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.
In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.
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