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 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.