I'll leave Stormy to the practical advice, he's talking good sense. I'll stick to the more theoretical side. This is really interesting as a discussion
I haven't really mentioned it so far, because I assumed you were aware of it, but you're going to need top-notch writing.
Really superb writing knows what to say, but more importantly what
not to say. Games are a piece of theatre or drama, not a novel - the action is happening in front of the player and they can see it. Narration adds detail and adds depth, but it WILL NOT and MUST NOT define the scene. That's shitty writing; lazy, forced and needless.
Consider Iago's asides in
Othello. We can see the scenes playing out in the background on stage, but what Iago says to the audience adds a tremendous depth to the relationship between the character Othello and Iago. Without it, we'd see a nonchalant conversation between a prince and his commander. With it, we see a callous backstabbing bastard lying barefacedly in his prince's face, a man who he seeks to ruin and destroy.
You'll want to pull this off with your text/audio (henceforth narration), if you choose to keep it. Never use it to describe the situation unless you're adding depth and grounding whatever else you're going to say. For example, "the room was deadly cold. The depths of winter had even had an effect on the doors; any leading outside were iced shut." We take a blatantly obvious, descriptive detail and turn it into something with depth, backstory, explanation or mystery - whatever. We make it into something
more.
Stanley Parable gets a bit meta with this, and does an epic job of it. It seems highly descriptive, but when you start to think about what's said and unsaid, a whole world of depth opens up.
When things get a little more spicy, keep it super-short, and don't put words in your player's mouth. Ever.
Bastion does this rather well; it doesn't say "SHIT'S SCARY YO, OH MAN THE KID IS SCARED" - it says "that's a real terrible beast there. Wouldn't do for The Kid to forget about his pals though." It enhances what the player can actually see in their face rather than kills it stone dead.
A cool, calm collected narrative voice really works with this.
Dear Esther,
Bastion,
Stanley Parable - all of them have ice-cold narrators. That's for a reason; it works with the immersion really well rather than against it. The only time to break out of that is to shock, and to maintain that in the immersive factor.
Nightmare House 2 had this really cool moment where the subtitles would come on and just endlessly write TURN AROUND TURN AROUND for about 10 seconds. It was shit frightening, no matter where it happened, because it was totally out of character of the subtitle system.
So yeah, a bit to consider there. Because you're balancing immersion, genres and modes, having the player read and register a scene and many things besides, you've really got to think here. This isn't taking pages from a book and bringing them into a game - it's having the game do the job of immediate description for you.
With this in mind, let's look at your examples.
jeeves wrote:I believe that this concept could be implemented with text. For example the player could associate the text with something bad happening in game, if pattern was made apparent early on. A novel(pun not intended) idea I had related to the fact that in-game narration - text or otherwise, could be assumed to be the characters thoughts. Imagine if the text was, up until a certain point in the level predictable; for example ("OH NO THAT'S A SCARY THING, WHY IS THAT DOOR OPENING) etc, changes to (" I'M GOING TO FIND YOU!, IM RIGHT BEHIND THIS DOOR HOPE YOUR NOT HERE!), so the player becomes disconnected from the thought process he's accustomed to, is he even hearing his own thoughts anymore?; Here's another example, : ("THE RED DOOR IS SAFE, OPEN THE RED DOOR"), and....guess what's behind the red door?.
You're going to have to think long and hard about whether you want the player trusting the narrator or not. Character's thoughts...ehh, I don't like the idea, and while it can certainly be done, it's too easy to default into asking the player to feel a certain way rather than actually managing it and underlining it with narration. I'd try not to go too schizophrenic either - again, perfectly doable and very cool, but very hard work to get it to function over a short, action packed area. Don't do too much at once, an effect like that would arc over an entire mod.