Tyrian2000, Paradyzja, Blindslight
(minor spoilers below)
I wish somebody made a game inspired by these. So, it would be shump (shoot them up), but it would also have a lot of story sprinkled here and there.
It wouldn't have micropayments, and you wouldn't need to repeat levels to unlock anything. But, at the same time, you would want to replay it to get different story outcomes. Hell, you could miss the whole story point during your first playtrough if you aren't perceptive enough!
Your story choices would be controlled by the weapons you purchase. If you buy weaker, more expensive stuff from rebels, you will get different outcomes. But you could also empower crazy inefficient fractions too. You could even get upgrades that make you weaker in some respects. You can integrate more with the machine, but you wont see how many interactions you lose by not being able to i.e. walk into a space station. And the 1st playtrough won't give you tips. Only the ending slides will.
In general, the player would not be able to see any mechanics that their not used to from say Chicken Invaders/Tyrian/Jets'n'Guns. The trick would be that these mechanics would do many hidden things for the story, and these consequences would only became visible overtime.
My only problem is that I despise conspiracy theories. So I'd need a state-crafted conspiracy theory as well maybe as a story device? So that it distracts from the actual Paradyzja conspiracy?
And why Blingsight? Because we live in the world with LLMs, and the author predicted similar behavior - intelligence without consciousness - from biological life and it was before even the 'Attention is all you need paper' (but after the 1980 Chinese room paper, of course).
Let's jump into some details. You can ship front and rear guns. You have some generator or a cooling system. You have side weapon bays too (mostly for consumables such as rockets). On mobile, you need to use 2 fingers to enable shooting. Mid + left side of screen enables front weapon, mid + right enables side. Each weapon has some power levels from updates.
But here we start diverging from what's most common. You cannot downgrade (most of the time). Shooting more targets isn't necessarily better - most of money comes from finished missions. Omitting some targets may yield ransom or an alliance karma points. You can also upgrade your body by becoming more robot (which gives you more maneuverability and survivability, but hurts some relations). Your equipment may break, and some factions offer cheap repairs while other enshittify you with their anti-repair designs (which puts a pressure for earning more money on you). Oh, and of course you start the game as a glorified lapdog for the bad ones (your role is similar to Dedra Meero in 'Andor'; 'Tyranny' comes to mind too); but you may not notice it at all. Story is conveyed to you with some equivalent of Tyrian's data cubes.
That's it. So from level design, weapons design, art, mechanics - it's just a retro shump. But the ability to smuggle in more and more story overtime comes in the form of these messages that you may get from different factions and a tree of different possible story arcs that doesn't really interfere that much with the game mechanics itself.
Edit.: Tim Cain talks about many players never completing the game as a counterargument to the idea of adding a player choice restricted content. So, let's allow the player to finish the game really quickly (2h? 1h?) if they simply pick the most powerful gun and best rewards without having a second thought. But the simplest ending will have really pessimistic outcome (for example a mono-culture, that ends up wiped by a cosmic event in the ending slides 200 years later).