Journey (2012) was beautiful from start to finish. There’s an elegance to it, the separate parts (visuals, music, interface, multi-player etc) all work together so well and the sum is just breathtaking.
Death Stranding (2019) is far from perfect but very occasionally the environment, music and game play would all click and there are these moments of isolated, yearning beauty that I really loved.
I agree, I haven’t really bothered with competitive multi-player since I tried rocket league.
“There’s no way a fun little game about cars playing football could get toxic”, I thought to myself. Oh, how wrong I was!