Games that look like paintings: 15 with brushwork you can see

These games look painted: you can see brush marks, soft edges and color laid on in strokes. StyleDex tags this look in a few ways. Hand-painted 2D covers 73 games where the art itself is painted. Painterly 3D covers 52 games that are 3D but brush-textured to look painted. A smaller group goes further and copies a specific kind of painting: oil on canvas, magazine illustration, or Romantic landscape.

Here are 15, grouped by the kind of painting they look like.

Painted 2D

These games are built from painted 2D art: backgrounds, portraits and, in some, every animation frame.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight pairs fine ink lines with soft, painted backgrounds that fade into darkness. Team Cherry gives each area of its bug kingdom its own color: green for Greenpath, rainy blue for the City of Tears, pink and violet for Crystal Peak.

Hades

Hades paints its character portraits in bold, saturated strokes with hard multi-band shadows, so they look like comic covers. The Underworld around them is darker and looser, which keeps the characters in front.

Bastion

Supergiant's first game, Bastion, set the studio's look nine years before Hades: a painted world that builds itself, tile by tile, under your feet as you walk. Its palette is mostly saturated greens, oranges and teals floating against a dark sky.

Slay the Spire

Slay the Spire paints every card's art in loose, quick strokes, a good model for games with hundreds of small illustrations.

Cuphead

Cuphead pairs watercolor backgrounds with hand-inked animation in the style of 1930s cartoons, every frame drawn on paper first.

Painterly 3D

These games are built in 3D, with textures and lighting tuned to look brushed. The camera can move around them and the brush marks stay on the surfaces.

Disco Elysium

Disco Elysium looks like oil paint. Its run-down city is rendered in 3D but painted over with heavy, visible brushwork, and its character portraits are full expressionist paintings. It's tagged with canvas brush texture, one of only 15 games in the dex with it.

Dishonored

Dishonored uses brushed textures and exaggerated faces and hands, so its plague city looks brushed rather than modeled. The palette is sickly greens and warm golds, both muted, like old varnish.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is 3D that copies 20th-century magazine illustration. Valve has said its art drew on illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker: soft painted gradients, warm rim light and simple shapes you can read at a glance from across a map.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark paints a Canadian winter in broad, flat strokes of color. Sunsets turn whole mountainsides orange. There's almost no fine detail, so rocks and trees read as blocks of color.

Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves has painterly ships and characters, and its water is shaded in bands of blue and green that shift like brushstrokes as the waves move.

Against the Storm

Against the Storm is a city builder in painterly 3D. Seen from high above, its rain-soaked settlements have hand-painted roofs and fields cut into dark pine forest, with warm firelight against cool blue-green shade.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a 2D side-scroller built from 3D and painted assets. It lights its blue and purple forests with soft glows, and blurs its backgrounds like wet watercolor behind sharp foreground shapes.

Games that look like landscape painting

The Romanticism tag covers games that borrow from 19th-century landscape painters, with huge skies and tiny human figures under them, lit for drama. The dex has nine of them.

Elden Ring

Elden Ring composes its open world like a series of paintings. Golden light breaks through clouds over ruins, and a huge glowing tree hangs over everything. It's also tagged concept art painterly: its views look like digital matte paintings, with loose atmospheric detail.

Journey

Journey is almost all sky and sand. Its desert glows in soft orange and pink, with your small robed figure walking through it. Most of its screenshots are two bands of color, sky and dune, with one small figure.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 mixes realistic characters with a world that looks painted: floating rocks, torn skies and brushy clouds, drawing on Belle Époque France.

Compare the palettes

The palettes from three of these games show how different "painted" can be. Hollow Knight sits in cool dark blues, Journey in warm sand, and Disco Elysium in muddy oils.

How games get the painted look

Painterly 3D games paint light and shadow straight into their textures, so surfaces still look brushed under game lighting. They also keep detail loose: a painting suggests a rock with a few strokes, and games like The Long Dark avoid fine geometry and sharp textures for the same reason.

Color does a lot of the work. Hollow Knight and Hades give each area one dominant color, the way a painter picks a key for a canvas.

The rest is lighting, mostly rim light on characters and low golden sun through fog. Painterly 3D games with soft ambient light are a good set to study.

More painted games

Browse the full sets: hand-painted 2D, painterly 3D, painterly shading (71 games) and concept art painterly (34 games).

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