Lots of people have thrown the term ludonarrative dissonance at certain games, meaning that the story it tries to tell doesn't fit to it's gameplay. Often given example is the Tomb Raider reboot from 2013, which tells the story of a young Lara Croft, scared out of her mind in cutscenes because she is trapped on an island with a bunch of bad guys. Which you as player mow down by the dozen in order to reach the next check point without losing a single thought about them. That destroys the story the developers tried to tell and takes the player out of the immersion.
And it is certainly an important point to critique, since the opposite, ludonarrative harmony, is the one unique technique that no other medium can use to tell stories. Video games as interactive medium have that interactivity that differentiates them from movies or books. But that doesn't only mean the story should fit to the gameplay. Or the usual "you can choose which of two options are going to happen". That is the standard requirement to be called a game. The highest point of harmony in my opinion however is were the mode of interactivity itself tells the story.
A great example of "normal" high harmony of story and gameplay would be Hades from Supergiant Games. In Hades nearly every part of the game mechanic is explained in the in-universe lore, and also included in the story the game tells. You try speed running the game? A certain character will notice and comment. You try to up the difficulty by enabling certain traits that make the game harder? Also noticed by NPCs and commented on. And there is a good explanation why you even do the whole thing in the first place and why you continue after seeing the credits.
But two extraordinary examples of ludonarrative harmony where the way the player interacts with the game itself is used to tell the story are in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and in Brothers: A Tale of two Sons. So for both endgame spoilers will follow. And by spoiling those moments I will rob you of the possibility of experiencing them yourself, because realising they are happening is the story being told. So I highly recommend at least playing the Brothers game, because it is shorter and the impact on the story telling is better. Also it's just a great game in general (Hellblade is also good, don't misunderstand me).
For Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice the story is about Senua, who has schizophrenia and hears multiple voices in her head and fights through Nordic mythology in order to find the goddess Hel. Hel has Senuas lovers soul and Senua wants to get him back. And so you fight your way through Helheim and in the end you reach He'll herself in her place of power.
And she summons waves of monster for you to fight against, as expected of the final battle against the goddess of Helheim herself. After defeating the waves of normal enemies you start fighting against shadow version of the bosses you fought before. And you defeat them, since you got a lot of training in fighting all of them before. But then the fight isn't over, you don't even get a second of pause to relax or finally fight against the goddess herself, instead new monsters are summoned again and you continue fighting them. And then you think you have made progress, because again rounds against the bosses are coming. And still you fight on. Because this is the endboss. Of course you fight on, that's what this is all about, isn't it? There is the boss summoning minions and here you are slaughtering them in order to proceed. And then another wave of monster gets summoned, then bosses again. And you fight on.
But for what? There seems to be no progress, just fight after fight after fight against the same enemies without getting closer to your goal. And then at one point you feel that this is ridiculous, no matter how hard you fight, you can't progress, so you stop fighting and let Senua get overwhelmed because what else can you do? And that is when the story progresses. Because that emotion of giving up is exactly what the developers wanted to make you feel. That feeling of futility of what you are doing. No other medium could have evoked that emotion in you. No literary description of how despaired Senua was or slow motion shot of the actor falling to her knees would have invoked that moment in you. So in this case it's not so much the interaction but the decision to stop interacting. And then the story goes on and comments about how certain fights are not winnable, or rather that winning them would destroy yourself in the process. That sometimes you need to stop fighting.
Now this game is certainly not the first game that incorporates an unwinnable fight, those are used a lot. But in other games I experienced them more as a way to show that the enemy is too strong for the current player. It's not that you feel futile in fighting on, but rather feeling the overwhelming strength of the opponent, often leading to a fake game over. I haven't experienced it in any other game similar to Hellblade at the end as storytelling device.
The only problem with the approach of having to lose a battle is that we are so accustomed to always winning in games that I read comments where people said they paused the game mid-fight and looked online what to do, because they thought they got softlocked or something. Because the point the game tried to make was not that enemies in Hellblade were too strong to overcome, they were just infinitely respawning and unwinnable through attrition of your and by extension Senuas will.
I myself have experienced the best example however in Brothers: A Tale of two Sons. In this game you play the two titular brothers on a quest to find a cure for their sick father. It is also described as single player co-op game, since you control each brother with one half of your controller: one joystick for the movement of each brother and the shoulder buttons for interacting. So for example if you need to build a bridge somewhere, one brother goes to each end of a plank, you press both brothers interact button and keep it pressed while you navigate the brothers to the correct spot to build the bridge and release the buttons to let the plank fall in the right place.
One common problem is that the smaller brother is scared of water after their mother died in an accident on the sea, shown in the intro.. He refuses to go deeper than kneedeep into any water. So for those moments you need the older brother to carry them both over water while the smaller brother is holding on for dear life. So you swim with the older brothers control button, while the smaller brother just needs to hold on.
Near the end of the game, the older brother dies however and the younger brother has to bury him by himself (great gameplay moment in itself, doing everything yourself certainly makes the whole thing much more personal than if it would have been a cutscene). Afterwards being close to home with the cure he then is confronted with some obstacles he only managed to overcome in the early game because his brother was there: high water. You try and swim through it, but the younger brother is still too scared of the water and refuses to go into it. You try different locations, explore for another way, but there is none. Somehow you have to get through the water.
And then after having tried everything else, you try the buttons of the older brother, which you haven't used in a while, because, you know, him being dead and all. And suddenly the boy starts to swim when you press his older brothers control button. By invoking his dead brother he is able to overcome his fear and push forward, which he couldn't do just by himself. That moment is the best use of a control scheme to tell a story I have ever experienced in a game. It recontextualizes a simple button prompt and elevates it to my personal Olympus of gaming moments.
Honourable mention goes to Indika, but this post is already long enough without needing to explain what this game does. But I definitely recommend it as well).
Those moments are what makes games a special form of art and I hope that more developers are able to create them.
Have you experienced similar great moments where games used the way you interact with them to really make you feel an emotion? Since it is often a spoiler, please first name the game and put the specific moment in spoiler tags (3 double dots, followed by "spoiler", than the visible part of the spoilertext and on the next line the inside part and at the end three double dots again), so people can choose to experience those moments unspoiled.
And no, frustration from hard enemies don't count, that's too common ;)
