Imagine, if you will, a sequence in a generic FPS where our intrepid hero, the player character, is attempting to fight their way through an enemy town or facility. An extended sequence that may or may not entertain a pretense of stealth but is mechanically defined by relatively straightforward fights against groups of unprepared or unaware enemies in successive arenas. All the while the player can overhear shouting by the faceless goons they're mowing down or over a PA system, speaking of but never to the player, struggling to coordinate a response or map out the player's path of destruction.
Odds are good this isn't a particularly difficult scenario to imagine and you may be able to directly point to examples of this in games. Depending on your familiarity with Ace Combat and/or the John Wick movies you may already know what I plan to ramble about here but I didn't start typing this to make assumptions so I plan to explain myself anyways.
For those not in the know, John Wick is a recent action movie franchise that has been beaten to death at least twice over but is fondly remembered for it's extremely long action shots, bullet-counting attention to detail, and shameless premise that the protagonist is THE guy, one of the scariest men in the world doing what he does best against overwhelming odds. This is one of those rare instances where a Hollywood movie fails to pick up any illusions about what it actually is and cuts to the purest form of lowest-common-denominator entertainment. To be clear this is a good thing, even the crudest and most banal media benefits from a clarity of purpose and John Wick is a movie that cuts fairly straight to the chase of what you're there for, Keanu Reeves doing his own stunts in extended martial arts sequences.
Ace Combat is a long running arcade flight game series where the player assumes the role of an anonymous fighter pilot in various conflicts across the fictional world of strangereal. The player is assuming the role of what I have seen referred to as a "mute psychopath" because the entire game will progress start to finish without a single spoken line from the player character despite other characters around you directly speaking to them frequently. Ace Combat is not particularly a game I would say is known for its creatively challenging mechanics or beautiful storytelling. It is understandably difficult to find ways to innovate on the mechanics of air-to-air dogfighting when most modern fighters resolve it by firing missiles and flares from miles away until one of them is dead. Then the stories struggle to focus in on any actual theme or moral because they are too busy using the player non-character as a fulcrum point.
That last point is I think the biggest strength of Ace Combat though and why I opened with that hypothetical sequence. That sequence is every mission of an Ace Combat game but with planes. Missions tend to be very direct, many are simply big playgrounds of radar-marked targets with assigned point values and a prescribed quota and timer to win the mission. Even the game's boss fights are usually just giant sci-fi planes that have a bunch of weak points you have to lock on to and destroy as if they were normal enemies. It's all very serviceable and pleasant but not really groundbreaking stuff, and it's all carried by the dialogue.
A strength of John Wick is that John's reputation is established through a conversation between two of the villains of the first movie, John is not in the room nor does he at any point have any meaningful dialogue with the characters present, and this provides an air of sincerity to the fear with which his name is invoked. Ace Combat, as a wholly unaddressed contrivance, allows the player to listen in on the enemy's radio frequencies with complete clarity, and takes care not to overlap friendly and enemy transmissions during combat. Neither enemy nor friendly characters ever provide any clear indication that anyone except the player can hear both sides, which lends a similar sense of earnestness to the fear and confusion with which the enemy responds to the player's actions.
It's an incredibly simple trick that Ace Combat employs to hype up the player. It does not resort to beating the player with a stick until they earn the carrot at the end, it certainly does not build up exciting stakes through its melodramatic exposition, it creates a clear air that no matter what is going on everyone around the player believes the player can do it. The player is a hero not merely because of their actions but because the game explicitly assures them those actions were heroic. It bridges the gap between its simple and direct gameplay and the dramatic affect of completing a huge RPG boss fight for the fate of an entire country.
It's an underutilized design ethos that the player can feel satisfied with their abilities by treating them like John Wick. By being clear to the player that other characters unaware of the player listening to them are amazed and afraid of the player's skills. It's a delightful balance of creating an extremely approachable and streamlined game that still manages to make the player feel like they are overcoming steep odds through impressive skill. It's a pure and clear power fantasy that allows the player to become an action hero.