The best video games for architecture and design fans
Design meets gameplay in these games that changed how worlds are built.
If you’re looking for inspiration from video game architecture, I’ve picked out ten games that really stand out from the crowd. These are games that take the principles of archviz seriously as much as how gameplay is crafted, and make world building an aid to narrative and design.
Games like Sniper Elite 5 and Hitman provide some wonderful examples of huge, intricately detailed levels that evoke real-world settings yet are completely fictional, while Sable offers a completely alien world that’s nevertheless directly influenced by famous architects such as Carlo Scarpa and Cesar Pelli. Read our Sable tutorial to discover how the art team created its look using Procreate and Unity. (We have a list of Procreate tutorials for more insights.)
Control, meanwhile, is a love letter to Brutalism (made famous this year in movie, The Brutalist), and the shifting interiors of The Oldest House draw from a range of twentieth century designers, like Marcel Breuer. And Alien: Isolation is a stunning tribute to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi masterpiece that extrapolates its set design to monumental scales.
Read my list of video games I believe have the best architecture that enables game design, narrative and more. Disagree? Let me know in the comments below.
The best video games for architecture
01. Sniper Elite 5
Mont-Saint-Michel is the most visited tourist attraction in France outside Paris, attracting around 3 million visitors every year.
Sniper Elite 5 does an excellent job of creating authentic feeling locations in German-occupied France that are actually completely made up. Beaumont-Saint-Denis in mission 3 is a prime example.
Based on the real-life Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, this island-based level features a towering monastery, and not only does it look stunning, it provides for some exciting gameplay, with warrens of streets to explore and a pleasing sense of verticality. The follow-up game, Sniper Elite: Resistance, pulls a similar trick with a wonderful level set in the fictional walled town of St. Raymond, which is loosely based on Carcassonne.
Read our Sniper Elite Resistance review for our views on the latest game in this series.
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02. Control
The Dead Letters Archive in Control bears a striking similarity to Saint Francis de Sales Church in Michigan, an astonishing modernist building designed by Marcel Breuer.
The Oldest House – the home of the Bureau for Control – is one of the most memorable pieces of architecture in all of gaming, not least because it tends to shift around with a life of its own.
The overall aesthetic follows the Brutalist style, particularly the concrete, windowless profile of the building’s exterior, which is based on the AT&T Long Lines Building in Manhattan. But inside you can find a range of architectural influences, including references to work by Marcel Breuer, Kevin Roche, Tadao Ando, and many more.
03. Half-Life
The 1989 game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES features one of the first ‘Akira lifts’ in video games, in a level set in the Technodrome.
It was tempting to talk about Half-Life 2’s amazing City 17 here, but instead I want to give a shoutout to the original Half-Life and it’s wonderfully claustrophobic Black Mesa lab facility.
The game’s famous monorail opening is rightly lauded, but one part I particularly like is the inclusion of an ‘Akira lift’, a giant, funicular-style elevator inspired by one in the 1988 anime movie and the manga it was based on. Nothing provides a greater sense of anticipation than slowly descending on a giant, diagonally moving elevator: something awful always awaits at the bottom.
Read how Half-Life RTX Remix is bringing this retro game back.
04. Sable
Shedworks is so named because the studio began in a shed in Greg’s parents’ garden (they’ve since moved to a proper office).
Sable is a smorgasbord of esoteric architecture, scattered through an alien desert that looks like it’s been ripped straight from the pages of a Moebius comic book. Gregorios Kythreotis, the co-founder of Sable maker Shedworks, studied architecture at university, and it shows: Carlo Scarpa, Cesar Pelli, Edward Durell Stone, Archigram and Japanese Metabolism are just a few of the architectural influences he has drawn on for Sable, with its characterful villages, lonely towers and strange monuments.
05. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has a ‘run’ button (R2), but it was added so late in development that at launch the game didn’t mention it. The instruction was later patched in.
This 2015 game from Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room stands out for its near-photorealistic depiction of a strangely deserted English village. Apocalyptic wastelands and bustling cities are ten-a-penny in videogames, but depictions of rural architecture are relatively few and far between, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture nails all of the tiny details, from pub ashtrays to Gilbert Scott’s iconic red telephone box. The idyllic thatched cottages even feature some authentically chintzy wallpaper.
The developer has continued its push for environmental detail and period-perfect architecture, last year's oil rig-set horror game Still Wakes The Deep is a wonderful example of the same attention to authentic architecture. Read how Still Wakes The Deep was made for more insight into the dev's process.
06. Hitman: World of Assassination
Lead level designer Torbjørn Christensen created the Hokkaido level, and has said he set it in Japan because he wanted to create a hospital where the technology “borders on science fiction”.
Where to begin with the architecture of the three most recent Hitman games? Every level is architecturally astonishing, from the glitzy Paris hotel of the opening level to the grungy Berlin nightclub in an abandoned industrial complex.
Sapienza is often picked as players’ favourite locale, with its idyllic seaside town juxtaposed against an underground laboratory that could double as a James Bond villain’s lair.
But I think the architectural highlight is the Hokkaido level, which features a medical facility for the super-rich. This metal and glass structure perched atop a mountain not only looks fantastical, but its cold façade perfectly reflects the cold nature of its elite residents.
07. Batman: Arkham City
The map for Batman: Arkham City is around five times the size of the first game in the series, Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Gotham looks fantastic here, and naturally Gothic in terms of architectural style, mixed with some Art Nouveau influences. But the clever bit is how the player is anchored by landmarks scattered throughout the city, like the neon green sign of Ace Chemicals jutting up out of the skyline, meaning it’s hard to get lost as you glide above the rooftops.
Also, the scale in Batman: Arkham City is perfect: Gotham feels suitably big, but the city is actually relatively small compared to many open world games. Instead, it’s densely packed with things to do and little details to discover, like the roses laid in Crime Alley where Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered.
08. Remember Me
Director Jean-Maxime Moris has said the visual style of Remember Me was influenced by Akira, Ghost in the Shell and various other classic cyberpunk anime.
Dontnod is better known nowadays for the Life is Strange games, but this overlooked gem from the Xbox 360 era showcases the studio’s talent for cityscapes. We’re presented with a near-future, cyberpunk vision of Paris, in which the city’s Belle Epoque streets have been smothered with neon signs and futuristic street furniture, while the dome of the Sacre Coeur is juxtaposed against glittering skyscrapers.
The mix of old and new in Remember Me's world design feels authentic to how real cities evolve, and the way the cyberpunk architecture stamps all over the capital’s noble past chimes well with the game’s story about an oppressive tech-based regime taking over this future world.
09. Dishonored
Dishonored’s visual designer, Viktor Antonov – who passed away in February 2025 aged just 52 – also designed Half-Life 2’s astonishing City 17.
The decaying whaling town of Dunwall is a delightfully miserable place to explore, and its architecture does a fantastic job of explaining the economics of this alternative world without saying a word. The sharp division between rich and poor couldn’t be more stark, with fancy soirees being held in beautifully appointed townhouses, while just down the street people live in squalor.
Dishonored's alternative, Victorian-like world runs on whale oil, and we see the grim reality of what that means in the rundown harbour area, with its industrial buildings dedicated to the rendering of poor cetaceans. Horrible, but fascinating.
10. Alien: Isolation
When we think of the design of Alien, H.R. Giger usually comes to mind, but Ron Cobb created some astonishing practical sets and props for the film, and Creative Assembly closely followed his designs and process.
The levels of dedication to world building in Alien: Isolation are off the charts. Creative Assembly set out to build on Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, disregarding anything that was introduced in the Alien sequels, and the result is a refreshingly idiosyncratic world that’s anchored in futuristic 1970s technology, all chunky telephones and monochrome screens.
The city-sized Sevastopol space station – with its three enormous towers bristling with antennas and various other bits of greebling – is an arresting sight, almost like a medieval cathedral launched into space. The studio recently announced an unexpected and long-awaited sequel, but it will be difficult to see how they could top the phenomenal architecture of this first game.
There are nods to Alien: Isolation in the new VR game, read how Alien: Rogue Incursion's world was made.
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Lewis Packwood has been writing about video games professionally since 2013, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Retro Gamer, EDGE, Eurogamer, Wireframe, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, PC Gamer and Time Extension, among others. He is also the author of Curious Video Game Machines: A Compendium of Rare and Unusual Consoles, Computers and Coin-Ops (White Owl, 2023).
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