When was the last time a minor detail in a game made you gasp?

Title pretty much says it all. I was looking through my 360 collection, and I found a copy of Lost Planet. Between fond memories of multiplayer and a dumb storyline, I suddenly remembered when I played the demo for the game at a friends house, before I had a 360 myself. While the game was fine, what actually instantly sold me was the smoke effects and explosions. The first time I saw a grenade go off, and smoke flew up in the air, I almost fell over myself in amazement. It looked so good! That one thing almost sold me on the 360 right then and there.

Another time, was a super minor detail in Breath of the wild. I had just started playing and I hit a tree, and some apples fell down. As I was picking them up, one of them rolled close to a fire, and suddenly, it was a baked apple instead. And I was once again, amazed!

Now, I may be easily excitable, but do you have any such examples? Just minor things, that sorta blew your mind?

Mainly: When your character has feet in a first-person shooter, when your character's reflection in a mirror actually looks good, and when a game supports 21:9.

A fourth detail is when your character sleeps under the covers, but that a rarity, and I like watching people play Deadly Premonition more than playing it myself.

As for a more specific event: ...Fuck, I dunno. Probably when Cyperpunk launched and I could pet the cat.

Just about every unnecessary, trivial and absurdly detailed animation or behavior of the various wildlife in Red Dead II. I follow that game’s subreddit purely for those clips despite all the complaining I have to scroll past.

probably the eyes in TLOU2. minor animations and the way they absorb light is pretty striking.

The court remembering that I picked up the medallion first before the girl in Chrono Trigger. Games aren't supposed to know things like that. I swear I am a nice person in real life. Honest.

Landing on Tallon IV in Metroid Prime, looking up and seeing amazing rain-drop effects on the visor.

Noticing how everything in your ship in Outer Wilds makes sense in this universe's technology, eg, a gravity crystal for artificial gravity. Actually, basically everything in Outer Wilds.

Heat haze. Racing games just weren't the same once they figured that out.

Modern Warfare 2019 and how sound affects the environment.

There's a lot of amazing small details in MW2019, but while i was testing out gun attachments in private matches i noticed a weird ringing sound after firing, i was standing near a metal bus stop which was apparently left ringing from the sound of a gunshot, never seen that in a game before.

I remember I think in Uncharted 4 (the one with your brother), there's a section where you're both climbing a mountain and you have a section where your brother climbs across your back to get to another location. The physics of having two bodies do that animation correctly was amazing to me!

The healing stuff in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I'd still probably gasp if I saw it now!

another: seeing the astronaut in Returnal quietly stalking in the distance.

Turning on ray-tracing in Control the first time after upgrading my GPU and seeing my reflection in the wood paneling.

Jedi Knight 2: Outcast - The afterimage effect when the lightsaber moved around was so cool to me. A little overdone in hindsight but at the time it looked so futuristic

@brendan: Oh wow, I totally forgot about Jedi Outcast 2, or maybe it was Jedi Academy. There's a level where you're out in the rain, and if your lightsaber is activated, raindrops will hit it and sizzle away. It was an extreme moment of immersion for me, I loved it so much.

All the various animations of the main characters interacting during the platforming in Prince of Persia 2008. So good.

You could cut down bamboo in Bushido Blade. My brother and I spent about as much time doing that as we did fighting each other.

In Watch Dogs 2 you watch someone try to kill himself by gassing himself to death inside his car in the garage and while you're probably supposed to save him you can also choose not to and just watch him die and it counts as a completion. It also takes a while for it to end so you're just sitting there for what feels like several minutes watching the most uneventful ways to commit suicide. All those people who requested Watch Dogs 2 be nonlethal only are completely wrong and missed out on one of the funniest games of all time.

Any game that does two-body animations correctly in today's games blows my mind. Also some of the water physics in the swimming scenes for this entire franchise always mesmerizes me.

Most recently, the snowfall physics from the Horizon: Frozen Wilds DLC caused me to stop playing the game and grab my wife to show her the screen.

The earliest I can think of is Max Payne on the PC and seeing the actual bullets from guns wiz pass Max during bullet time. In most third person shooting games, and many shooters in general, you never seen the actual outline of the bullet, just small bright balls of different colors and shapes depending on the weapon. There is also the fact that the PS2 Rock Star port of the game removed that small detail among other things, making the PC version special.

Dune Legacy (PC) - 10 seconds "skip ahead" hotkey

I don't like MGS games and I don't like Kojima, but there are details in his games that makes me gasp and respect him as a creator. Crossfades in later MGS games for example - most real-time 3d games don't do this because it doubles the rendering load. Sports games that do broadcast-style crossfades cheat by simply blending with a freeze frame so that they're actually only rendering one shot in real-time. However, in MGS games, they actually render both shots!

Framerate be damned, Kojima didn't want to compromise his vision. I can only imagine the push back from the engineers.

I'd be curious to know what other games have real-time cross fades. I noticed that Amplitude (the rhythm game) has it but it's a graphically light game.

For me it was when games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider started really adding a lot of subtle incidental animations while the character is moving, to slightly react to their immediate environment - putting out a hand to keep themselves away from the rock wall, shifting their shoulders or hips to avoid or navigate through/around bits of foliage or rock formations, nudge a door open or closed as they move near it, etc.