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?
Really suprised to see no one has mentioned Death Stranding yet. The gameplay is contentious, to be sure, but the atmosphere, setting, and framing of the scenes were beautiful.
In Red Dead 2, the moment Unshaken starts playing after escaping from Guam was beautiful to me, and Death Stranding has a few awesome moments like that. You finally make it up a ridge and are greeted with a huge beautiful vista right as a great atmospheric song kicks in.