It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this — books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That’s how you win. Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit can become absurd, as illustrated by Rockstar Games’ compulsion to animate horse testicles responding to ambient temperature in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 . It also has very little to do with anything a player, well, does. This is where Housemarque diverges from its peers. The Finnish developer is an oddball in the PlayStation Studios roster.…