What do good graphics in a game mean to you? Is it about fidelity, or the freedom to create anything? Or, is it about making graphics that look as much as the real world as possible?
For many gamers and developers, it seemed for a long time that more photorealism was the logical path of progressions for graphics, but I disagree with that, and it feels like game developers (and players) are starting to broaden their taste a little.
Photorealism in Games Is Becoming Old Fast
Nothing makes me yawn harder than seeing a new game showcased, and it’s clear that the idea is to make it look like a live-action movie. While real-time computer graphics have come a long way, we’re still pretty far away from leaving the uncanny valley.
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Of course, I have nothing against the attempt to make games photorealistic. It’s the idea that the ultimate expression of game graphics is to be photorealistic. To mimic the mundane world as we know it.
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Reality is boring.
For the vast majority of gaming’s history, this wasn’t an option. Game developers had to use the limited tools at their disposal to draw the suggestion of a character or an environment.
Benj Edwards / How-To Geek
This gave us games with unique looks, and beautiful pixel art. Games like Golden Axe and Street Fighter II turned low-resolution art into something iconic.
With most modern games that aim for photorealism, not only do they age poorly as technology advances, and they look less realistic by the day, it’s also incredibly boring to look at and hard to tell these titles apart.
Crisp, Smooth, Artistic Games Play and Look Better
Pushing for photorealism often means compromising on other aspects of game graphics, some of which affect gameplay in a negative way. Many of these games are soft and blurry, because they have to render at such low resolutions before being upscaled. When the GPU’s horsepower is used to create simpler,but crisper graphics, that’s often more pleasant to my eye.
The game doesn’t have to have simplistic graphics, mind you, just not an attempt to render every pore on a character’s face or grain of sand on the beach. Think of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its stylized graphics, but at 4K and 60fps. Gorgeous to look at with a clear visual identity, and you avoid the utter weirdness that a photoreal version of the game would bring.
Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek / GPT-4o
Game Showcases are Packed With Strong Art Direction
The whole reason I started thinking about how boring photoreal games have become was thanks to two major game showcases in 2025: The PlayStation State of Play and the Xbox Games Showcase.
What struck me about both of these shows where we get to see new games is that the number of strictly photoreal games was rather low. Instead, I saw games that offered cutting-edge graphics, but with all that horsepower turned toward a more artistic look and feel.
Look at Silent Hill F, which might seem to be a photoreal game at first, but instead the game looks more like a stylized CG movie, which is pretty impressive on its own merit.
Another great example is Clockwork Revolution, which has a visual style that reminds me a little of the Bioshock series.
That’s exactly what I want from video games today. Give me something that’s unmistakably its own thing, but powered by the fidelity that’s possible with modern hardware.
I Hope We See More Games That Look Like Games
Just like the weird sentiment that live-action adaptations of animated films are somehow better, the idea that games should look like movies is one that needs to die if you ask me.
I’m all for a next generation of video games that look hand-drawn, or like stop-motion animation, or anything the developers can imagine. The last thing i want is for realism in any form to limit what a game can be.
