Games that are art: What's your candidate?

[LiquidGrape]

Oh, I didn't mean to circumvent your opinion in order to "gain one" if that's the impression I made; I merely tried to isolate wherein I think our differences lie.

To contextualise; What I consider to be art, is a creative construct specifically made to elicit an emotional and/or sensorial reaction.
While the creative party may have an additional, determined intention with his/her construct, I would not say that this design is what ultimately makes it "art".
- The artistic reward is experienced by the recipient, whom it's very possible derived a completely different reaction from it than the one "intended".

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

Planescape: Torment. Utterly bizarre, yet absolutely beautiful.

i have to agree, i had Psychonauts in mind, but Planescape has themes 10x more deep.

 

[Kryzantine]

Using literature as a comparison, I thought Assassins Creed 2 was perhaps the most artistic. Its setting is handled phenomenally and the story in it is very good in itself.

 

[Kyte]

I'll go with Portal.

 

[SniperMacFox]

A lot of the ones I would have picked have already been said so let's go for World of Goo. Indie puzzle classic which has a dark tone in humour storyline which the art style compliaments very well.

 

[KimberlyGoreHound]

Zelda: Ocarina of time + Majora's Mask
bioshock 1
& more recently, Assassin's Creed 2

I haven't played AC2, but OoT, Majora's Mask and Bioshock were the exact games I had in mind. Absolutely beautiful games, with compelling storylines, hauting quotes (Sheik's speech before learning the Serenade of Water, 'a puppet which has surpassed its use...is mere garbage', 'would you kindly?' respectively) and interesting characters. Perfuckingfection.

 

[lollipopz]

Also, and I feel petty for this, but:

Muramasa: The demon blade. Only downside is that its on wii.

That's not a flaw for the game. That game is flawed in that there's a massive amount of useless backtracking and the fact that there's an audible clunk between the story and gameplay aspects.

Yeah okay, but I wasn't talking about the gameplay, I was talking about the visuals. Could have been so much prettier on a more powerful console

 

[PixieFace]

Bioshock.

The guy who wrote that article made an excellent point: If you took a brief synopsis of that game (a man escapes from an underwater city by killing lots of mutants) then you're making a massive, sweeping generalization that destroys what I took out of that experience. You know, just like how of Mice and Men was just about two dudes working a job in the midwest. There is more than that.

Bioshock was more about questioning morality, playing off of classic Ayn Rand utopian ideals and showing how twisted and villainous men can become when they start off with genuinely good intentions. Art was brought up repeatedly as a motif - what is it? Could it be the photograph of a dead apprentice, hung on a beautiful humanoid structure? What did that photograph mean to Sander Cohen, and how did it make him feel? What of Dr. Steinman, who thought the body could be molded into something more beautiful and artistic than our God-given forms? That game was a visual representation of insanity, of decay, and of a society's collective self-hatred and low self esteem evident through trying to find "perfection". Not just that, but there was art in a typical sense - in the beautiful lighting, in the water that splashed on your face when you stepped under a spill, and in the old-school posters of smiling faces hanging on dilapidated walls.

You have to take it all in context, Ebert. Please don't point at what I love and admire and say it's meaningless, because now you're just being a dick.