What games feature objects that would be instantly recognizable to most players, but are described by the game as if the player character is completely unfamiliar with them? I don’t mean games like Rover’s Day Out or Lost Pig where the whole point is that many things are described this way, I mean games where the character is presumably much like the player in most respects and the object’s description sticks out as unusual (even if there is an explanation for it).
Fake example:
And at some point the player goes, “Oh, it’s a soda can.”
One from Spider and Web:
the coffee maker at the very end
A couple in So Far:
the piece of hard candy and the decontamination shower(?) in the power plant
That one seemed justified to me: the player is in a lab full of incomprehensible machinery for the teleporter, and assumes that the coffee maker must be part of it.
My memory of Spider and Web is very hazy, but I vaguely recall
something about using the teleporter(?) machine to steal advanced technology? Since Spider and Web takes place on not-Earth I thought the suggestion was that the coffee maker was brought back from a parallel universe or whatever, perhaps by accident. So the character really has no idea what it is.
I remember a children’s book like that: IIRC, it was told from the perspective of a future archaeologist exploring a modern-day area. Each page would have his/her textual description of some object on the front, and a picture of the objects on the back.
IIRC in the original Crowther and Woods version the rod was described just like the rod found earlier, with the only clue being the response to one command:>BLAST
You see no dynamite here.
Oooooh, nice one. Yeah, that one’s fun, and more than just being “alien objects” they also provide the game’s main motivation and characterisation of the PC.