I haven't experienced the following games myself, but they do strike me as impressive looking at first glance:

The Banner Saga 1 and 2

Jotun

Kentucky Route Zero

The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker

The cel-shaded visuals and fluid animations work together to bring the game to life like a cartoon as no other game before it had done before. It was not a mere visual flourish. The world was animated with charm and character, accompanied by a Celtic musical score, capturing a child-like wonder for adventure that befit a Legend of Zelda game on the open sea.

Muramasa: the Demon Blade

Exquisite hand-drawn artwork set in the Edo period of Japan that's amazing to behold in motion.

Kirby's Epic Yarn

A tour de force in creativity. An entire world is brought to life with everything made out of yarn, patches, buttons, and zippers. It's as much of a joy to watch as to play (albeit, awfully forgiving on the challenges you must overcome).

LIMBO

A stifling black-and-white aesthetic expresses a bleak, dreadful atmosphere of ever-present danger. The visuals evoke an imagination borne of nightmares, made all the more convincing by the veil of deep shadows that obscure the world and its inhabitants like living silhouettes but with a discomforting closeness that touch upon our primal fears and survival instincts.

Honorable Mention

Rayman Origins

Comically delightful and strikingly sharp visuals complements the zany characters and platforming action.

Hackneyed Difficulty Modes. Going to the trouble of including multiple difficulty levels should mean more than bumping up the health and damage of your enemies, throwing in more enemies for you to deal with, limiting your number of lives, or designing AI to cheat to give you a profound disadvantage. Give me more objectives, fewer resources, new enemies and game mechanics--whatever is necessary to challenge my skills and knowledge of the game other than adjusting a couple of stats and labeling it more difficult.

Unlockable Difficulty Modes. Don't force me to play the easier difficulties in order to unlock the most difficult ones. If I had completed the game in the past and lose the save file, I shouldn't have to play through it all over again to play the most challenging modes. I'm looking at you Ninja Gaiden Black and Metriod Prime 3.

Ridiculous Survival Mechanics. It's not fun to be on the verge of death by starvation, dehydration, and illness every few minutes.

Extreme Randomness in Crafting. I shouldn't need to craft dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of items because the crafting results are random. Everyone knows that wherever it's incorporated in a game, it's to serve as mundane resource- and time-sinks.

Rubberbanding AI in Racing Games. No explanation is necessary.

Quest markers. The first game I recall playing that had this feature is Oblivion, and, while it did solve an onerous problem from Morrowind, where it could be difficult to find where you must go to continue a quest because of a simple map and vague and ambiguous directions from NPCs, it also made exploration and player participation in questing mindlessly trivial. Now, it seems like all modern RPGs and MMOs have an abundance of quest markers for fear that some player will stop playing because he couldn't figure out after more than a minute where to go next. It's not enough to tick a box in the options menu to remove them either, since it's often the case that the entire quest structure assumes the quest markers will show you the way, and without them, you're not given the requisite knowledge to figure it out on your own. It's streamlining run amok for the sake of accessibility.

Multiplayer level progression (such as in Call of Duty, Battlefield, and League of Legends). If a game's multiplayer isn't good enough to merit my attention for long, locking out weapons, upgrades, and characters behind a superficial progression system won't do it either. It's a cheap, manipulative way to keep people playing a game much longer than they normally would have while punishing players who don't have the same amount of time to potentially get the same experience as the hardcore players. I create my own kind of progression by setting goals I, not the game, want to aspire to achieve. Don't hold me back because you want to win my precious time.

Story-telling through audio playback. This was done well in Bioshock, but when every other modern open-world game seems to do the same thing, it comes across as contrived. How many people do you know in real life who record audio diaries? And why would they be scattered all over the place? It's a lazy method to fill in the holes in a plot or character. Just because it's somewhat believably explained in, say, Watch_Dogs and the Division because cell phone calls get recorded without consent, doesn't make it any less forced, disjointed, and out of place in the grand narrative.

Daily and weekly quests. A quick way to kill whatever joy there is to do in a game by giving players excuses to log into a game or inhibit progress behind rewards that are arbitrarily limited by quest lockouts. Make these rewards actually rewarding to get, rather than another chore among many others.

I don't know about you guys, but my i5 4670k is being well utilized. All four cores frequently run at 60-100% capacity. Screenshots don't do the game justice. You have to see Chicago in motion, without the static blur of poorly compressed images, to appreciate the work that has gone into the presentation. I think the game looks amazing more often than it doesn't. No other game I've seen does rain showers more impressively than Watch_Dogs, just as one example. I do hope, however, that Ubisoft works on smoothing the frame rate while driving.

@cyloninside: While I agree Watch_Dogs is better described as a cross-generation title than a next generation title, the reveal trailer did exhibit a number of effects that made the world come to life in impressive ways that I hadn't seen done in a video game before. It's disappointing the trailer doesn't quite match up to the end product; however, people need to realize that games revealed a year or two or even more before release are subject to significant changes for a host of reasons, including a change in artistic vision and performance optimization. The latter reason probably doesn't happen much until late in the production cycle. The trailer obviously wasn't being shown as representative of the final product, so people should keep that in mind before accusing Ubisoft of deceptive practices.

We can look to fiction novels as an example of a medium that can change over time as they're being written. Anyone who has read novel excerpts published in magazines before the novel is complete knows subtle and even drastic changes can be made before the novel itself is published. War and Peace (originally titled All's Well That Ends Well) was re-written, revised, and published in six different editions in the course of 18 years, and Tolstoy never finished serializing the novel in magazines as was customary at the time. Tolstoy's wife, who acted, in part, as an editor for her husband, wrote the novel out seven times, and even made her own changes, as did others, at her husband's discretion. Some may not know this, but the second edition is the one often considered authoritative, and it's the one probably most commonly read. Tolstoy wasn't entirely content with his creation in his lifetime, and would have made more revisions if he hadn't lost interest in the project. If anyone thinks art and entertainment is some fixed, linear process where parts created early will inevitably be left unchanged before completion don't understand the creative process.

Andrew Burnes, who wrote the Nvidia Graphics, Performance, and Tweaking Guide for Watch_Dogs, explains what this setting does in this comment.

This is exactly what I meant by "conflicting reports."

Jiggly, do you mean when just checking on CPU usage from Task Manager or also while in-game with a third-party application independently tracking CPU usage?

Thanks for the information. Are you tracking the usage of each core of your CPU or the Total CPU Usage? I'm curious whether the game uses all of your cores, and, if so, how well they are being used.