One example is the recent Tomb Raider reboot. You play as a distressed teenage girl who is shipwrecked on a dangerous island with no survival skills or knowledge of self-defense or hunting.

Yet later in the game you are brutally murdering hundreds of enemy combatants by stabbing them with a homemade ax, shooting them with arrows in the head, lighting them on fire.

On one hand you are just trying to survive, find missing people, gain intelligence about the island you’re on. Needing to kill someone would only happen in an extreme situation, and you would be desperate to run and hide or use weapons to incapacitate rather than kill. On the other hand you function nearly as a harbinger of brutal and complete annihilation for the groups of enemy foot soldiers, mowing down hundreds of them, using anything in the environment to brutally kill them.

You aren’t a fallen anti-hero in the game’s world though. You are the thumbs-up, wholly moral protagonist, but the actions you perpetrate go far beyond anything justifiable for mere survival.

I think this effect is also something unique to specifically video game story telling, because it’s very hard to depict a character acting directly antithetically to the moral character the reader/viewer is supposed to believe they really represent, without entering some type of morality surrealism.

But in the game, since you are asked to be the agent who perpetrates the irreconcilable actions, you are more willing to engage the dissonance aspect, and feel like the brutal, unjustifiable actions don’t negate the character, since you “had to” do it to complete the game.

The Uncharted series also contains a lot of ludonarrative dissonance, as you are a cheeky Indiana Jones character who at root is a “good guy” just out for treasure, but who ends up brutally murdering thousands of bad guys along the way in over the top, morally indefensible ways.

The Metal Gear franchise has components, especially with the Raiden character, that touch on it too.