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It sounds like Apocalyptic Log might be what you're looking for. Or Framing Device.
Edited by DipperPines "Stay curious, stay weird, stay kind and don't let anyone ever tell you you aren't smart or brave or worthy enough."—The Author
If anybody ever figures out what trope this is, there's another example in the alien city in "Colony in Space".
I don't think we have any tropes for just walls, just books, or just voice recordings. We should have several for the more general concept of "characters discover what happened from surviving records", but Apocalyptic Log is the best suggestion yet, and that's limited to cases where the people making the record didn't survive.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Thirding Apocalyptic Log as the general trope here- its just a visual form of someone documenting what happened rather than a written form. See also Storyboarding the Apocalypse and Fling a Light into the Future if the murals are a warning, and Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair for the Mountains of Madness form where they double as a monument to the Elder Thing's lost civilization.
Late to the Tragedy pops up alongside this form as well- in Bioshock, for example, things like advertisements, murals, sculptures, and graffiti do a lot of wordless storytelling as you explore the ruined city.
Apocalyptic Log would only apply if the carver was doomed
, not if they scripted a story for self expression or vanity.
It'd apply to situations like the Elder Thing's murals- the minimal spoilers version is that the murals are an illustrated history of their civilization, and they kept carving new panels depicting events right up until their final days. (Again minimizing spoilers, the phrase "mistakes were made" comes to mind.) Noteworthy that even in-universe this was lampshaded as possibly being some sort of compulsion for the Elder Things.
Edited by Scorpion451
Do we have a trope for a situation when main characters learn about the backstory, i.e. prehistory of an alien world or long lost civilisation by finding a conveniently placed wall with carvings or murals depicting it all in kind of a comic strip? This is basically what happens in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, but I haven't found this thing listed there. It's a particular way of presenting an Expose. I guess it would be a sub-trope of Infodump.