Anything from Journey, but especially at dusk before you jump down into the dark area or the very end

The area with the giant metal tendrils in Horizon Zero Dawn

The Clockwork Mansion in Dishonored 2

Blood Gulch from any of the original Halo Trilogy games.

Anything from Ghost of Tsushima.

Subnautica has some nice scenery, though for a painting I’d probably go with something like the safe shallows where there’s plenty of sunlight, or maybe the underwater islands or the kelp forest.

MInecraft would have a lot of possibilities, particularly with some of the new terrain generation for mountains as well as the cherry tree biome that was recently added. However, with each world being generated randomly, there’s no definitive scenes that would be instantly identifiable as Minecraft. So you’d have to rely on making the painting sufficiently blocky and/or replicating some of the terrain generation quirks like the occasional floating tree or lava flowing out the side of a hill and things like that.

Red Dead Redemption 2. Pretty much anywhere.

Anything from breath of the Wild or tears of the kingdom.

Here are two that I thought were particularly striking visually.

Brothers a Tale of Two Sons: The site of a battle between giants, where you had to navigate among bodies fifty feet tall.

Alice Madness Returns: The ice level, where you could see sea monsters frozen in the ice. (Ignore the text; I couldn’t find a better screenshot.)

Green Hill Zone

If you want another CS level, Italy Inferno has a ton of photogentic spots in both Source and GO. I’m also particularly fond of Lake, but that might be partly the 500 hours of Wingman on the map speaking.

Edit: or for Valve games in general, theres the dam from Half Life, Ravenholm or the drained shores from Half-Life 2, or an overgrown chamber from Portal 2.

The landscape when you get out of the first cave in Elden Ring

Anything from RDR2.

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Guild Wars (the original base game) made extremely good use of clear visual themes and bloom to create an absolutely entrancing visual experience. It was a pretty shit game, though.

There are a few carefully planned reveals in skyrim that live in almost all our heads (one really memorable one for me is heading into the Rift and transitioning into autumn themes for the first time).

Cheydinhal is absolutely breathtaking in Oblivion.

Pretty much the entirety of Stray - outside the village areas they put a lot of effort into dramatic art reveals.

Ocarina of time has a few excellent ones but it’s low poly and may be hard to appreciate at this point. Especially Hyrule Castle creeping over Lon Lon ranch and the frozen Zora kingdom.

Gosh I feel like I’m missing so many others… though on the topic of CS de_infero and de_cbbl were some of my favorite visually.

I liked that bit in Oblivion where you jump into a painting and it’s a painting pastel world and there’s a painting troll and you fuck his shit up

Xenon map from Cube2:Sauerbraten FPS.