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What games have you played that beautifully marry their mechanics with narrative and/or aesthetic?
(sopuli.xyz)
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.
Gonna 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!
Aw I loved magicka but non of me friends did. It’s pure chaos with multiple people.
Banana.
Also it's by Arrowhead, the same peeps behind the much more recent Helldivers 2.