All video games tend to become beautiful when given the Dead End Thrills treatment, but Rise Of The Tomb Raider is a special case.

God damn it's a beautiful game.

When I think of 2015's best looking games I think back to the games that held up the best technologically, but those that also had a presence so striking that I can't help but remember them. The way the light peered through the trees as the wind raged in The Witcher 3 was one of them. The dark, Victorian London-esque environments of Bloodborne have still stayed with me. And the presentation of Battlefront ... it's superb.

Fallout 4 is beautiful for other reasons. That was, of course, until Dead End Thrills got their hands on the game. Now it's just straight out beautiful.

Mirror's Edge was born to be high-res. The latest shots up at Dead End Thrills show Dice's first-person runner looking sharper than ever. Pleeeease don't let Mirror's Edge 2 suck, pleeeeease don't let Mirror's Edge 2 suck...

I never could get all that excited about Rage (this was at least partly due to that terrible name), but I did appreciate how good it often looked. Especially those nice, oddly bulbous character models -- not everyone liked them, but I did.

Killer is Pretty: There are a bunch of new games featured at the screenshot site Dead End Thrills, including last year's Killer is Dead. Turns out, that game's stylish art looks incredibly nice in high-res.

The latest batch of HD PC shots up at Dead End Thrills focus on Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot, and are looking mighty fine.

Gallery: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends, racing through super high-res backdrops! These beautiful screenshots come to us from Duncan Harris at Dead End Thrills, who's been using a debug build of Sonic & Allstars Racing Transformed provided by developer Sumo Interactive to grab some beautiful high-res images.

Yesterday, I spent an inordinate amount of time messing around with the nifty new photo mode in Infamous: Second Son. It's surprisingly rare that we get that kind of opportunity to slow way down and really appreciate how beautiful video games can be.

BioShock Infinite has never really been wanting in the art department. So what better game to document with gorgeous, high-res screenshots?

Grand Theft Auto IV may be almost six years old, but its age doesn't stop folks from doing all sorts of amazing stuff with it. Take, for example, this excellent noire "walkabout series" by gaming's best screenshot artist, Dead End Thrills. The game looks gorgeous like this, no?

If the best video-game screenshot artist around wants to spend a bunch of weeks cataloguing Dark Souls, that's just fine with me. Dead End Thrills is still at it, and has posted some more beautiful shots from the game over at his site. Some real doozies up this week.

Dark Souls. Dark Souls? Dark Souls! Dead End Thrills is still at it, pulling down some dramatic new shots of Dark Souls, looking great on PC. Head over there for more.

Dark Souls is a beautiful game in more ways than one. It's a terrific feat of design, for starters. But it's also just lovely to look at, if you can relax for five seconds and take in the view.

Here's that DayZ wallpaper you were looking for, courtesy of the one and only Dead End Thrills. Higher-res version here.

DayZ isn't really a conventionally beautiful game, but it does have an austere quality that I find appealing. That quality is on full display in the latest shots from Duncan Harris at Dead End Thrills, who has been running the game in offline mode to capture the cleanest images.

"Some modders are making Morrowind in the Skyrim engine," they said. It's looking really good. And I listened to them, I did. But it wasn't until I saw these screens that I believed it.

It's hard to believe DmC came out this year… last January feels like a hundred years ago. Ninja Theory's game boasted their usual striking visual style, as demonstrated in these new shots from Dead End Thrills.

Nope, these aren't photos of actual planes. They're video game screenshots.
Specifically, they're high-res shots from Flight Simulator X captured and posted by Duncan Harris at Dead End Thrills.

This isn't quite a Last-Gen Heroes entry, but it could be, since Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West deserves some retrospective love. It was one of the most surprising games of the last several years, and also one of the most beautiful.