Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has one of the most interesting world in stories inside and outside of gaming. I hope we will see many more stories set in that world.
The hook alone is great.
Spoiler for the prolog and trailers.Around the end of the 19th century the whole world broke apart and a part of Paris (called Lumiere in the game) was thrown into the sea. And this giant “Paintress” started painting the number 100 on an enormous monolith and each year she counts down. And everyone who is that old or older evaporates into ash and flower petals.
So the people started sending out expeditions to find out wtf is going on.
Spoiler for the rest of the game.The world is actually a magical painting the Paintress’ son made when he was a child. For him, his sister and their parents to play in. But when he was an adult their other sister was tricked by “the Writers” into setting a fire which killed him. In her grief the mother fled into the painting because it was the last bit she had of him. Fearing she would stay in there until she died of starvation the father went in as well to get her out. As she wouldn’t relent he started erasing the painting and she tried to prevent that. Every year painting the age of the people she wouldn’t be able to save from him onto the monolith. So we actually have this world of magical Painters and Writers who are at war with each other and it is hinted that there are Musicians as well. And who knows what other artists with magical powers exist in this world. I’m imagining Programmers joining the fray in the future. The possibilities both inside any art pieces and outside in the “real” world are endless.
And for the translation, they probably just made it a reference to how your only dialogue options in the game are ever yes or no, so when the one NPC asks you an open-ended question, you sound like a weirdo.
I like the simple messages you get in Quantum Conundrum every time you die. They’re not super serious things, but just things that the main character will never get to experience as they grow older, ranging from mundane things like not getting a drivers license to more realistic teen/immature young adult fantasy of eating a whole can of whipped cream as a meal.
Marathon (1994) has several call outs to the player when the AI giving you mission briefing calls the PC out for not caring and just wanting to shoot things. There’s a lot of meta commentary in that series.
There is a spot in Space Quest 6 where you can skip a puzzle and go to the solution immediately… If you already know what to look for. I tried that once, since it was not my first run and I remembered the last step.
At first the narrator wonders how you did that, then he assumes you’ve been using a walkthrough. He shames you and punishes you by slowly draining your score counter… Before reverting it and telling you not to do it again.
They used Poets of the Fall way the hell back then?! I had MP1 and 2 at launch; never got into the band. But got into them because Control has that one sound booth you can listen to Dark Disquiet in and they have been in my playlist ever since. 🤣
Their work is awesome. I want to see them live. I was actually just listening to them on the way to class today.
Remedy sticking with them is something I love. Something about their work feels like authentic. I don’t mean it as a jab to songs made for video games, but a lot of the time songs made for video games have this “feel” where you can tell “yep. That’s tied to a specific game”. Something about PoTF’s work though feels like it’s an actual album
I’ll try and believe in the guy to not be a troll.
It could just be bad UX from a Lemmy app. In voyager, for example, it isn’t always clear while browsing a feed, that an image post also has text in its body. But the app lets you reply from the feed view. So, you see a screenshot in your feed, tap the image instead of the post, so you just see a bigger screenshot, and there’s no hint in this view, that there might be text in the body. So, you just type up a reply from there.
This isn’t quite in line with your question but it’s adjacently meta:
the first time you fall to your death in Bastion the (amazing) narrator says “…and then he fell to his death. … Ahh, I’m just foolin’.” and then you respawn on the platform because videogame.
Elden Ring has the deepest, most complex worldbuilding of any game ever made, and it’s not even close. For anyone interested in worldbuilding I strongly urge you to watch some Elden Ring lore videos from The Tarnished Archaeologist to learn about the techniques that the Elden Ring devs use to put incredibly deep and subtle worldbuilding into their games. It’s changed the way I think about worldbuilding in any context.
In Postal 2 there's a platforming section and, because I suck at platformers, let alone in first person, so I was saving a lot. After a few very short and successive saves, the dude made fun of me for saving so much.
Also in Portal 2, just a lot of GlaDOS lines in general.
I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.
In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.
So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.
It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne