Long gone are the days when visual excellence in games was associated with graphical fidelity, realism, and raw technical prowess (‘Can it play Crysis? Yeah, more like can it play… Why-sis?). As the relentless progress of video game graphics has slowed down in more recent generations, and as indie developers have found increasingly impressive ways to make games look beautiful on limited budgets, it’s become more interesting to talk about game visuals in an artistic context rather than a technical one, don’tcha think?

That’s not to say you can’t have games that are both graphical powerhouses and artistic achievements, and we’ve got a fair few of those in our DualShockers Definitives end-of-year Top 10 for art direction, but the big lesson here is that luxuries like ray-tracing aren’t required for a game to shine.

Disclaimer: These rankings are based on a direct vote put out to DualShockers’ 100+ contributors, writers, and editors, not our individual reviews.

10 Dredge

From the painterly idyll as your fishing boat pulls into safe harbors, to the yellows and pinks as dusk looms, through to the otherworldy purples and blues of deep-sea monstrosities attacking you out on the choppy waters, cosy-fishing-game-meets-Lovecraftian-nightmare Dredge is, quite simply, gorgeous.

Even the fishmongers and other folk you interact with in towns brim with character, with their furrowed, angular faces and haunted eyes, not entirely unlike the equally lovely Disco Elysium. The devs at Black Salt games did an incredible job with limited polygon counts to create a deeply atmospheric game that undulates like the ocean between the relaxing and terrifying.

9 Disney Illusion Island

Vibrant and nostalgic, Disney Illusion Island takes the old-school Disney aesthetic and layers it with a bright, borderline psychedelic color palette that brings these old-timey characters into the modern gaming era. Our Audrey wrote in their review that it ‘shines bright with personality, and the hand-drawn characters snazzily embody each character’s defining traits.”

Each of the game’s distinct biomes—from the Engineering biome to the intergalactic Astrono—is popping with color and whimsical humor built into the environments themselves. The game looks beautiful in motion too, from the creative cutscenes to the bright poppy particle effects as you bound joyfully across the screen.

8 Darkest Dungeon 2

Relying on an oppressive color palette of browns, reds, and blacks, Darkest Dungeon 2’s aesthetic is as foreboding as the game itself. Each of your hero’s character models oozes gritty resolve through their sunken eyes and arched eyebrows, while the Lovecraftian horrors in the titular dungeons exhibit some truly harrowing designs—all tentacles and bones cranked into horrible positions and fleshy fungal mouths.

What’s cool is that developer Red Hook Studios really shook up the art style from the original game, moving away from the dinky characters towards more adult, realistic proportions, and uplifting the whole thing with lovely animations that bring these intense turn-based battles to life.

7 Street Fighter 6

When you’re sitting on one of the most successful fighting game franchises of all time, with the last two games in the series getting praised for how they looked (among many other things), it’s a brave decision to take things in a new artistic direction. But Street Fighter 6 does that with confidence, reinvigorating the look of the series by reworking everything from the characters to the backgrounds with a more earthy, realistically proportioned look that feels in line with the growing maturity of the series.

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Street Fighter 6’s animations are liquid-smooth, suddenly making Street Fighter 4 look like Play-Doh by comparison, while the backdrops thrum with life, from cherry blossom flowers sprinkling the ground, to Ancient Sparta, a Vaudevillian Paris that glows with filament lighting. The dramatic splashes of vibrant paint with particularly intense moves and combos cements this as the most gorgeous Street Fighter game to date.

6 Octopath Traveler 2

Octopath Traveler, the game that pioneered the gorgeous HD-2D aesthetic, got a sequel this year that somehow manages to look even better than the original. The rich 3D backgrounds and foregrounds (layered over with sprites and 2D textures to evoke that ‘90s nostalgia) are wonderfully detailed, from dappled sunlight trickling down through trees to wind kicking up dust—or snow in the game’s colder climes—while not being overly busy, retaining that 16-bit mystique.

Octopath Traveler 2’s visual style is embellished with more dynamic camera movements than the first game, which add cinematic flair as well as letting you see this lovely world of Square Enix’s creation in more detail than ever. The whole look makes you feel like you’re in a dream about your best childhood JRPG memories, and it’s little wonder that Square Enix is now applying this style to other games like Star Ocean: Second Story R (here’s hoping they do it for Xenogears too).

5 Super Mario Bros. Wonder

The more critical among us have been murmuring for a while that the 2D Mario games have maybe become a bit staid in how they look (leaving us yearning for something more experimental like Yoshi’s Island). Well, Super Mario Bros. Wonder delivers. Backgrounds have a fairytale-like quality to them, green pipes come to life and crawl along the ground like caterpillars, and the game even switches perspectives to a decidedly unMariolike top-down view at points.

Every single leap, every perfect animation feels like a celebration of the series’ singular character, bolstered by some totally unexpected segments that blend music, mechanics, and visuals into one big happy, trippy whole.

4 Hi-Fi Rush

Saturday morning cartoons, a nostalgic 2000s rock and industrial soundtrack, and scintillating rhythm action combine for an aesthetic tour-de-force in Hi-Fi Rush that’ll transport you back to lazy weekend mornings spent in front of a CRT TV (well, assuming you’re old enough to have ever had a CRT TV).

As you fight transformer-like mechs in arenas of pleasingly primary colors, you’ll enter hypnotic flow states as you leap and smash them with hero Chai’s robotic arm to the sounds of Nine Inch Nails and The Prodigy. In between the action, you’ll be treated to a fine story delivered through great-looking cutscenes that hit home the unique and charming Saturday morning cartoon vibe.

3 Lies Of P

Yes, the ‘Bloodborne but with robots’ moniker may be apt, which by default makes this grimdark Pinocchio Soulslike a bit of a derivative work (and yes, it does borrow a whole bunch more from Bloodborne too). But once you start playing, Lies of P asserts itself as its own kind of beast, with impressive enemy designs ranging from marionettes held up by spectral strings to clanging ironclad robots seeking to slice you in two.

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Also, architecture nerds will observe that the game’s city of Krat isn’t in the Victorian-Gothic style (like Bloodborne’s), but more like French Baroque, evoking the Parisian ‘Belle Epoque’ period with its colonnades, large windows, and steely industrial bridges. It’s a grand, daunting, and distinctive environment to explore, and actually not just a copycat of Bloodborne, thank you very much.

2 The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

The fact that graphically there wasn’t much further that Tears of the Kingdom could go on the Switch hardware, and yet it’s managed to create such a breathtaking spectacle, is testament to Nintendo’s artistic capabilities (not that they were ever in doubt).

Ascending above the clouds to one of the Sky Islands and looking out over the floating rocks and structures while the sun sets in the distance is a thing to behold, and descending into the foreboding depths forces the mind to race at every threat just out of sight. Up close, that dreamy, sparing art design makes the game’s enigmatic characters as expressive as the series has ever been. There’s an unbelievable number of moments in this game that could be snapshotted and framed on your wall, in what ranks as not only one of the most beautiful games of 2023, but of all time.

1 Alan Wake 2

Let’s get it out the way that Alan Wake 2 is a hell of a looker, even in the purely graphical sense. Ray-tracing, path tracing, stunning interactions between fog and light. It’s beautiful. But it wouldn’t have made top spot on our list were it not for the fact that it’s as much an artistic achievement as a graphical one.

The dual settings of the Dark Place—a noire, nightmarish twist on New York City’s Times Square—and the Bright Falls area—Pacific northwest small town but filled with Finnish folks and… a coffee-themed theme park—are both filled with memorable environments. The Dark Place physically transforms as Alan finds new hooks to his story, and the game deftly shifts atmosphere between cooky, campy moments, and raw spine-tingling horror.

But the real showstopper here is Remedy’s use of FMV, which they’ve been toying with for years but finally nailed here. Real-life acting overlaps with in-game graphics seamlessly, and that musical segment alone feels like a wild, celebratory dance to Remedy’s achievement. They’ve shone a light on how this stuff can work together, and now it’s up to other devs to follow the beam.

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