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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.
Ixion - a by the numbers resource management game which uses narrative and music to become something very special, especially the way the decision making of the narrative feeds back into the mechanics.
Hell yeah!
Another game that also achieves something very similar, is Frostpunk.
Would you say the original homeworld also answers your question?
It's certainly beautiful and fluid
It does! As fleet command, the player leads the survivors of Kharak across the galaxy, doing things in gameplay that slot perfectly into the story of the game.