The worst part is, in Super Mario 3D Land, at least, if you even see the invincible leaf, it locks you out of getting all the stars on your save file. The game doesn’t even have the courtesy to tell you.
Portal and Portal 2 are packed with passive aggressive remarks. One of my favorites:
Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: “A horrible person.” We weren’t even testing for that. Don’t let that horrible-person thing discourage you. It’s just a data point. If it makes you feel any better, science has now validated your birth mother’s decision to abandon you on a doorstep.
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.
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.
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.
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