Painting The Medium / Video Games

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• The adventure game AMBER: Journeys Beyond revolves around using a device to astrally project yourself into three ghosts haunting the house to help them pass on and allow you to save your partner, Roxy. With each ghost being stuck in a strange limbo-world based on the moment of their death, the gameplay window changes to match.
  • A World War II widow's has the look of a black-and-white photo in a scrapbook.
  • A drowned boy's setting looks like a washed-out blue picture.
  • A delusional gardener's early-1960s era turns the view into a Cinemascope-esque widescreen, shown in the oversaturated color of B-movies he liked.
• The main Assassin's Creed games are masters of this trope: the Framing Story takes place near the end of 2012, and you only play as the Assassins through accessing their genetic memories through a device called the Animus. The game uses this to justify several standard video game tropes, most obviously why the HUD is laid out the way it is — because the Animus is letting Desmond control his ancestors like a video game. Losing health is called "desynchronizing," and fully desynchronizing (i.e., dying or failing mission objectives) simply restarts the genetic memory from the last checkpoint.
  
  Assassin's Creed II takes it up a notch with the Animus 2.0, which adds several gameplay refinements and subtitles, which were absent in the first game. A note in the game's manual from Lucy is a reminder to fix the nasty bug in the Animus 1.0 software that prevented the ancestor from swimming (and indeed, Ezio is a very prolific swimmer), and a side conversation has Desmond thanking a member of his Mission Control for the subtitles. Version 2.0 is also the explanation for why the historical characters suddenly acquire regional accents. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed: Unity go even further, referencing the development of, and eventual release of, a Templar-developed video game console based upon the Animus technology.
• AV8B Harrier Assault lets the player explore the decks of an amphibious assault ship. Since the game is a combination RTS/flight simulator, the player transitions between the roles of Harrier pilot and task force commander by moving from the pilots' briefing room/flight deck and the command center or vice versa. Additionally, rather than simply display information such as numbers of available aircraft, ground units, and supplies on an in-game computer screen, the player can check on this themselves by visiting the appropriate deck.
• During the Little Sister sequence in Bioshock 2, the city of Rapture becomes significantly more serene and dream-like. White satin and roses adorn everything, and the bloom is cranked up to eleven. The game occasionally flashes back to the normal view to remind you how much of a hellhole Rapture really is. It's the creepiest part of the entire game.
• BlazBlue: Continuum Shift: At one point in his Story Mode, Arakune inadvertently projects himself back through Ragna's timeline to the finale of the previous game, when Ragna encountered Nu-13 for the last time. In the conversation that follows, Nu has two sets of voiced lines - one is her excitement over being reunited with Ragna, while the other is her stoically questioning who Arakune is. The two voice sets play simultaneously.
• Bravely Default has a plot point that Ouroburos wants to break into a "higher dimension". At one point? The 3DS camera turns on - revealing that the being in the higher dimension is in fact you, the player. Similarly, the game will call upon other alternate worlds... which are your friends' copies of the game.
• Bug Fables: Dialogue from holograms or robots will have some letters randomly flicker to symbols, to show their digital nature.
• Call of Duty:
  • In several games in the series, allied characters generally have their names colored green or blue in subtitles while they are speaking, while enemies have red. This is affected by shifts in allegiances within the storylines; for example, General Shepherd's name turns from green to red after the Evil All Along reveal at the end of Modern Warfare 2, Gabriel Rorke's name turns from red to green during a flashback mission showing his Start of Darkness during Ghosts, and all of the CIA characters turn red while the Soviets and Perseus turn blue after Bell's Face–Heel Turn in one ending of Black Ops: Cold War.
  • In Modern Warfare, cutscenes before the start of a mission are presented as the networking and information system used by the protagonists' various organizations, displaying relevant information while important characters speak over it, although the presentation itself is a heavy dramatization of what anything like this in reality would be displaying, it takes up the entire screen, and the characters speaking are never seen, as if they're standing right next to you, watching it just like you are. And then it's taken up a notch in Modern Warfare 2 when one entire cutscene is, with no elements recognizable from the game itself, the emergency broadcast system of Washington DC, telling you where to go for evacuation as the Russians invade the city.
• Captain Blood represents the degenerative disease the main character quests to cure with an increasingly jittery mouse cursor.
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale: Not literally given that there are magic brushes, but the characters use different fonts and speech bubble colors to express themselves, with some words shaking for emphasis. However, this can be toggled in Settings for better readability.
• While Comix Zone doesn't paint the medium in a video game sense, it does do so in a comic book sense. The main character is a writer trapped in his own comic while the comic's villain is transported to the real world and tries to kill him. Each level is laid out like a comic book page, with the protagonist jumping between panels, and ripping open pages can be done to do things like find hidden items or form giant paper airplanes to throw at your enemies. Meanwhile, the main villain is actually drawing enemies into each fight scene, and at one point actually sets fire to the page.
• Command & Conquer:
  • The DOS installation program of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn pretends to be an elaborate setup sequence of the AI interface.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series:
    • In the Red Alert games, the installer pretends to be a highly classified program that contains an intelligence briefing on the current situation. Your CD-key is called a "security clearance code" by the "secret program".
    • The setup process of Red Alert 2 pretends to have hacked into the Allied network, requiring you to use your CD-key to disable the security measures. The installation itself plays out as a slideshow briefing. It also takes the liberty of informing you that a Navy SEAL team has been dispatched to your location.
  • In Firestorm, Nod's CABAL taccon AI goes rogue and tries to kill the player. For the next mission, you have none of the usual voice responses from your HUD, because those are all generated by CABAL; the mission after that is to steal a GDI EVA as a replacement, and the player's UI is changed to the GDI voice for the rest of the campaign.
  • In an interview with the developers, they said they worked on the idea that you were a "telegeneral" leading your troops through communications links from a control centre — you're supposed to be sitting in front of a computer guiding your forces in the manner of someone playing a real-time strategy game. The actual interface shows up in Renegade, and the idea of "battle commanders" comes up a few times throughout the series.
• The Corridor:
  • In one level, the narrator tries to discourage you by massively reducing the game's framerate. When that doesn't work, he tries reducing it even more in the next level.
  • In one level, you unplug several plugs that apparently power the game's sound, textures, and models, as each of those things vanishes one by one.
• The story mode for Dance Central 3 begins with a laser beam scanning the player at DCI HQ. At the same time, the Kinect sensor also moves up and down.
• In Darkest Dungeon, when the Siren boss uses her Song of Desire attack, the background battle music is altered to include a quiet One-Woman Wail humming along the tune for a short time.
• The Deadly Tower of Monsters purports to be a cheesy sci-fi B-movie from the early 1970's, with bad effects. At one point you acquire a pair of scissors and use them to cut the strings that monsters are suspended by.
• The level map of de Blob 2 shows all of the locked levels as their normal names with the Blanc-symbol attached. After INKT takes over, the symbol changes to the INKT-logo, and the names of the levels change to match the new INKT-regime.
• Deltarune: UI elements in the Light World are stylized identically to how they were in Undertale, whereas their Dark World counterparts are more lavishly-designed, tying into the recurring emphasis on the Light World's familiar mundanity and each Dark World's unique vibrancy:
  • In the Light World, text boxes are black with plain white borders, and menus once again take after the ones in EarthBound (1994), being segmented into multiple of these text boxes. In the Dark World, a more advanced menu divided into drop-down tabs is used, and text boxes have a fancy silver border.
  • Lightners have monochrome portraits like in Undertale, while Darkner portraits are in full color.
• The iOS game Device6 uses this as its main draw, forcing you to turn the device as the character moves.
• When Laharl first encounters Vyers in Disgaea, he decides to start calling Vyers "Mid-Boss" instead of his real name. Apparently this counted as an official name change, as not only does everyone start calling him Mid-Boss without batting an eye, but even Vyers' own text boxes start referring to him as such.
• The Mr. Saturns in EarthBound (1994) are the only characters in the game to speak in a different font from everyone else. Their font is a squiggly, loopy font resembling a child's handwriting, highlighting their alien nature and childlike naivety. This continues in Mother 3.
• Elden Ring: Dragonlord Placidusax's version of the Ancient Dragons' lightning glaive attack is so powerful, the music will stop dead once he's started the windup and only pick up when the attack is done.
• In Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, as you lose sanity, the game will do things to screw with the player, such as turn the volume down or pretend that your Gamecube has been reset.
• The interface of the strategy game Evil Genius conspicuously reconfigures itself during the final stages, down to a large section sliding aside to reveal a big red "launch" button.
• Flight sims love to play with this trope, living up to their "simulation" status. For example, F-15 Strike Eagle III's main menu is a recreation of a hanger at the Nellis, NV air force base, with pilot selection being done by clicking on a locker, mission selection by clicking on a map or officer, and starting the mission by clicking on a plane just outside the hangar.
• Fahrenheit has a quick-time event where the on-screen cues light up like a Christmas tree, and it becomes impossible to win. This represents how the main character is panicking and frantically hammering on a keypad. There's also a scene where the solution is to fail a series of quick-time events, since they're for making the main character shake off a horde of glowing hallucinatory spiders, actions which the not-hallucinating policeman interrogating you will take as proof of violent intent.
• The tutorial level in The Fairly OddParents: Shadow Showdown is supposed to take place in an old fairy training film, and as such, everything (except the main trio) is colored in sepia tone, film grain and spots pop up all over the place, and even the music sounds as if it's coming from a phonograph.
• The chaos of the Iron Republic in Fallen London is represented in many ways, but one of them is that the Bazaar tab offers you Fuel and Supplies from Sunless Sea - reality is so far out to lunch that you can buy items from a different game.
• In the first two Fallout games the character's dialogue options depends on their intelligence. A sufficiently stupid character will only be able to say "Duh." In the second one, they make a joke about it that also paints the medium. Early in the game, you meet a very dull-witted man (Torr). If you try to talk to him as a character of average or higher intelligence, he'll just respond with grunts and short words. If you are also of low intelligence, you will have a conversation of "Duh!" and "Grr bad man" translated into verbose and elaborate speech, in which you discover a very helpful piece of information much quicker than usual.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V often uses a cartoonish thought bubble over the characters' heads reading "?" whenever something confuses them. When Galuf meets his granddaughter Krile in the Ronka Ruins, the bubble appears again. Then it bounces away across the floor as he regains his memories.
  • Galuf's Determinator status is highlighted in his battle with Exdeath when his HP drops to 0 and he keeps fighting. The player has full control of this. It's actually entirely possible to keep his HP over zero through the various Game Breakers FFV provides - but why would you do that?
  • High concentrations of Mist in Final Fantasy XII produce distorted reflections of the characters, their surroundings, and their status bars.
  • The makers of Crisis Core promised that their slot-machine–inspired "Digital Mind Wave" combat system, which seems like just a game mechanic, would somehow prove to be a pivotal, emotionally intense plot point at the end of the game. Anyone who doesn't believe them obviously hasn't played to the final battle...
  • In the original release of Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, the game's spritework is of higher quality than the original Final Fantasy IV; in general, everything is larger and, as a result, more detailed and more smoothly drawn. This is especially noticeable on people. Whenever the story calls for a flasback (flashing back to the destruction of Mist, for example), the spritework reverts to the original squat style of Final Fantasy IV. A copout to avoid remaking the scenes with new sprites? Not quite, as the style also reverts when flashing back to events not in the original, like Ceodore's birth. Later releases keep the art style consistent across both games.
• The main menu for each FreeSpace space sim is a mock-up of the inside of the carrier the player character is stationed on. To play a mission, click on the ready room doors. The atmospheric impact well makes up for the fact that changing carriers in the plot means that the player won't even know where the exit button is.
• The Golden Sun games tend to avoid this, with the exception of the final battles in both games. Just as the fight starts the screen appears to shatter.
• Goodbye Volcano High does this with its choice-based mechanics, which are portrayed as Fang's thought process. Choices with intense emotion behind them like steely bluntness, anger, or excitement may have special effects on their boxes. Choices can also require additional input in order for the player to select it, showcasing how difficult it is for Fang personally to make that choice. Some choices are actually intrusive thoughts that, when the player tries to select them, they glitch out and can't be selected. And sometimes, if the player begins to make a choice but doesn't follow through, it will glitch out, showing Fang losing their nerve.
• Done very subtly in Hearts of Iron III, where the nation selection screen has a map of the world with Axis members in a Germanic gothic font, Allies in a sans-serif, neutrals in a typewriter-style font, and Comintern members in Faux Cyrillic.
• In the iOS game The Heist, you regularly receive phone calls from the PC's partner in crime. During said calls, the game actually mimics the iPhone "incoming call" interface to give the illusion that you're receiving an actual phone call. The final call even has the partner using Facetime. However, this has the drawback of looking silly when you're playing on an iPod touch...
• The classic Infocom text adventure The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) has a scenario whereby you cause a Temporal Paradox, which, in typical HHGTTG style, destroys the universe in a most thorough fashion. The game explains in literary detail the havoc which ensues, ending with "The universe ceases to have ever exis" — cut off just like that, in mid-"existed".
  • Not only does the text cut off, the program cuts off - the "end execution" opcode is in the game data. Not every interpreter handles this gracefully; some will exit completely, closing the game window before you can even read the text, while others will lock up, forcing you to reset the interpreter to continue playing.
• In Homeworld, Mission Control is injured before the last mission, and many of the voice notifications stop working.
• The pause menu of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is presented like a VHS tape, and whenever the story goes forwards or backwards in time the tape "skips" and goes FFW or REW respectively.
• This trope is used to kill the player in I Wanna Be the Guy - in The Guy's Castle, the Ryu room has a Windows XP error message pop up... then drop down and kill you. Amusingly enough, the game has a tendency to actually crash.
• Jetfighter III has a whole aircraft carrier for the player to explore. You can choose and arm your plane, read your in-game mail, paint your squad emblem, and launch your plane by getting into the right room.
• This trailer for Just Cause 2 uses YouTube's feature of embedding links in videos to turn itself into a Gamebook.
• In Just More Doors, the text speaking to you on the walls can switch to "automatic mode", and the font changes to reflect that.
• Kane And Lynch 2: Dog Days is presented as if someone just decided to start filming right behind a madman with a gun. Brutal headshots (and nudity) get censored, the camera drops if you die, digital artifacts are everywhere, a timestamp appears, and during one explosion in the demo, the frame rate drops incredibly, the camera gets almost entirely pixelated, and the fake camera man almost gets knocked off his feet.
• Kindergarten and its sequel emphasises a character yelling particularly loud by doubling the font size, and sometimes even making the screen shake. The game also sometimes uses the text scroll in the dialogue box for this, such as by stopping the scroll for a second after every word to indicate the sentence is Punctuated! For! Emphasis!
• In Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts III, the command window changes to fit the theme of each world. In particular, Timeless River in II (a Retraux world based on the Classic Disney Shorts) is entirely Deliberately Monochrome, and the audio is presented in mono with much lower quality than the rest of the game, as well as a filter that adds hisses, pops, and even the sound of a film projector.
  • In the final battle of Kingdom Hearts III, Sora appears to get knocked out as if it's a Game Over... except you hear Donald and Goofy shout "Sora!" through your controller's speaker and it vibrates.
• Canonically, nothing in Kingdom of Loathing, or its spinoff West of Loathing, is painted to the fourth wall; it's all real to that world. It really is black-on-white line art populated with stick figure people.
• In the final battle in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Kirby inhales so strongly that he inhales the boss's health bar along with everything else.
• Dying in League of Legends will cause your view to be displayed in black and white until you respawn.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel: The font size in text boxes becomes much larger when characters are shouting.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Wind Waker, Ganondorf's powers break the rules/code of the gameplay.
    • When he curses the Great Sea, his theme music overrides the background music while Link is sailing.
    • It is always night when you visit Forsaken Fortress the first two times. Daylight only comes when Ganondorf leaves the fortress.
    • The player can never use the Hero's Charm on Ganondorf.
  • The DS game The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has a puzzle that requires an emblem to be "stamped" upon the player's map from an inverted map. The solution? Move the inverted map to the top screen, open your map on the bottom screen, and physically close the Nintendo DS. Problem solved!
  • In Skyward Sword, Fi gets a purple, cloudy text box with a diamond pattern. As does Ghirahim, albeit a much darker one, once his true form is revealed.
  • Tears of The Kingdom gives the player a surprise when Ganondorf goes into his Demon King form, by refilling his life meter from all the damage he took in the first phase, then filling it up even further, up to about double the size of any other life meter in the game, in order to show just how durable he is.
• The Deluxe Fan Translation of Live A Live uses a different font for text in each time period. Odio also has a font of his own.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has a boss make his entrance by ripping apart the victory screen (or if you continued, the character select screen) from behind as if it were paper. Likewise, the super move background is also papery — slashing moves leave marks on it and fire moves burn it away at the end instead of the background ripping itself apart.
• Mass Effect:
  • The various starting menus and character creation scenes are invariably part of some in-universe computer system.
  • Outside of the game, in quotations, discussions, and especially fanfic, the Reapers' distinctive style of speech is generally rendered in either bold or smallcaps to emphasize their monstrous...ness.
  • Doors in Mass Effect 2 have either a red (locked), yellow (hackable), or green (open) symbol in the middle that serves as your interaction point with the door. During the Overlord DLC adventure, the symbols start blinking different colors or giving false information, culminating in one of them sliding across a wall to another door, to demonstrate just how much the AI has screwed up the base systems.
  • The Bullet Time effect in Mass Effect 3, in addition to being used for standard action sequences like the shootout with Dr. Eva, pops up whenever Shepard suffers health damage or is stunned by attacks.
• The Max Payne games maintain their noir-themed presentation even in the main menu, as the prompts for quitting the game are formulated in the same way as Max's Private Eye Monologues.
  The wail of sirens was a constant echo in the night.

  > But I was too tired to go on.
  > I couldn't stop. I had to push on.
• Mega Man:
  • The Humor NaviCustomizer Part in the Mega Man Battle Network series has at least one joke in each game it appears in that paints the fourth wall, if not outright breaks it.
  • In the second game of the Mega Man Zero series, which takes place a year after the first ended with Zero stranded in a desert, the Start menu initially appears as a battle-damaged version of the Start menu from the first game. It is only after Zero is reunited with the Resistance that the menu design changes to the one used throughout the second game.
• In Melty Blood, Sion's ability to partition her brain is represented by having a scene from her perspective with three dialogue windows covering different subjects. The text advances in one box at a time, and often will stop mid-sentence to jump to another one.
• Metal Gear:
  • When using the Directional Microphone in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, subtitles will get larger and smaller depending on how on-point you are listening in.
  • Guns of the Patriots has a flashback to the first Metal Gear Solid, which appears with PS1 graphics, including a dream sequence that you actually play.
  • If you have a wireless headset registered to your PS3, you can receive CODEC audio via the headset rather than your speakers.
  • Snake's HP and Psych gauges drop to zero in the microwave hallway. Without this tiny detail, the player wouldn't be able to appreciate just how much damage Snake was taking while still pushing forward. He wasn't merely close to death but should have died.
• Metroid Prime actually has the player looking through Samus's helmet instead of just being a disembodied camera where her head should be like in many First-Person Shooter interfaces. Diegetic Interface aside, this also results in effects like the player being able to see Samus's reflection on the inside of her visor when something flashes nearby. The second game also has a mechanical enemy that can infect Samus's suit with a computer virus, one of the many ill effects including an intentionally choppy framerate.
• After the introduction of MIND: Path to Thalamus, the Player Character notes that he can't feel or see his actual body. Neither can the player, despite being able to interact with the world, but that was probably chalked up to standard video game conventions until it was pointed out.
• When you first meet the Undead Wizard in Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, he speaks entirely in solfege-based gibberish and you are unable to progress until you figure out how to understand him. Which is done by... adjusting the language options in the Options menu.
• In Monster Girl Quest! Paradox RPG, the dialogue of characters related to Chaos often has some (occasionally all) of the letters replaced by white boxes.
• How does Neko Atsume simulate the shyness of real-world cats, especially towards humans? The game only lets cats come to your yard while the app is closed.
• NieR: The Forest of Myth sections of the game are presented entirely through text in a manner similar to an Interactive Fiction, even featuring a narrator and quests based on dialogue choices. Both Nier and Weiss seem to be aware of this and end up arguing with the narration itself.
  • The ver.1.22474487139... remaster goes even harder during The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the newly-added Ending E, in which the HUD switches to the one from the game's sequel, NieR: Automata.
  • On a smaller note, the game's Strategy Guide Grimoire Nier features a group of novellas expanding the game's lore. At the tail end of the last one, which served as the base for the remaster's Ending E, Kainé's final yell towards Nier occupies two entire pages. The original version even includes various images from the game, while the Revised Edition's version appears shaky and doesn't fully fit in the pages.
• NieR: Automata:
  • The player can upgrade one of the playable androids' capabilities through plug-in computer chips. All HUD elements are attached to a chip that you start playing with. Which means that if you want, you can free up some RAM for a hot new Weapon Atk Up chip by unplugging your health bar. The androids also have an OS chip, but unplugging that gives a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • The game's visuals also turn black and white and get distorted when near death, showing the current android's systems beginning to fail.
• No More Heroes:
  • When Travis gets a call on his cell phone, it comes through the Wii Remote's speaker instead of the TV's speakers. As such, the volume is (in theory) lower and thus you're holding the Wii Remote to your ear as Travis holds his cell phone to his. In practice, the voice coming through the remote is surprisingly loud — Sylvia has No Indoor Voice.
  • That's not even going into everything that happens once you finally make it to the final ranked battle. The poor, unfortunate fourth wall gets painted, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then the pieces get repainted.
• In The Pedestrian (2020), the pause screen is displayed diegetically on a TV screen in the vicinity of the current puzzle. This remains true even in the first-person sections of the final area.
• Characters in Pentiment "speak" in one of several fonts; most of these are medieval scripts reflecting their social standing or level of education, but printers instead use serif print (which, the first time they speak, is seen "being printed" onto their speech bubble). Sometimes a character's font will even change if the protagonist learns something that changes the way he sees them.
• Persona:
  • Persona 4 uses the law of Nominal Importance by giving a seemingly-incidental character her own portrait when she's revealed to be far more important than initially thought.
  • Persona 5:
    • After getting A Taste of Power during the opening, the protagonist is arrested and brutally interrogated, and entering his name is contextualized as signing a False Confession.
    • A traitor is revealed as such when they gain a much more sinister-looking Character Portrait than their usual set.
    • Near the end of the game, Morgana is revealed to have lost his humanoid form by his own dialogue portrait switching from the aforementioned humanoid appearance to his housecat one.
  • Persona 5 Strikers:
    • Morgana starts out with a housecat portrait, but regains his humanoid portraits when he, Joker, and Ryuji accidentally enter Shibuya's Jail.
    • Haru's rampage up the Sanyo Expressway is represented on the area transition screen by the camper van icon backflipping multiple times as it enters and doing a barrel roll as it moves to Kyoto's icon.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney:
  • Throughout the series, characters have their text scroll faster when they're nervous or angry, indicating that they're speaking faster; three separate characters (Wendy Oldbag, Moe the Clown, and Wesley Stickler) have their text move so fast it's nigh-impossible to follow when they start rambling. When someone yells, their text shoots up in size.
  • Ron DeLite of Trials and Tribulations occasionally trails off in his speech as the text fades to match the window's color.
• In Pocket Mirror, when Goldia thinks her name is Enjel, she gains a name box with that same name in her message lines. When Harpae disilludes her about it, the name box fades away.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, females speak in red text and males speak in blue. Neutral text, such as interface elements and Pokémon Speak, uses gray. The Japanese version does something similar, but without the colors; male characters use a standard "computer" font, while female characters use a curvier, "softer" font that resembles handwriting.
  • In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers, upon encountering Primal Dialga in a cutscene, he roars so loudly that your screen shatters.
  • In Pokémon Black and White, N is chastised by Cheren for speaking too fast. This fact is highlighted by the fact that the text appears in the dialogue box much more quickly than they do for other characters, even when one has their text speed set as fast as it will go.
  • In Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the battle theme for Primal Groudon and Kyogre is the game's remix of "Battle! Super-Ancient Pokémon" with an added synth beat and the original Game Boy Advance version of the song fading in and out, reflecting how the Pokémon have reverted to a more primitive and dangerous state.
• In Portal 2, the Aperture Laboratories logo on loading screens changes depending on the part of the facility you're in; in decommissioned old chambers it changes to the old Aperture logos the company had at the time those chambers were built, and when the player returns to the modern facility after it gets taken over by Wheatley, the logo reads "Wheatley Laboratories". Some of the tutorial's on-screen prompts are mislabeled, cheerfully implying that the main character may have "a very minor case of serious brain damage".
• The Prisoner (1980) has the game over scenario involve entering a specific secret code at any point in the game. This includes at least once scenario where the game apparently crashes to the operating system prompt and a recovery program asks for the line number of the crash... which just happens to be your secret number.
• In Puyo Puyo, Zoh Daimaoh is known for his rage-fueled strength. To convey this, he has the unique distinction of having his Puyos make a loud CRASH instead of its usual squishy noises. In some games, they also cause his field to shake.
• The Rats, a 1985 Spectrum horror strategy, interspaced with scenes of text adventure (unfortunately written years before this concept became feasible), depicts the encroaching presence of rats by having teeth marks, claw marks and actual vermin appear on the screen, and being killed by a rat by having one TEAR THROUGH THE TEXT WINDOW AND LUNGE AT YOU!
• There is a level of the Reservoir Dogs game where you play as Mr. Brown, the getaway driver who has been shot in the head; in the movie we cut directly to him crashing the car after several miles and shouting, "I'm blind!", to which Mr. Orange informs him that he isn't blind, he just has blood in his eyes. In the game, you have to drive Pink and White out of the jewellery store with your sight increasingly obscured by blood dripping down the screen, a narrowing field of vision, and eventually flickering between black and white, colour, and sepia tone.
• The old Cinemaware game Rocket Ranger introduces The Man Behind the Man by having it slash the victory screen in half.
• The Sacred Armour of Antiriad: The health bar and lives counter don't work before the PC finds and wears the Powered Armor suit, gaining high-tech tracking for those things.
• The Secret of Monkey Island has the memorable cutscene in which Guybrush is attempting to steal the Idol of Many Hands from the Governor's mansion, and a fight ensues between him and Fester Shinetop. Most of it takes place in another room that the camera doesn't cut to, so Guybrush's unshown actions are represented using the UI's command bar, with items appearing and disappearing from his inventory as appropriate. The result is much funnier than actually seeing what's going on would have been.
• In the Skullgirls Story Mode cutscenes, the presence of Double in the form of another character is sometimes represented by that character's name followed by a question mark at the top of their speech (eg. "Big Band?").
• Sonic the Hedgehog CD has a subtle one concerning its soundtrack, tying with the time travelling gimmick: in the original Sega CD release, the music tracks for Present and Future areas are in CD-quality Red Book audio (streamed from the disc), while the Past songs are in analog PCM (generated by the system's sample-based soundchip, and thus, of lower quality). In later versions of the game, all of the music is streamed, but the Past tracks are still noticeably lower fidelity.
• In Spinnortality, during one of the endgame crises a rogue AI explains its plan to subject all mankind to peace, abundance, and control. The player can beseech it to consider pride and the joy of work. Only the player character is the CEO of a horrifying cyberpunk MegaCorp, and this is so rich coming from you that the AI's laughter stretches clear out of its text box.
• The premise of South Park: Phone Destroyer is that the player, AKA the New Kid, is a "master of the phone", so the story mode occasionally has characters talking to the player via Facetime.
• Splatoon:
  • During the first Splatoon's single-player campaign, Agent 1 tries to communicate with her radio upside down, which somehow manages to make her unintelligible on the other end. This is represented by having her dialogue box shown upside down. A mysterious stranger ends up doing the same thing while trying to contact you during the second game, cluing you in that it's secretly Agent 1. DJ Octavio also speaks in upside-down text in both games, this time to represent being physically upside-down after being knocked back into his Humongous Mecha. Commander Tartar delivers his last words the same way in the Octo Expansion.
  • During Splatoon 2's "Hare vs. Tortoise" Splatfest announcement, Pearl and Marina do their usual banter, only for the latter to be completely caught off guard when Pearl somehow vocalizes a misspelling.
    Pearl: Ooh... Too shay!
    Marina: Uh... What? Did you jus—
    Pearl: Aight! Tortoise and the hare. REEEEEEE-MAAAATCH!
    Marina: OK, but I'm pretty sure you just said-
• Splinter Cell:
  • Splinter Cell: Conviction:
    • The game uses the rather cool technique of "projecting" elements like mission objectives and backstory onto the surrounding environment. For example, as Sam approaches a mansion the words "Infiltrate the Mansion" appear on its facade like they're being beamed from a film projector.
    • At the end of the Third Echelon HQ level, Sam learns that his daughter's death was faked and goes into a full-blown Unstoppable Rage. To illustrate this, the player is given unlimited Mark and Executes, allowing you to finish the level by headshotting everyone as soon as they appear.
  • Splinter Cell: Blacklist continues this trend, with images appearing on the walls whenever one of Sam's teammates talks over the radio. It also paints the briefing menu in the final mission - instead of the normal "launch the mission?" prompt, it prompts you three times, as one by one, each of Sam's teammates agrees to launch the mission.
• The original version of Star Control II predates digitised speech, so each alien race speaks to you in a different font, matched to their personality. For example, the Ur-Quan has a heavy, declamatory font, while the terminally depressed Utwig have a spidery one.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe:
  • In Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, after Cal taps into the Dark Side while rampaging through Nova Garon, the skill tree menu becomes tinged inred for the remainder of the game.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The main menu of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords will be one of the titular sith lords depending on how far your current game has progressed: Darth Sion, Darth Nihilus, or Darth Traya. If you're severely dark-sided, though, your character will be standing there instead.
  • At one point in the Imperial Agent storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic, the player is brainwashed by Imperial Intelligence, rendering them unable to disobey any directive given with a specific code word. This is represented in conversations (which use the Mass Effect convention of tagging each dialogue option with a "paraphrase") that have different paraphrases, but the same actual line, as the Agent wants to disobey but isn't able to.
  • The main menus of X-Wing and TIE Fighter. The game opens up with a pilot selection screen presented as a roster. An officer will ask you to enter your identity, and if you try to skip ahead, armed guards will block you. Once you get inside, the main menu is presented as the interior of a Rebel or Imperial base.
    • In the pilot entry screen in X-Wing, the computer will refuse to let you play if you enter "Vader" as your name, since the Alliance doesn't admit "known Imperial agents".
  • In X-Wing Alliance, the main menu is the ship the player is based at à la FreeSpace. This "hangar menu" is more than just a menu styled like the hangar — it actually is the hangar, as becomes especially apparent when, during a mission when your ship is under attack, you can enter the hangar to rearm and the red alert lights will be flashing and the battle going on even though you're at the menu screen.
• In Stellaris, whenever you end up in a First Contact situation with an alien entity, that entity is referred as the "Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta aliens" by the interface until you formally establish contact with them. Unless you are a Xenophobe empire, in which case they are referred to as the "Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta menace" instead... A subtle implication that any alien entity has been through an extensive Demonization campaign in your empire...
• In Tales of Hearts, the characters experience the Mysterious Waif's guilt flashback to just before she had an inadvertent hand in Armageddon. Late in this flashback, another character tells her past self to come along and begin the project. Her text box simply says "Yes", but the voice actress screams out "No!" At this moment, the viewer-character separates from the flashback-character and enters the final stage of her Heroic BSoD.
• Throughout Tales of Xillia 2, the protagonist Ludger Kresnik uses Dialogue Trees to make decisions in the story. When he's presented with a specific choice to kill his brother, Julius, if the player continues to refuse, the dialogue choices will become identical, showing just how unwilling Ludger is to let that happen and locking you into the Bad Ending. There's even a timer ticking down to emphasize how immediate the danger is, but letting it elapse just automatically picks one of the identical responses, leading into a fight against the rest of the party.
  Choice 1: Stop! Please, just stop!
  Choice 2: Stop! Please, just stop!
  Gaius: It has to be this way. For the sake of this world, we must reach the Land of Canaan.
  Choice 1: Then I'll protect Julius myself!
  Choice 2: Then I'll protect Julius myself!
• The 1985 wargame Theatre Europe simulates WWIII. Accessing nuclear weapons requires a real-world phone call. Wikipedia: "The telephone number connected the player to a recorded message, which started with the sound of air raid sirens and dramatically built up through various sounds of war to a huge explosion, followed by the sound of a crying baby. As this faded out, a voice stated "If this is really what you want... the code is 'Midnight Sun'"." Also, the global thermonuclear war option has no helpful uses and ends the game immediately with a score of 0%. The single strike option is answered in kind, until an unknown but low number of nukings triggers global thermonuclear war instead. The player can turn off their automatic response to head this off, but will then be in the hole if the enemy uses nukes. At the hardest difficulty level, it's impossible to win as the Warsaw Pact, reflecting NATO's first use policy.
• The fourth Tropico game has a Modern Times Expansion Pack that unlocks new buildings and edicts as time passes in-game. After 1986, you can enact Ban Social Networks to increase productivity, disabling the integrated Twitter and Facebook functionality of the game in the process.
• In Tyranny, green text in dialogue or a description usually indicates a tooltip describing something the Fatebinder should already know, but the player may not know or immediately recall. Bits of lore an educated person like the Fatebinder would have been taught, memories from before the game's start, and so forth. But there's two other uses:
  • The Voices of Nerat can also use the same text to telepathically communicate to the Fatebinder. Usually quips at Graven Ashe's expense.
  • Messing with Lantry's cerulean ink causes quite a synesthetic trip, with the tooltips offering bizarre commentary and potentially prophetic hints.
• ULTRAKILL: The dialogue of Hell itself is either written in all caps, or the characters are spaced out from each other. Sometimes, it's both. Either way, its dialogue is always written in blood red, just    L I K E T H I S .   
• Undertale:
  • There are a pair of skeleton brothers named Papyrus and Sans. Papyrus has all his dialogue displayed in the Papyrus font, while Sans has all his dialogue in Comic Sans. There's also the possible third relative W.D. (Wingdings) Gaster, who literally speaks in Wingdinglish.
    
    In the Japanese version of the game, Sans still uses a curvy, goofy-looking font to contrast with Papyrus's, which is designed to look like handwriting... but while Sans's dialogue is written in the same left-to-right way as the rest of the text in the game, Papyrus's dialogue is written in the traditional top-to-bottom, right-to-left style, showcasing his stuffy, no-nonsense personality as opposed to the fun-loving jokester Sans. Their fonts are also written in the local equivalents to their namesakes, with Sans in particular using the infamous Soueikaku Poptai.
  • The game also contains a group of strange monsters called Temmies. Their text uses the same typeface as every other ordinary NPC, but it is filled with bizarre spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors. For example, instead of saying "Hi!", they greet you with "hOI!". And it only gets worse when they try to string together complex thoughts.
  • At the end of a No Mercy playthrough, the Fallen Child's destruction of the world is represented by a slashing attack animation covering the screen, followed by a wall of repeating 9's (implying an infinitely high amount of damage) as the game window shakes from side to side in the same way a slain monster does in-game.
  • At one point Mettaton traps the player in a room full of bombs disguised as all kinds of innocuous objects (such a movie script, a glass of water, a basketball and a dog). As he lists off all the objects that are actually bombs he ends with "Even my words are-" before the text suddenly falls out of his text box and explodes.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • Malkavian players have an alternate, jumbled-up font for their alternate, jumbled-up dialogue options. The oddness continues in that news broadcasts on various TVs, which serve as background and interesting little recaps of your more public adventures in the game for other characters, take a more sinister turn for Malkavians. Not only does the news anchor speak directly to you, his descriptions of various stories are far more twisted and violent than normal — the game's way of translating your character's madness into a form that the player can directly experience.
  • There's a Malkavian Thin Blood on the beach in Santa Monica who offers to read your future. She actually does describe events that happen in the game (though they only make sense in retrospect), and if your character is Malkavian, your lines add even more information. Also, if asked about how it all ends, she answers that it's not important whether you win or lose, it's if you bought the game that counts.
• This is the primary gimmick of the Viewtiful Joe series, except that the player controls them, and it's cinematic tropes that are used. Slow motion lets our hero dodge attacks and punch more dramatically (and punch bullets), zoom in temporarily stuns foes, mach speed lets him move very fast, Silvia's Replay lets her attack for triple the damage, and sometimes Joe will smack foes so hard they bounce off the screen.
• Warcraft I and II have a subtle detail. The UI has a sword on the button for "attack", a shield on "stop," et cetera, so upgrading equipment makes those buttons fancier. This is also true of World of Warcraft's auto-attack and auto-shoot buttons, which use your currently equipped weapon's icon (or cat or bear paws, for druids in those forms).
• WET is heavily influenced by the Hong Kong action films of the 80s and early 90s, along with the drive-in movies and grindhouse films of earlier decades. As a constant reminder of this, it uses phony projector tricks similar to Grindhouse — fake fading and scratching, the film slowing down when you're near death and catching and burning when you die, loading screens composed of in-film advertisements, etc.
• The Wii U console features context-sensitive audio. For starters, the instruments in the menu music are divided between the TV and main gamepad's speakers. The player holding the gamepad will also receive special audio based on the game they're playing or the menu they're looking at.
• Yoku's Island Express: At the end of one sidequest, Yoku is flung high in the air, up past all the playable areas of the game, and into the title screen, before falling back down to the part of the island where the sidequest took place.
• The vintage adventure game Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders represents the eponymous character's eponymous treatment by emptying his set of commands and having them gradually return as he recovers.

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