the single best moment in video game storytelling of all time has to go to the one point in Creepy Castle (2016) where an archer side character, Arrow Ace, shows up shortly before a climactic battle with the game's main villain (who for complex reasons is building a machine which will remove the ability of everyone on earth to experience emotions) to help with a fight but also turn towards the camera and explain directly to the player character that, while the villain's emotion-removing machine is called the Heartbreaker and the narrative has made a big deal about how it's going to prevent everyone from feeling love, some people actually already don't experience romantic love, and this doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them, because the real problem with the Heartbreaker is that it will prevent everyone from making their own decisions and living their own lives as people. What I'm saying is that more art should be brave enough to explain directly to the audience how you're meant to interpret it just in case it wasn't clear. Also I'm easily impressed by puns.
actually the number two IRL
- he/any
- twotwos.nekoweb.org/
Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.
in reply to @two's post:
I need a collection of instances of telling‑the‑audience‑interpretations‑directly done well, as I always have this concern that something kind of gets taken away when you do that??
and so far my notes pi lon ala says puns.
I originally wrote that this was the only example I could think of of this sort of thing, but then I realised that telling the audience the meaning of the story is almost the whole basis of the genre of fables. Still, very funny to do it diegetically in the middle of the story instead of saving it for the end! Creepy Castle gets away with it in my mind because it already has a not-even-hidden room with credits and portraits of the developers and areas that are just full of characters designed by the Kickstarter backers and very little else, it really doesn't take the artifice seriously at all so it can get away with just about anything.