For a mildly obscure one: (Also, mild Outer Wilds spoilers that are listed in the game's store page)
On your first time playing Outer Wilds, if you manage to get yourself killed before you do the [plot event that gets you into a time loop], then you simply die, game ends, and you get kicked out back to the main menu.
While not a satisfying of an ending, it unfortunately makes sense.
Not sure how obscure this one is, but in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, there’s typically a bunch of creative ways to do things, and you’re punished for being consistent (you do mostly headshots? They get helmets!). There’s a boss fight with an ancient sniper known as The End, and Kojima wanted it to take a week to complete. He was told no, of course, but it’s still a massive exercise in patience.
Alternately, you can just quit the game, pop the cartridge out for a week, and when you start it up on day 8, The End has died of natural causes.
At a certain point in Nier Automata the game changes the way saving and re-spawning works to coincide with a major plot point in the story.
Nier Automata Spoiler
This happens when the YoRHa Bunker satellite is destroyed, because there are no longer servers available to back up the 2B and 9S's data. From that point on, iirc, you must reload an old save when you die, like a traditional save system.
Nier Automata is fantastic at blending the gameplay and story in satisfying and surprising ways. I only played it for the first time earlier this year and I can say that it lives up to the hype!
Disco Elysium makes quite a big statement on law enforcement, and you play an amnesiac cop who does all sorts of weird shit (because you're the character in a point and click game) and people tolerate it because you're a cop. That by itself supports the message about law enforcement.
Assuming ludonarrative harmony is the opposite of
Ludonarrative dissonance is the perceived conflict between a video game's narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. Ludonarrative (derived from Latin ludus, meaning 'game', and narrative) refers to the intersection of a video game's ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative elements.
DOOM 2016 spends the whole game making you charge into fights, getting up close and personal with the enemies and generally smashing things. When the story starts to try and get long winded with monologues your character goes "nah f this" and continues to smash stuff up.
one infamously frustrating level of Celeste has a cutscene at the end where the main character uses a centering technique to get a grip, imagining using her breath to keep a feather in the air. it kicks off a minigame where you do just that by pressing and releasing A. the level being so frustrating primed me to be in a similar emotional state to the main character and the minigame had the same effect on me as it did for her. it's a small thing but that always really stuck with me
In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, there's a cutscene where you're about to be executed by a group of Sableye using the move Fury Swipes.
In the main series games, this would make no sense. Fury Swipes has piddly power, and Sableye have middling physical attack.
In the Mystery Dungeon games, multi-hit moves like Fury Swipes are unbelievably busted, physical attack is far less dependent on the base stats of the Pokémon using the move, and a bunch of Sableye would definitely kill someone using it over and over again.
I think Hardspace Shipbreaker does a really good job of this. You work as an exploited blue collar worker, and the gameplay really makes you feel like a blue collar worker. Especially at the end, the plot and gameplay synergizes in a really creative way.
At the end
You form a union and go on a strike. The strike involves intentionally breaking everything. That essentially means doing the opposite to what you've developed your muscle memory for for the entire game. It's a really cool twist on the normal gameplay that, up until this point, was becoming somewhat stale.
It also highlights the overall theme of the game, which is to explore why it's so easy for people to fall in line with the status quo and why it's so important to stay vigilant to company overreach
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors ending
This game built its twist around the DS hardware.
The player is led to assume they're viewing everything through Junpei's perspective, but only the top screen truly represents him. Everything you saw on the bottom screen was actually past Akane's perspective, because she's been psychically guiding Junpei to help him solve every puzzle. I'm glossing over a complicated plot about seeing through time, you'll have to play the game for it to make sense.
But past Akane couldn't solve the final puzzle in her own time, and would've have died. She's revealed to be the one who orchestrated all of the events of the game just so that future Junpei would develop the same psychic time powers that would enable him to guide her past self through that puzzle, closing the loop and saving her life.
So for the final puzzle, the player must turn the DS upside-down so that the touch screen is now on top, representing Junpei solving the puzzle himself in order to guide Akane.
It's a bit of a tragedy that this detail had to be sacrificed in the single-screen HD remake, because it's so damn clever.
In the mod Kaiserreich for Hearts of Iron IV, Germany won WW1 but is now and overextended global empire. The first gameplay year for Germany involves playing something like four simultaneous minigames all on different timers, all the while having to juggle an army build-up as well. As a player you really feel as though you are trying to hold this global overextended empire together, having to sacfrice some areas to save others. I really enjoy it.
Sanity effects in Eternal Darkness. The magic antagonist making your character more easily insane.
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