There's a tweet going around of a hyper-realistic close-up of Horizon 2 protagonist's well-rendered teeth, comparing PS4 and PS5 graphics, with a difference in the roundness of said teeth.

Why the hell do we need games to go this hard on realism and detail if we're all playing on 20-25-inch monitors with the camera pointed at the protag's back anyway? How often are we going to be centimetres from her lips?

Why is so much money going towards tongue bump-mapping. To fucking teeth textures.

I played the new Kirby game demo recently, Neo TWEWY yesterday, and I await the release of Soul Hackers 2 and Live-A-Live. Can we please have more games with an actual art direction instead of trying to make things realistic, my aversion to looking at faces can't deal.

It's almost like Japan isn't afraid to go all out with style and direction visually, and the only time the western side of things does anything different is indie games and Tim Schafer.

This isn't to say there won't be some design language to Horizon 2 or whatever. Deus Ex Mankind Divided had a metallic colour palette to everything despite being generally a realism-fest. You can have a visual personality and realism.

But it really does remain quite tiresome.