tired of launching out of the base in the first level. SO REALISTIC. SO CUTTING EDGE.
Another thread we could talk about is “game that squeezed the most out of a console”. Starfox was probably pushing that SNES graphical capabilities to its max.
What other games pushed their consoles to absolute max? I think Breath of the Wild was every single thing the Wii U could do…
Starfox was pushing the SNES beyond its capabilities; the cartridge came with a co-processor for handling polygons.
Regarding most beautiful, my vote is for Yoshi’s Island. I played the GameBoy Advance version, but now I get to play the original version as emulated by my Nintendo Switch. The cartoony graphics are timeless, in my opinion.
~Max
It was so great. I loved the sequels to that game as well.
Realistic graphics do not a beautiful game make. BOTW graphics are perfect for the game and the whole game has a specific “feel” that the graphics complement. Past a certain point, and as long as the gameplay is good enough, graphics aren’t really the important part of a game.
I thought BotW looks pretty nice.
I did have a few humorous interactions with non-gamers who bought it. It was their first time playing a big open-world game and they were blown away. “Look!” said a friend, pointing at the screen. “You see that mountain? I could totally walk there.”
I smiled and nodded and didn’t tell him that he was gushing over technology that’s been around for a while, because why would I? I thought it was cool how excited he was by this stunning, unbelievably realistic game.
Here’s a game I thought was stunning and unbelievably realistic when I gawked over it in the mall.
I wish I could flip a switch and relive the awe I used to feel every time video games struggled over a new graphical peak. No amount of photorealism will ever stun me like some of those early FMV cutscenes. I don’t know how many times I watched and rewatched Warcraft 2’s opening cinematic.
If trailers for The Sims 5 are an accurate representation of gameplay, they’re going for photorealism.