Gaming

I definitely agree and hear what you're saying but strong art style achieves the same thing and invariably ages better. There are definitely occasionally those games going for photorealistic that make me pause and appreciate it but more often than not it's the games that really own a distinct, creative, and well thought out visual style.

I think the obvious games that had this reaction for me were the Witcher 3 and AssOdyssey, but neither of those are photorealistic, they both just make smart use of lighting and environment design. They're both gorgeous, stylized worlds.

I understand you, but I felt deep emotion seeing a 640x480 scene of a sprite (kidnapped female slave) punching another sprite and using some edgy language. Yes, it did require me to stop for a minute to imagine everything for it to hit this deep - which the game's turn based mechanics helped me with.

I also feel the less detailed something is, the more HORRIFYING and VIOLENT it appears, as it stimulates imagination much more than HD scenes in games and movies, where most of the times that won't be able to create something more SHOCKING that what you imagined (The modern +13 goal in games and movies plays a role too, so there might be bias)

There was a pirated TV channel that specialized - mostly - in horror movies, it had horrible audio and video quality - especially the bitrate, everything that appeared on the channel was horrifying, the lack of clearness induced a feeling similar to fearing the dark, the low bitrate in particular meant that you - the viewer - was practically blind in every fast scene, which dramatically increased the suspense.

You might tell me to just go read a book if I want to use my imagination, and actually that's a pretty nice suggestion.

PS: the game in the first paragraph is the first Fallout if anyone's wondering. I also barely heard of Ghost of Tsushima (or most modern games outside of FF7R)