What are some games that "get real", so to speak?
My example is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. It seems like a cute, slice-of-life roguelite with a lighthearted story and fun atmosphere. Halfway through the game, shit hits the fan and the game does a 180. Everything gets a lot darker, and the difficulty seriously spikes.
I loved this, and I want more of it. Any game that appears cute, but suddenly gets very serious, will do.
I suppose you already know about Eversion ?
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Muv-Luv although it's a visual novel
Spec ops the line is an obvious one
Mother 2.
In Tales of the Abyss the MC is a dick through the first half of the game, until he massacres a town from his ignorance the game then spends a good amount of time shitting on him.
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Wonderful 101 maybe
also despite the 3.3 million dollar man I'd say maybe psychonauts as it feels like half of it is a tutorial and then you get to the part where you realize you can go into any adults mind and all the levels suddenly rely on combining all the mechanics you learnt
super paper mario, somewhat. i dont know if the difficulty spikes that much but it can be pretty unnerving sometimes and shit hits the fan pretty hard
more like wonderful 777
Kid Icarus Uprising.