mine is the zsasz interview tapes from arkham asylum. Extremely creepy to 12 year old me
The level 343 Guilty Spark in the OG Halo game. You get dropped off in a creepy swamp, combat is generally refused which is unsettling for an action game, go into a giant, artificial maw, and spend the next 10-20 minutes working your way inside past all the barriers and blood splatter that is set up to defend against whatever you are moving toward. That first part of the level is peak environmental storytelling building up to the first real combat/action scene.
yeah the build-up to Assault on Control Room and switch to 343 Guilty Spark is a really effective change in tone. Cortana gets left in the control room at the end of the epic previous level so it’s the first level without her since she was introduced, and there’s no music separating you from the environmental sounds (also the first, maybe only time this happens in the game). phantom enemies and allies on the motion tracker in the swamp. being alone in the swamp with no music or cortana is so creepy! it’s great!
half-related
I asked google to refresh my memory on which levels don’t have cortana in Halo CE (I think it’s 343 Guilty Spark and the library) and it got it completely wrong
Halo – The opening level, set aboard the Pillar of Autumn, where the Chief is introduced to the Covenant and the ring. Cortana is not in this level.
The Truth and Reconciliation – The third level, where the Chief rescues Captain Keyes from the Covenant battlecruiser. Cortana is not present in this mission.
The Silent Cartographer – The final level, where the Chief confronts the Monitor and learns the truth about Halo. Cortana is not in this level.
I’ve guess I’ve been spoiled by Kimi, but google is still consistently incorrect on gemini queries.
Same with the lead up to first encountering Raiden in MGS
I used to love manuals for games fleshing out more of the world. Like I remember the Diablo 2 manual talking about the different barbarian tribes in the world and the weapon styles they favored.
Blizzard, and other developers back then made tomes of the manuals and filled it with amazing stuff. The fallout 2 manual has a full ass diary from the vault dweller of the first game that summarizes the game for you (the manual also came on a ringed binder thingy and was like 150 pages)
I still remember from the starcraft manual the blurb about the average battlefield life expectancy of a Terran marine: 12 seconds.
Oh man the peak game manual of all time was the whole ass book that came with the og Homeworld
same, used to read the d2 manual
ooh how could I forget the cave johnson recordings and the doug rattmann murals in portal 2
outer wilds
finding out the nomai were trying to explode the sun but then shortly after learning it failed and the sun (+universe) is actually just at the end of its life cycle
also outer wilds
finding the mural of the nomai discovering your primordial aquatic ancestors, and finding the occasional patch of ghost matter with water blocking its radiation
Oh I didn’t ever notice your second point. Love this game so much, probably time for another play through .
yeah as far as i know that connection is never made explicit in-game, but it’s a really cool explanation for how timber hearth evolved
I’ve got two.
Legend of Dragoon:
Later in the game when you’re wandering through the abandoned ruins of the city where the race of fascist magical winged flying elves had their capital there’s these little flying robot things zipping around. There’s a room with all these little magical robot things are zipping in, dropping some text boxes with each other and zipping off… and the dialogue is pretty much “city council debating a new stop sign” or “approving a $1,000 expenditure to fix a pot hole”. As bot networks and now A.I. agents are a thing now, I think about that more and more. A race long extinct but survived by a network of bots just mindlessly repeating the menial tasks that were deemed too uninteresting or unimportant for their creators to pay any attention to.
Borderlands 1 (includes the DLCs):
(Its been forever since I’ve played an my memory is very fuzzy about the details) An entire world ecology destroyed through interstellar strip mining. The empty ocean you can drive around in. There’s an old billboard advertising the amazing megafauna of Pandora (T-bone Junction, I think)… with a big red X painted over all the ones that are no longer alive. And its all just… normal. No complaints, no thoughts from any characters about the devastation, and here you are as one of the Vault Hunters - just doing their own version of strip mining.
I’m sure FF7 and Xenogears had some bangers but its been so very, very long since I’ve played them to remember anything.
Arkham City stories are a recent favorite of mine. Replayed the game a week ago and only discovered them then.
System Shock 2
spoiler
“The Polito form is dead, insect.” And the room completely reconfiguring around the corpse.
I mean of course SHODAN is there because it’s a System Shock game, but that reveal was absolutely awesome. It’s also subtly hinted at a long time before it actually happens. If you listen carefully to Polito’s messages, you can hear her voice doing a very slight SHODAN glitch thing occasionally.
In the Aladdin game for the Sega Game Gear, there are what looks like nuclear bombs littered through the background, which combined with the genie’s references to 20th century pop culture after being in the lamp for thousands of years and what seems like a de-Islamified yet clearly middle-eastern setting paints a picture of Agrabah as a long-post-apocalyptic city where ancient technology manifests itself as indistinguishable from magic.
FFXIV
spoiler
The revealing of Amaurot. The music alone elevates the sense of awe and wonder as the camera pans over the city. It looks familiar to us but completely foreign to the Scions.
But there is still sadness in the air even as you all look over that cliffside
