Top 10 Games with the Best Graphics of 2023

The past year of 2023 has treated us to a plethora of top-notch games, earning its place among the best in the history of the gaming industry. However, the long-awaited convergence of reality and virtuality let us down once again. We saw many simply beautiful games with excellent graphics, good animation, and high detail. It's time to list the brightest releases of the past year — for both consoles and PC!

The easiest way to understand the level graphics have reached today is to play Atomic Heart. It's built on Unreal Engine 4, so you don't have to worry about the quality of textures, surface detailing, particle systems, or the lighting model with realistic play of light and shadow. All of this is at a high level. If desired, you can enable ray tracing and behold the delights of new technologies. The sense of a living and dynamic world is enhanced by extensive semi-open spaces filled with decent (though not perfect) vegetation that players can explore. As for the drawbacks, we would mention the rather simple NPC models and stiff animation. If you've seen trailers and screenshots of Atomic Heart, you might think that it's the bare minimum in terms of graphics among the projects of 2023. But this is one of those rare cases where the beauty of the game does not depend solely on the technologies used, but captivates with its visual style and creative approach to design.

A complete reimagining of the original Dead Space, utilizing all the modern graphical technologies. What shocks the most are the necromorphs: their flexibility, sharpness, and highlighted animation of body parts surpass not just the original but other projects of the genre in recent years. Dead Space Remake offers a new lighting system and boasts realistic interplay of light and shadow in the utter darkness of the game world, creating an atmosphere of space horror like never before. The seamless world greatly enhances immersion: the USG Ishimura ship can be traversed from end to end, through and through. Moreover, the «planet cracker» has been rebuilt towards more believability. The game is developed on a modernized Frostbite engine, which after a couple of years of lagging behind, has shown excellent competition to newer engines in terms of visuals.

The indie project Witchfire has impressed players with its technological splendor. It's a clear demonstration that in the right hands, Unreal Engine 4 can be an effective tool for creating vibrant worlds with realistic effects. Photogrammetry is one of the technologies that has enabled such a result. But that's not all. The lighting system adds depth and atmosphere to the game, creating colorful light effects and shadows. Thanks to the meticulous work on the assets, Witchfire manages without ray tracing, and its visuals are hardly inferior to games that use the famed ray tracing. The project is still in early access, and some locations and objects may be excessively similar to each other. Otherwise, it's one of the most astonishing projects of the year.

Another project in our TOP list is the successor to the legendary indie survival game The Forest. And since it has caught our attention, you can understand that even on Unity, there are projects that can compete with the big names. The world of Sons of the Forest, full of forests, meadows, and streams, is truly expansive, impressing with the detail of forested areas that cover a significant part of the territories, created using the same photogrammetry. The developers have implemented seasons with smooth transitions, as well as interactive elements such as leaf fall, the first snow, icing, and even deep knee-high snowdrifts. The game boasts a wide range of graphic settings, including anisotropic textures, draw distance, ambient occlusion, and dynamic resolution, which can nicely boost FPS on the screen.

A game set in the cinematic universe of James Cameron's famous «Avatar», worthy of the film's visual quality! Overlooking any gameplay shortcomings, consider Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora as an impressive virtual tour of Pandora, where you can wander among its majestic forests filled with lavish and amazing plants, interact with fantastical creatures, explore picturesque open plains and breathtakingly steep mountains with soaring cliffs. As in the movie, you can enjoy the world of Pandora while flying on the dragon-like creature, Ikran. Additionally, many plants have been endowed with bioluminescent properties, giving them a unique appearance at night. Ubisoft's technical team has fully leveraged the potential of the Snowdrop engine, although the game requires a powerful computer for full-scale visualization.

Dead Island 2 may not boast outstanding textures, stunning interplay of light and shadow, or next-gen solutions for vegetation visualization. However, the same adjectives can be applied to the ultra-violence and brutality present in this game. Indeed, only in Dead Island 2 can one observe in detail how the blood splatters glisten in the sunlight after being struck from a nearby zombie, how their bodies are destroyed by melee weapon blows, or how they are blown into pieces by explosions. Fortunately, the action unfolds in the sun-drenched city of Los Angeles, so the lighting is on point. The «ketchup» from the zombies gets on the hands, clothes, walls, and generally paints the space around the protagonist, enhancing the immersion in the ongoing carnage.

The detailed environment, rich in elements and artistic choices, with attention to the finer details in Hogwarts, is one of the most noticeable features of Hogwarts Legacy. The visual beauty of the landscapes of northern Britain, coupled with excellent effects, captivates from the first minutes (especially against the backdrop of all previous Harry Potter games). The inclusion of ray tracing makes the game even more beautiful. There's a reason to linger here and there, observing reflections and catching nuances of different lighting and light scattering. Yes, to some extent, Hogwarts Legacy is a typical console port, its graphics on medium settings are more or less equivalent to the graphics on XSX and PS5. But this also means that it can be comfortably run on an average PC, and with a more powerful system, you can take advantage of all the graphical perks.

Now, let's talk about a true next-generation experience. Built on Unreal Engine 5.2, the indie horror game Fort Solis has surprised with excellent character and NPC animations — both body and facial — which have even been called some of the most realistic in the industry to date. Movable, correctly directed pupils, blinking eyelids, forehead wrinkles, and proper smile processing — these are just a few of the technologies at play. All light sources can cast shadows, and the environment looks really great. The use of Nanite technology has allowed for the display of a large number of details without the need for objects to pop into existence suddenly. However, Fort Solis is a very demanding game, confidently running only on the latest flagship NVIDIA graphics cards.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2, developed on Insomniac's proprietary engine, has unveiled the potential of console graphics at the zenith of the PlayStation 5's development cycle. The landscapes of New York, the views of transportation, and the character models impress with their splendor. There's more geometry in the buildings, higher detail in city areas, and a variety of textures and materials everywhere. Lighting, shadows, and reflections have been meticulously updated, giving the game a visual sheen. The streets are filled with large crowds of NPCs, and the city that never sleeps is almost always stuck in traffic. Despite the vast world, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 loads in mere seconds, and the lightning-fast traversal through it does not cause performance issues. The game offers two graphics modes, and its photo mode is rightly considered one of the best in modern projects.

Another project developed on a proprietary engine, rather than the mass-produced Unreal Engine and Unity, but in no way inferior to them. In some aspects, it even surpasses them. We've characterized Alan Wake 2 as a technologically advanced, excellently optimized game. It stands as one of the first next-gen projects created at the intersection of cutting-edge graphics and cinematography. The picture looks very good on minimum settings and excellent on maximum settings. It delivers a stable 4K 30 FPS with ray tracing on PC and consoles, easily scaling up to 120 FPS, which was previously impossible in projects of this caliber. The photo mode in the game is also considered one of the best in modern games.

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The end of a spectacular gaming year in 2023 is no reason for sadness. Hold on tight, as games are coming soon that will make you care less about reality. Buoyed by success, developers are set to raise the bar for graphical excellence to new heights in the next couple of years. We're confident about this, are you? We're waiting for your opinion in the comments!