Two that always bug me:
- game narrative introduces urgency (“we have to hurry up and catch X before it’s too late!”), but time doesn’t matter at all. And in fact you’re encouraged to grind away on sidequest and collect items before continuing that urgent main story
- early game has a city surrounded by weak monsters and some local needs you to hunt down a few that have been bothering them. two towns over there’s another town of normal people surrounded by monsters 100x stronger but they don’t care or need your help.
But in context dissonance the price scaling is just weird when you start to think about, just how rich comparatively the people in later areas are? Why isn't there any people who retired? Just bring that pile of gold even from middle game area to starter area and well you have enough money for rest of your live...
I'm not just talking point and click adventure games, I mean any game that breaks its own rules just gets on my nerves. If it's a Sci-Fi setting you tell me there's FTL, fine but then when I can't use that in a context where it it follows the other game rules to do a thing I want to do, that just ruins it for me. How many open World RPGs are there with just invisible walls in a place that looks totally passable? When in cutscenes or story elements the characters can just walk through that area or have no problem turning on the FTL.
I know it's a lot of effort, but attention to detail hearing about the end result is the only real fix this kind of shit.
This is describing the rules of a game as related to the narrative of the game.
A ludonarrative dissonance would be the narrative of the game being "we need to hurry and rescue the thing!" but then the rules/mechanics of the game having no punishment for not actually hurrying and rescuing the thing or maybe no support for even understanding the time taken by the player.
Similarly the mechanics of the game can clash with the narrative. The narrative says the player character is a strong hero but then with the game mechanics they're killed by a rat in the forest.