Star Trek Elite Forces when you’re disobeying Janeway near the end. There’s a long shot of you while Janeway is commanding you to turn around. Goose bumps.
Wing Commander when you find out your cat buddy, that you’ve been defending the whole game…REALLY IS an enemy. You’re in the cockpit to go after him, all those ‘warm-up’ sounds are going…AGAIN you’re being ordered to stand down. And your choices are “Revenge!” or “Discretion is the best part of valor”…
…I killed him so quickly it sort of broke the game. He’s supposed to get away and one of your buddies dies cause you went after the traitor. He does show up later anyway and I had no idea what anyone was talking about when i got back and they said I’d gotten someone killed.
In Resident Evil 4, you enter a cut scene where one of the bosses starts giving a speech, but during the speech one of his henchmen throws a dagger at you that you need to dodge. Nice little let your guard down check by the designers.
There are numerous cheat codes in Duke Nukem 3D that allow you to defy physics. Some of the ledges you climb to have graffiti on the walls that say “You shouldn’t be here cheater”
Those old PC shooters like Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior were always filled with easter eggs. Every level had little secret areas with some kind of inside joke or pop culture reference. I wish games still had that stuff.
In Fallout 3, you are in the Enclave base, a series of round tunnels really tubees with grates laid halfway up to form a floor. In the mess, the bottom half is covered with flatware knives. Apparently every time an Enclave trooper would drop a knife while eating, it would fall through the grate and he (or she) would just go and get another one.
One I noticed recently in Stardew Valley: Usually, it’s easiest to just sell the produce of your farm using the shipping box. But you can also sell it (at least, most of the food items) at the general store. And if you do, the townsfolk will occasionally give you dialog about how they bought it and enjoyed it, and didn’t know that Pierre’s sold that.
In Prey, there’s a segment in which an antagonist who has been taunting you and sending killbots after you tampers with the life support to a section of the station. If you want to save the people there (assuming you haven’t already killed them or gotten them killed), you have to go fix the sabotage.
[spoiler]It’s obviously an attempt to bait you into the open, and he’s waiting for you with his bots in the room. There are a bunch of different ways to break into the room and take him out, and that’s what most people do. There’s a timer, with people about to suffocate, and that pushes people toward the direct approach.
However, if you’ve been exploring a bit, you may have learned that there’s a console in another room that performs an atmosphere flush in the Life Support section. The antagonist doesn’t have a pressure suit on, but you do. You can just go to a different room, press a button, and watch through the windows as the asshole who sabotaged other people’s air supply staggers around and collapses because you pumped the oxygen out of his room. It’s a lovely bit of irony.[/spoiler]
I believe Abigail sometimes mentions that they had something you sold Pierre for dinner, and that she thinks it was because the whatever-it-was was going bad. Of course, this is from the girl who eats rocks…
One of my favorites in Stardew is sad one–it’s when Jas trusts you enough to drop the one line that makes Shane’s backstory fall into place, and you realize why he’s such a hot mess. He never tells you himself; you have to put Jas’s comment together with his living situation.
In Starcraft II toward the end of the first campaign one of General Warfield’s lines is “We’re taking terrible, terrible damage.” The string “terribleterribledamage” is the cheat code for god mode.
In Wolfenstein: The Old Blood you overhear two German soldiers talking. One is berating the other for using poor grammar. So, a grammer Nazi.
At the beginning of Far Cry 4, you are brought to a room and asked to wait. If you actually just wait, Min eventually returns and politely leads you to the shrine, tells about your family, then helps you plant your mother’s ashes at the shrine, essentially ending the game right then and there.
I saw this just last night while playing Skyrim again. A bard was singing to a small crowd a song about Ulfric Stormcloak. They were all doing the skyrim arm-raise dance thing, and when the song ended she whipped out a drum and began to play it. Everyone- everyone- turned around and walked away, and in my head I filled in the dialog: Drum solo, let’s go get a beer.
There’s a particularly impactful one near the end of Bastion.
[spoiler]You’re presented with a choice near the end of the game. You find the body of a friend who betrayed you, and must choose to either abandon him or abandon your weapon of ultimate destruction. If you choose to save him you become defenseless and walk slowly, but can still use health potions.
While carrying him some Ura warriors start attacking you. They have been one of the main enemy types in the game thus far. You block some of their ranged attacks with an obstacle, but it gets destroyed. You’re still getting low health warnings at this point, but your health potions are out or running low, and there’s still a lot of ground to cover. It doesn’t look like you’re going to make it.
Just as it looks impossible, the Ura stop shooting at you and give way in respect of you trying to save the friend who betrayed you. In that moment the enemies who have been mooks so far start to seem like people. Perhaps your friend was right to betray you. Perhaps the Ura were right all along, and your actions in the game have not been justified. Even after you’ve killed them in the hundreds, they are still willing to show you mercy.
The scene wouldn’t be half as powerful if this was done in a cinematic. Telling the story partially through game mechanics and letting you play through it really enhances the scene. This is all accompanied by an amazing song that really gives it atmosphere. [/spoiler]
At the beginning of Mass Effect 3 one of your squadmates (Ashley or Kaiden, depending on who you let survive in ME1) gets bodied by some chick on Mars. There’s an ensuing cutscene where you bring them to the med bay and as your place him/her on the table Liara is talking to Shepard. Shepard is looking down at the squadmate so Liara bends over to get into Shepard’s vision, Shepard kind of looks away and Liara keeps miming Shepard to stay in his/her vision. Mass Effect’s cutscenes never really impressed me, but the smoothness of the action and how natural it seems always impressed me.
I love that little segment and it lasts all of 3 seconds. It’s just really well done.
I think one of the Ura actually raises a weapon at that point, and another one stops him. It’s a very powerful moment. I thought it was one most people who have played the game would know about, though.