Maximalist Culture-Shock Immersion

Unicorn Overlord and Metaphor have me musing-

Combining these makes me feel TRANSPORTED to a big new game world:

Maximalist ui
Maximalist music
En media res opening
Multiscan environments
Complex systems (slowly ramped)
Unfamiliar controls
Culture Shock
Novelty

A very visually noisy screenshot from Unicorn Overlord’s prologue, showing a large knight thrusting a lance through an enemy that you can't even see because of the VFX.

A very pretty but complicated-looking ui from Metaphor, the Archetype Tree, which shows a big hex grid of icons overlaid on top of a Vitruvian Man-style figure.

Looking at the list, it’s all about an almost overwhelming novelty and stimulation that reduces me, as a player, to a state of feeling small and uncertain in a place I don’t yet belong or understand, and it takes effort to learn

It reminds me of this Majora’s Mask quote:

A quote from a Zelda dev, Hiromasa Shikata, from 2000. He was the Field Designer responsible for Clock Town and ROmani Ranch in Majora's Mask. "Shikata: Organizing all the various parts of the town while managing the size was difficult. We created a complicated area so players would feel uneasy and uncomfortable, like they are in a strange town in a foreign country, carrying the sense of uncertainty that comes with that sort of situation. However, ‘I don't understand it at all’ and ‘I played for a whole day, but I still don't know what to do’ among others were many of the opinions that we kept hearing, so we continued to adjust. Now I think getting lost is a positive part of the game."

It flies a bit in the face of conventional game design and UX wisdom: an intentional upsetting of player comfort.

Stuff like… not adhering to genre norms in control schemes, baiting and switching, confusing jargon, art styles or menus that are initially hard to parse.

The pause menu from Metaphor Refantazio. It is wild, the ui elements are breaking free of their bounds, there’s flashy art, it's highly animated. The background is the main character's head lying horizontally, looking up.

The sphere grid screen from FFX, famous as a complicated-seeming way to award basic stat growths.

I mentioned “multiscan” environments.

A single-scan environment is one where the player can trivially, at a glance, see everything they want to see. A multiscan environment requires more active and ongoing attention. It may have a more subtle visual language, or a higher detail art style.

A screenshot from The Minish Cap. It’s bright, high contrast, with every gameplay element clearly visible at a glance.

A screenshot from Hyperlight Drifter. The character is smaller, the art style more detailed, the contrasts less drastic. You can look at it for awhile before spotting everything.

Another Zelda quote. Takizawa doesn’t use the same terms, but he’s describing the same thing:

A quote from a Zelda Dev, Satoru Takizawa, 2017. He was the Art Director for the Wind Waker HD and for Breath of the Wild. "Takizawa: There was also another concern with The Wind Waker HD art style [as a possible art style for Breath of the Wild]. The concern was if older players could look at the screen for just an instant and understand everything they were seeing, they might feel the art was intended for children, and was not for them."

When I said “culture shock”, I meant in a worldbuilding way: characters use terms and behave within norms I don’t know, have alien names.

It’s especially effective if the characters are unquestioning about something that screams “Weird! Scary!” Like the robots from Horizon or the total acceptance of the horrible nature of the world in Xenoblade 3.

A screenshot from Xenoblade Chronicles 3. From the overworld, of the party standing near “Soldiers’ Husks”. In this universe, it was normal to find bodies in the world, and to play a song on a flute to send them to the afterlife.

Key art from Majora’s Mask, of Link standing alone and looking small in the middle of the foreign city Clock Town, with people bustling around him.

Sometimes it’s good and effective to make players uncomfortable or out of place!