I’ve come to really appreciate when games aren’t merely graphically pretty, but that they also take great care with their use of camera angles and animation in general. I speak particularly of cutscenes and dialogue, but frankly this question applies to the entire game.
I find there’s a lot of games that do take cinematography in mind for cutscenes, but nothing else. Or at least the rest of the game is considerably less impressive than cutscenes. e.g., rather than animate something, some games will just have a text box say what happened. And dialogue in many games is very basic back and forth (often with very lackluster quality lip syncing).
RDR2 is perhaps the best game I’ve played so far in this regard. It felt like it animated everything carefully, even had a cinematic mode for horseback riding that I found very pleasing to use, and cutscenes often felt movie quality.
What other games (of any kind) put a lot of effort into cinematography?
The recent God of War games come to mind immediately. They’re both made to look like a single continuous shot throughout the game and it’s obvious the developers put a lot of thought into the cinematography.
Most of them have already been named but the ones I’d choose are:
- Ico
- Shadow of the Colossus
- The Last Guardian
- Journey
- The Last of Us
- The Last of Us Part 2
- Half Life 2
- Bioshock
- Mass Effect 2
- God of War (2018) / Ragnarok
- Kentucky Route Zero
- Limbo / Inside
- Abzu
- And similarly RDR2
Edit: I could also potentially consider Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Similar to the other first person games I listed, they designed their environments so that certain features are prominent as you move forward into them, which to me qualifies as this type of “cinematography” or framing we’re talking about in games
-) Metal Gear Saga and Death Stranding
-) Ico and Shadow of the Colossus
It’s a very different answer from the others here, but Psychonauts 2 is gorgeous. The animation is incredible and the visual design is totally unique.
Here’s a video that talks about some of the animation and cinematography in Psychonauts 2: https://youtu.be/dnbb5pcaSr4
Their audio work was great too.
Really suprised to see no one has mentioned Death Stranding yet. The gameplay is contentious, to be sure, but the atmosphere, setting, and framing of the scenes were beautiful.
In Red Dead 2, the moment Unshaken starts playing after escaping from Guam was beautiful to me, and Death Stranding has a few awesome moments like that. You finally make it up a ridge and are greeted with a huge beautiful vista right as a great atmospheric song kicks in.
Ghost of Tsushima had great cinematography in its cutscenes, which makes sense since it was explicitly aiming for Akira Kurosawa style samurai films.
Horizon: Zero Dawn was pretty good in this respect.
The Quarry is like directing a real classic kind of horror film (like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street). It also has real actors and actresses playing the cast, complete with their likenesses accurately rendered in 3D.
Normally, I don’t like these kinds of “games.” But this one was dope. Unlike most of the games I’ve played in this style, The Quarry was well-written, and had amazing acting. It also kinda flips some of the tropes on its head, so it can still surprise both gamers and fans of horror when you select the “obvious” answer and then end up losing a character.
As such, the cinematography is just what you’d expect from a good slasher flick.
It even has a straight up “movie mode” where you can select the good ending, the bad ending, or set up the character’s traits and see what happens and just watch the entire game as a movie.
For real. I’ve never been big on movie-style games, but The Quarry was great. I’ve heard people complain about the cheesy acting or whatever, but it just hits that slasher movie tone perfectly imo.
The first game that made me notice this and led me on to studying film making in University was Silent Hill (1999). Excellent use of camera angles and movement to give tension to the player and restrict the players vision of what they can see on the screen. At the time when Resident Evil was using static camera angles, Silent Hill introduced a more cinematic style to video games and Enhanced it even more in SH 2 and 3.
Limbo/Inside, but especially Limbo
Flower and Journey, kinda both equally
Most modern AAAs (thinking TLOU/2, Horizon etc.) will tend to have very well done ‘world’ lighting – usually veering towards realism, but when it comes to expression of a unique cinematic look they tend to be samey in my mind. Great, but samey.
I just couldn’t get into Flower, Journey was cool though. You might also enjoy Proteus, A Short Hike, and Sable.
For sure… Sable and A Short Hike are great mentions and both have really distinct and beautiful styles. Haven’t tried Proteus so thanks for the recommendation there.
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Heavy Rain
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Metal Gear Solid 4
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Silent Hill 2 & 3
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Shadow of the Colossuss (Avoid the PS2 version if you can)
And if you like comic books then Max Payne 1 & 2 are great choices as well.
And yes, i know my selection is very “dark & gritty”, but these games are really something else when it comes to inmersion and storytelling.
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Hellblade.
Bonus points for games that let you make cinematic moments yourself.
Monster Hunter World (A Greatsword True Charged Slash into a head break or tail sever feels ridiculously good to land)
Rogue-lites (I’ve mostly ran Hades, but I’ve seen a lot of great things about Dead Cells and Risk of Rain 2)
Dragalia Lost (May it rest in sweet sassy molassy, and may Silent Hope bring some of that ARPG goodness back)
Check out the Vanishing of Ethan Carter
Klonoa for PS1 had some clever camera stuff to deal with the problem of “how do we make this 2d-ish platformer work in 3d.” And it’s a gorgeous game to boot.
