Games That Dazzle
Not every game needs a grim, gray palette awash in shadows to make an impression. Some of the most memorable ones explode with color, shifting shades like stained glass in sunlight. These aren’t just fun to play, they’re fun to watch, even when the controller’s not in your hands. Think of them as interactive art exhibits, except ones where you can actually touch the canvases, break pots, or fight monsters.
1. Okami
This game’s ink-washed world looks like a Japanese scroll painting come alive. Every stroke of the brush feels as if it were conjured from an artist’s imagination, from the blooming cherry blossoms to the bold lines of wolves and demons. Even pausing the game feels like hanging up a piece of art in place of your television.
2. Journey
This indie adventure game consists of endless dunes of golden sand. A robed figure glides and slides across the sands, leaving snaking trails in the sunlight. The palette is minimal—burnt orange, crimson, deep blue—but the atmosphere swells with the power of the desert. Watching the traveler’s scarf flutter in the wind is strangely emotional, like staring at a candle flame that refuses to extinguish.
Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
3. Cuphead
This game is a 1930s cartoon come to life, featuring hand-drawn characters with rubber-hose limbs, watercolor backdrops, and enemies with teeth crowding out of their mouths. The colors are bold but slightly faded, like film reels dug out of a dusty basement archive.
4. Gris
In this game, sadness has literally painted the world in tragic hues. You begin in muted grays, then gradually unlock colors—blue, red, green, yellow—until the screen blooms like a watercolor book gradually filling in. The vistas are delicate, emotional, and creatively bold in a way you don’t often see.
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
When it first came out, some people mocked its cartoon style as being too childish, too bright. Years later, those same critics now declare the game timeless. Even after all this time, the cel-shaded seas, the bold blues and greens, and expressive character faces continue to shine out of our screens.
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6. Splatoon 3
This game is chaos in neon colors, with splashes of magenta, teal, lime, and yellow everywhere. You’re literally painting the map with ink while battling opponents, and when matches end, the map is so messy it looks like an abstract bit of graffiti.
Tim Bartel from Cologne, Germany on Wikimedia
7. Ori and the Will of the Wisps
Set within a glowing forest, this game is dark and luminescent all at once. Light seeps through trees with swirls of purples and blues, shimmering in the air like stained glass. The little spirit Ori darts across branches and leaves, leaving a luminous trail of brightness in its wake.
8. Persona 5
This game deals in shades of red and black, with sharp lines and bold contrasts. Even the menus look cooler than some games’ main levels, and the entire game looks like it belongs on a magazine cover. When “all-out attacks” finish with comic-book splashes of color, you almost want to frame the result and hang it on your wall.
9. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
Studio Ghibli’s fingerprints are everywhere in this game, with its lush forests, whimsical towns, and wide-eyed characters with their hand-sewn clothing. The game’s backdrop is bright, dreamy, and deliciously soft at the edges, as if you’ve fallen into a living anime film.
10. Firewatch
This adventure game portrays the Montana wilderness in dusky oranges, pinks, and purples. Every sunset feels like your own personal painting. The palette shifts with time and weather, leaving the adventurer in a setting that is sometimes smoggy, and at other times golden. You can almost smell pine needles and campfire smoke wafting in the air.
Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash
11. Rayman Legends
Every level is positively bursting with color and extravagant detail, from bright musical stages to lush jungles. The art is cartoony but layered and full of movement. Even backgrounds ripple with life, making it feel like you’re bouncing through a kaleidoscope of color.
12. Abzû
This meditative game is set in the ocean, allowing you to swim beneath the waves alongside schools of fish swirling like ribbons of confetti. Coral reefs glow in oranges and pinks as sunbeams break through the ocean surface from the world above. All around you lies the faint suggestion of a ruined ancient civilization that upset the balance between man and nature.
13. Katamari Damacy Reroll
This action puzzle game features bright blocks of color and absurdity on every side. Your task is simple: as the tiny Prince of All Cosmos, you must roll up all objects into a giant sticky ball. This means cows, candy, cars, and entire skyscrapers. It’s cluttered, clunky, and yet somehow charming in its simplicity.
14. Flower
As you make your way through this world, petals drift by on the wind and grass bends as you fly by. The landscapes shift from calm meadows to electric wind farms, with colors flowing by you in waves that saturate the screen. It’s slow, relaxing, but dazzling all at the same time.
15. Hades
Within this dark but vibrant world you play Zagreus, the rebellious son of Hades. Within this hellscape, lava glows against deep shadows, and gods pop with vivid golds, purples, and greens. Somehow even the underworld looks like a place worth visiting despite the suffering apparent on all sides.
16. Slime Rancher
This charming life-sim features a pastel candy land filled with adorable, bouncing, slime creatures. Pink slimes, glowing phosphor slimes, tabby-cat slimes with ears—you name it, they’re there in abundance. The world itself is colorful, but it’s the round, smiling blobs that turn it into a living cartoon.
Neeqolah Creative Works on Unsplash
17. Fez
This mind-bending indie game allows you to wander through a peaceful pixel art world. Blocks of neon pinks and soft blues abound all around you, and each shift of the world reveals new patterns, hidden doors, and glowing runes. It feels retro and contemporary at once, as if your childhood Rubik’s cube was the inspiration for an entire world.
18. Yoshi’s Woolly World
This delightful world is constructed entirely out of knitted landscapes, featuring yarn enemies and giant buttons for clouds. Every texture is stitched, crocheted, or stuffed. Pastel blues and pinks make it look like a craft project gone magically alive.
19. Concrete Genie
This visually stunning game is like graffiti come alive. Dark, empty walls transform as you paint neon monsters and glowing landscapes that interact with your environment. The colors trail and sparkle, filling gray spaces with bright light.
20. No Man’s Sky
In this game, you’re a space explorer traveling across the universe. Before you are planets with purple grass, turquoise oceans, and neon skies. Sometimes the combinations look impossible until you recall that in the vastness of deep space, all things are possible.
