Technology

The latest game where I thought "damn this looks good" was Sifu. I get like 200fps on my half-potato (5500XT), and that's at ultra quality, definitely "let's turn on vsync to get rid of the fan noise" territory. The reason it looks good is good lightening choices, fluid animation, as well as well-decorated levels. As you can see the textures and geometry are often very simple -- a red fire hose box in a a hallway is just a red box. No fine detail at all, and that's sufficient: It's enough detail so that things don't feel empty, your brain isn't thinking "there should be more here", a whole uncanny valley of its own as the brain gets kinda queasy if there's nothing that it can ignore, but not enough detail as to be cluttering, that is, detract from the readability of the graphics.

Good style and execution will always win out over realism.

And yes it's a 30G game, high-res textures and not kitbashing the levels tends to do that. Also, storing stuff uncompressed the download size is 20G.

(And btw whoever made that video is a good player deliberately playing like ass. You can tell by how they're taking ages to get through the level, the pitiful score, but still not dying or really taking much damage at all).