Certain video games are just known for looking incredible. And a large component of that is a fully realized, detailed, beautiful, lived-in world. Because if you don’t have that, even if you have the most highly detailed characters running around in a low poly, dull-textured world, it wouldn’t look good. So let’s talk about that.
Hi folks, it’s Zaid, and today on Aura Riot, 10 of the most beautiful game worlds ever.
10. Night City – Cyberpunk 2077
It’s one of our favorite video game worlds of the last decade, of course. It’s a place that stirs your imagination. A bustling metropolis that’s so big, there’s always more to see in and you always wanna see more. Starting out in the slums, your high-tech mercenary begins the game with an impossibly cool apartment in a high-rise tower. The walk from the high-rise to the city streets is one of our favorite transitions in video games. Going from the packed interior of a superstructure to the shadowy streets, sunlight cutting through the skyscrapers, it’s just a memorable way to begin.
And there’s just so much to see. The giant dam with the ramshackle neighborhood, it’s a weird site. The walkways in the sky overlooking the streets, the enormous unique structures, and the vast roundabout square in the center of the city. It’s overwhelming in the best way and it’s no wonder that players were disappointed they couldn’t ride the trains it released. But the developers at CD Projekt Red have continued to upgrade the game, adding more and more features, including riding the trains as a role play feature.
Players wanna live in this city and experience it. From the crumbling, abandoned Pacifica to the Rashes Afterlife Club, there’s so many moving parts to this city. Japantown is a market on the raised walkways over the high up, while the Kabuki market is a slum mall with a bunch of services for a street Samurai. It’s no surprise people want more. The world may be slightly unfinished, there are still missing textures and messy geometry, if you’re looking, but it builds a beautiful image in your mind. Night City is the iconic Cyberpunk City and we need more of it.
9. Red Dead Redemption 2
Red Dead Redemption 2 fully immerse us in a wild west world. The developers at Rockstar just went above and beyond recreating the world of the past with just unmeasured authenticity. It’s a game that’s so much about the land itself. There’s just this unrivaled natural beauty to every rolling hill and sun-drenched mesa your gang crosses in their lawless travels.
The starting town of Valentine is the quintessential one-street settlement. You’ll be spending a lot of time here watching the sunset, and the distance, and light flicker in the darkness. The living, breathing world is what makes Red Dead so special. The raindrops from buildings, the people going about their day, the travelers racing by on carts, it’s all pretty wild. It’s a true city with public transport, trolley, cars, and trains running day or night.
And seeing the lavishly detailed interior of the theater, walking the rain-soaked streets at night, it fills us with an entirely different vibe compared to the rest of the game. Because most of the game, you’re just braving the extreme weather outside on your own. It’s often the crackle of distant thunderstorms and the vast planes of the frontier. The heavy snowfall in the northern mountains and the Caribbean beaches of Guarma, they all make for different adventures and you’ll have to survive all of them with your crew.
It’s almost a shame we’re stuck so close to the ground ’cause the Vestige you’ll see from the sky are just unbelievable. We were never meant to see the full breadth of Red Dead’s world, but we’re pretty glad that moders have given us the chance to view the world from impossible angles. It’s a game that deserves to be watched, either exploring the deserts out west, the sleepy forest town of Strawberry, or the bustling minds, there’s just a breath and a depth to the world that Rockstar accomplished here. Even the bunnies are covered in just the right amount of snow in the Rocky Mountains. We could do an entire list on RDR 2 alone, but we obviously have other games to explore.
8. Silent Hill 2 Remake
The small town horrors of Silent Hill 2 are made even more vivid in the Bloober Team remake. The original game is a landmark work of storytelling with its own iconic style, inspired by the haunting art of Francis Bacon. Silent Hill 2 claws into your brain and just stays there.
Silent Hill 2 on PS2 was also an incredibly good looking game at the time, and the remake owes everything to that original game. What the developers at Bloober Team did was expand in painstakingly detail that original game, adding everything we saw in our mind’s eye. We knew the Silent Hill 2 remake would be a good looking game. It was kind of a requirement, I don’t know if that was really the problem people had with Bloober going in, but the remake adds new details that feel like they just flat out belong here. Should have been there in the original even.
The town itself has also been expanded with more locations to explore and the many locations you’ll visit have only become more surreal. What starts as a mundane abandoned hospital becomes a nightmares rusted hellscape. The surreal mixes with the all too normal in Silent Hill oh, so well. You’ll visit a museum plaster with stranger pictures only to enter an impossibly long stairwell down into a world that’s unrecognizable.
The level of detail is incredible. The opening walk to Silent Hill has a calming dread as you explore this quiet cemetery and walk along the foggy coast. The town itself is relatively calm, even with monsters stalking the streets, but it becomes far more intimidating late game when you’re stuck in the town at night.
The tranquil hotel at the end of the game looks even more like a small town resort than ever before in the remake, and the new locations like a maze with walls barely hiding machinery and meat, add new layers to this frightening game. It isn’t a world we want to stay in, but it is beautiful.
7. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
This game creates a world like any other. It’s both familiar and wildly new. At times, starkly beautiful, and others, terrifying. Elden Ring presents a fantasy world that honestly feels alien. The more deep you explore, the more darkness you’ll find. It’s everything we want from a game world, and Shadow of the Erdtree actually adds a lot more to explore.
Starting in the Gravesite Plain, we see hints at strange sights and sounds you’ll soon explore. The enormous walking kiln guards, a burnt village field, the vast cast in the far distance, it marks your destination. The Gravesite is just the start of your journey and the world only twists in a stranger, more beautiful shapes.
The Cerulean Coast is a blue-hued, ghostly beach, covered in massive floating graves, and following that, leads to the Stone Coffin Fissure, a really big fricking area, and it’s just one of the many places that go completely unexplained in the expansion. What are the giant coffins for it? We’re given hints of why, but never concrete answers.
The Shadow Keep itself is a place of stark beauty. There’s a flooded district that becomes even creepier once the water is drained, and a research hall filled with calcified specimens of creatures, we’ll thankfully never encounter. And then you got the whole Ancient Ruins of Rauh, the massive underground passages, the jungle fill of poisonous bugs. From this impressive plateau, you’ll be able to view the entire world, and find more locations to go to.
The Abyssal Woods are special in their stillness. Entering the lowest section of the world, you have this vast, seemingly empty forest to explore, no enemies, but you’re mount, too afraid to enter. And oh, you’ll soon and see why.
Midra’s Manse is a closet haunted house with a madness-inducing twist, with library stacked with burned books that implies a horrible legacy. The most beautiful location is also the last, the vast stairway to heaven called Enir-Ilim. A holy place delicately built to touch the sky with winding stairways in the atmosphere of a cathedral. It’s imposing and beautiful at the same time. Every location, even the bizarre like the Finger Ruins, opens itself to your imagination. A beautiful, strange world that’s always worth revisiting.
6. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
This is a legitimately great game. It’s developed by Eidos-Montreal, and it kind of was released to the stink of Marvel’s Avengers. But the movie license does not hinder. This is, like I said, great, has some of gaming’s best locations to explore too.
The comfortably messy ship your crew calls home is an absolute favorite, with intricate detail, telling us tons about the characters without anybody having to just blab it in your face. It’s the kind of spaceship you want to hang out into, it’s just one of the many locations that are just overwhelming with charm and character.
5. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
This game does what a good Indiana Jones game should do. It takes us to exotic environments and lets us explore. The starting area, Vatican City, is crazy different from the ancient tombs we usually encounter in a game like this. And the city is an incredible site. Military bases are stationed near marvel statues and the opulent Italian city. They interact with real works of art and detailed pieces of architecture recreated by the team at MachineGames, and this is just the start of the adventure.
Soon it traveled to Giza and traverse ancient pyramids, dodge Nazis, and as massive dig site, just it’s crazy. And this train spitting out smoke leads you to the heart of the operation. A scale is off the charts at every point. You have to beat the heat and the scorpions to survive it. The workers camp and the local villager welcome respites for Indie to rest in before going back in the fray too.
One of the biggest surprise missions is set in the destroyed ruins of Shanghai after a bombing raid by Japanese Zeros. The once bustling city is abandoned, but it’s a very different location with its own incredible architecture. For an area you won’t see for long, the developer has spent a really long amount of time making the details feel so specific to this location.
The journey gets a lot wetter in Thailand too where you’ll explore more flooded temples and drive a motorboat through the beautifully recreated jungle. There’s almost too much to see and do in each region in the Great Circle. And it feels almost like a museum. It’s a little too exciting, but it does.
4. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
This game created a very different kind of apocalypse. Instead a scorched earth, the end time in Horizon sees the earth restored after 1,000 years of collapse. The world has changed a lot, but the colors are more vibrant than our time. This is a stunningly beautiful apocalypse and absolutely unreal in the best ways.
The world is populated by these enormous walking machines too. The Tallnecks are some of the most impressive. The Gentle Giants patrol all over the world. And it kind of feels like you’re in “Jurassic Park” in a certain way. Obviously, those are not robot dinosaurs, these are, but it feels like that.
The fantastical meets the mundane and these beautiful rendered fields and forests and every detail is so strong. The wind blowing through the fields and the way nature moves, it’s just all incredible. It doesn’t settle on making the world as realistic as possible.
Meridian is a new society built on a giant mesa under the shadow of a technologically advanced (indistinct). The distance to city is an impressive work of engineering in a colorful place. It isn’t your average post-apocalyptic settlement. It’s this kind of creativity that makes the devastated world of Horizon Zero Dawn just feel so unique.
There’s ruined skyscrapers and musty bunkers, but it’s everything new that’s really interesting here. It’s a world that’s moved past the apocalypse and thrives even if you need to hunt down a few robot dinosaurs to keep everyone safe.
3. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Easily the strangest world on this list and easily one of the most visually stunning. This doesn’t have the deep visual clarity of a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 and it doesn’t have the same budget clearly, but it does have boundless creativity in its giant alien environments.
The French JRPG, which by the way is just hilarious to say. This French JRPG is set in a fantasy world that’s literally falling apart at the seam with mysterious structures and jagged landscapes filled with painted enemies. The world is, it’s like a canvas, and every environment looks entirely uniquely alien.
There’s bizarre towers that reach in the sky covered with rickety scaffolding, vast lakes of strange rocks, structures, and cities ripped apart from below, but even the safest locations are very strange. Your first major village is populated by bizarre baseless creatures. You’ll even recruit one of these monsters as a party member, and later, you’ll gain a flying friend that gives you a bird’s eye view of an old school overworld map.
But that overworld map doesn’t do this game justice because each area is like a painting brought to life. It isn’t the biggest budget world, but it is unforgettable.
2. Black Myth: Wukong
An adaption of the classic Chinese novel, “Journey to the West”, a darker adaption. But you wouldn’t really know that it’s darker while exploring these beautiful, detailed, realistic worlds the developers created. This was reportedly one of the most expensive action RPGs ever produced in China and its shows.
Starting in thick jungles and reaching the Sunbaked Deserts of the west, every region has a photorealistic look and detailed mythological monsters skulking around every corner. The starting jungle is this beautifully complicated location with ruined temples and vast castles to explore as you progress your journey.
Later locations become a little more mysterious and bizarre. A prison with a giant rotating bell in the center is a standout ghostly aberrations spawn in the prison halls built into the rocks of a deep hole. The prison leads to snowy cliffs and eventually back to a giant tortoise, one you’ll be able to walk across to reach the frozen banks of a river. The snow realistically tumbles and deforms while you walk.
Later locations like a Buddhist temple reveal deeper secrets. Those incredibly detailed miniature statues built into the walls, they are there for a reason we will not spoil here.
1. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
This game reimagines the static image environments of the original Final Fantasy VII. Truly beautiful for their time as vibrant environments overflowing with color in life. This is the kind of beauty and unlimited budget and a talented team can deliver.
A JRPG in an over the top steampunk world that feels somehow real and grounded. You can walk with people and listen to conversations in the castle town of Kalm, barely a blip in the original game. Now, it’s this beautiful European-inspired dream town with a huge clock tower overlooking the bustling square.
Even the slums are beautiful in Rebirth. Underneath the stacked metropolis of Junon, there’s a quiet fishing town in the shadows. The city of Junon itself, very impressive. With a vast shopping mall area that’s almost unbelievably detailed for a location you’ll never be able to return to.
Even the quiet jungle outside Costa del Sol is a welcome location with waterfalls, cascading through explorable, beautiful areas. There’s too much to see, I mean, in the game as a whole, but particularly, at the Golden Saucer. One of our favorite locations in video games if we had to choose a favorite location.
In the Golden Saucer, it’s probably the hotel themed as a haunted house. It’s whimsical, it’s cheesy, it’s a theme park attraction in the best way, and it’s just one of the most charming rest spots in the game. Even the deserts are interesting. The rocky eclipse of Cosmo Canyon are remade in pretty big grandeur, right? It gives us kind of a mini Grand Canyon to marvel over while exploring the homey, natural sediments built into the rocks.
The original game gave us a miniature world we wanted to live in, and the remake builds that world to a one of a kind place. It’s probably a once in a generation game based on the budget and the talent involved. But I mean, this is the second of these games and we’re getting a third to complete the story.
Leave us a comment, let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time right here on Aura Riot.