One of my favorite games, Tunic, has the mechanics of having collectable items and weapons, using the in-game manual book, and a fictional undecipherable language. Interacting with these machanics over time, the player experiences dynamics like exploration as the player collects more pages of the manual book through exploring different parts of the world. The player also experiences puzzle-solving as new manual pages gives clues to discovering secret character abilities and map areas. This then helps the player recontextualize the environment, as previous symbols and structure that seems unusable are actual powerful tools that one can unlock after solving its related puzzle using the manual.
These dynamics then led the player to enjoy the game through fantasy, as you play as a tiny fox adventurer in a world full of mysteries to explore and solve. It also tells a narrative as the player assembles the story page by page about the fox and its world by collecting manual pages. The strongest aesthetic presented by the dynamics is discovery. The world is full of hidden paths, shortcuts, and puzzles in plain sight. Lots of fun can be had solving the secrets scattered densely in the game.
