What games have you played that beautifully marry their mechanics with narrative and/or aesthetic?
What games have you played that beautifully marry their mechanics with narrative and/or aesthetic?
Title.
You might've heard the fancy term ludonarrative dissonance, which describes something a lot of modern games suffer from. It's the way games often tell stories that don't fit within their gameplay loops. How a character can take 20 shots to the head in gameplay, and then die from a single wound in a cutscene. Or how in the story, characters can act like people who would never do the things they do do in gameplay.
This conflict doesn't actually ruin a game most of the time. But the pictured game is one which is renowned for showcasing what can be done when gameplay is used as a narrative device, reinforcing rather than conflicting with the story. Using every element of a game in concert.
I don’t know is Spec Ops: The Line falls into this category or not. As you progress through the game and your characters mental state deteriorates, most of the voice lines change from professional to aggressive and the loading screen tips break the fourth wall.
25Oh yes it does.
In that game the devs basically asked "what if the story went exactly where the gameplay suggests it should lead".
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Braid is probably the first game I saw do this in a masterful way.
Right now I would suggest Helldivers 2. You are a young soldier fresh out of boot camp. Frozen and thawed out to carry out a suicide mission. The game constantly praises you and mentions how you are the best of the best. You are actually incredibly expendable and likely to die in less than two minutes. There is no "respawn," you are replaced by another Helldiver just like you.
20That's true! Helldivers has fantastic attention to detail, and Arrowhead has really put effort into having every piece of the game sing to the same tune.
The game isn't always immersive in the typical sense, especially matching with randoms, but it still manages to evoke that feeling of being "in a different reality" when you play.
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Outer Wilds.
Anything I can say about this game is potentially a spoiler. Just play it. The expansion Echoes of the Eye is well worth the extra pennies as well.
13omg... this fucking game.
My SO and I have been playing the expansion; I'm trying so hard to take it slowly and savor every moment and the wide range of emotions that accompany them.
I can't wait for them to catch up to me because today I found
(spoiler!)
the reel that shows that the the deer-owl aliens were seemingly KILLED by the goddamn Eye of the Universe?!?!
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Nier Automata It has brilliant blending between story, game play, combat, and even the music.
12Buy Brothers, buy Brothers, buy Brothers
- TotalBiscuit
11Subnatica. Every element of this game just fits together perfectly to create an atmosphere of isolated desperate survival.
10journey does this in a cool way.
it has some replay value, but its sadly too short
8My sister played the crap out of Journey, she'd hang around the first area until another player showed up, then guide them through the game, showing the stranger all the secrets she knew, tracing hearts into the sand and such.
The embroidery on the robes actually becomes more elaborate as you find more secrets in the game, so she realized she could tell new players from experienced ones, and would guide players or look to learn from them accordingly.
She got the white robe without ever looking up where to find the symbols for it, just finding other players who'd show her where to look.
10i'm glad she did, this was the coolest part when i played it!
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Darkest Dungeon is seemingly only winnable if you can learn to treat your heroes as disposable, in your unhinged quest for occult power. The friends you made along the way become burned out husks that you discard. You monster.
Besiege makes you feel like some kind of goblin engineer whose mad genius will destroy the world.
Rain World uses clunky mechanics and dynamic AI interactions to make you feel like a vulnerable morsel in a hostile ecosystem of lively beasts.
Undertale's combat system artfully turns every fight into a metaphor for your relationship with the enemy.
8And that's why I never won Darkest Dungeon
I also never learned how the sparing mechanic works in Undertale because Toriel is a two-faced hypocritical abuser and when she told me I could defend myself from violent monsters by choosing nonviolence I thought she was full of shit.
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Little Nightmares is one game which I adore for the way it marries gameplay, music, narrative and aesthetic.
Everything works together to build a sense of desperation and unease, which eventually through a twist gives way to a cathartic sort of dread as you realise there's no innocence to be found anywhere in the game.
Only monsters.
6I would say Hollow Knight. Every new ability you get is from the environment, which changes the environment after you get it. One great example is that the room where you get the double jump is gusty, which disappears once you get the double jump. Those gusts then affect a different area, and any more would be semi-spoilers. Regardless, the whole game is wonderful, especially if you love Metroidvanias.
6Ixion - a by the numbers resource management game which uses narrative and music to become something very special, especially the way the decision making of the narrative feeds back into the mechanics.
5Gonna buck the trend of beautifully produced games with serious stories here and say MAGICKA. Magicka is a multiplayer PvE game where you can craft spells however you like on the fly, and friendly fire is enabled. This results in utter chaos. Players constantly kill each other, both accidentally and on purpose, the battlefield is full of absolutely random spell effects from everyone's spells, messed up spells result half the time in accidental suicide and the other half of the time in new absolutely devastating combos, and nobody is entirely sure what's going on in the story.
This is ludonarrative synchronicity, of course, because Magicka's story is a comedy about a bunch of underprepared incompetent wizards exploring a universe of mediaeval fantasy satire and slapstick. It's great!
5Aw I loved magicka but non of me friends did. It’s pure chaos with multiple people.
4Banana.
Also it's by Arrowhead, the same peeps behind the much more recent Helldivers 2.
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Tchia was that for me. There was no point in the game where I felt pushed to do anything I felt was out of character for her, and gameplay and storyline harmonized beautifully.
Runner-up would be Horizon Forbidden West.
4Horizon is pretty good at keeping Aloy, the story, and the gameplay, walking hand in hand. Combat with the machines is never questionable, but I do think things could have been done better when it comes to the human on human conflict.
I do end up feeling a little bad for all the Quen that needlessly end up as arrow pincushions, especially. They flip-flop between friend and foe so many times and each time you just absolutely slaughter them.
In the Burning Shores, the Admiral is all grateful about Aloy and Sayka bringing the missing people back, nevermind that as the player you probably killed just about every combat-capable Quen among the missing.
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I finally started playing Tears of the Kingdom. The way learning new mechanics is woven into story is a lost art.
4Really surprised that nobody has said Dark Souls yet.
4Super Meat Boy is the first that popped into my mind. Not for the story, but the aesthetic and gameplay go hand in hand. Your character is rushing around the screen, dodging (or attempting to) all sorts of metal blades and spikes to reach the exit. As you move and jump off of walls your meaty body leaves a trail of red everywhere you go, and if you hit a blade you shower the area with it. If you win you see the path you left through the level in a very cool way, and the sound effects you make when leaving the meat trail sell the squishiness of your body.
The cartoonish and over the top gameplay goes hand in hand with the cartoonish and over the top graphics and sound.
2That reply is the most AI sounding response I've ever gotten.
I'm not sure which of us that reflects most on 🤔
-1I try to be encouraging when it comes to discussion threads, and also I'm not sure which of my many replies to commenters you're referring to.
LLMs do do that weird sycophancy thing, but often while getting details wrong.
6Yeah, sorry, that reply was put in the wrong place. 🤦
No worries, I appreciate your positivity! Just making a light hearted observation. Probably means I'm spending too much time with LLMs
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