Where is “posting a screenshot of the games I’m playing” guy when you need them?

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

The painted world in that one side quest in Oblivion.

You could take a photograph there, frame it, and then say you painted it.

Any random location in Elden Ring. The aesthetics of the game are done in such a way, it’s meant to invoke images of renaissance period paintings.

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.

The bridge in Shadow of the Colossus, crumbling and ancient yet still striding as a titan across the vast landscape

The opulent neo-classical Indian cityscape of Sonashahar in Pacer

The Hanging City in Outer Wilds, clinging to the underside of a hollow world’s fragile shell

Also, like, all of A Highland Song. It’s intentionally designed to look like landscape paintings anyway. The castle in the loch is probably my favourite, or maybe the giant dam

Red Dead Redemption 2. Pretty much anywhere.

Oblivion. It kind of already has that paint aesthetic, especially if you choose the setting with the quest where you enter a painting to rescue the painter.

The title screen of Disco Elysium. It kind of looks like a painting alreday.

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.)

The first Halo

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.

Green Hill Zone

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