10 Deliberate Gameplay Features That Ruin Your Immersion
3. Characters Describing Button Prompts
Okay, admittedly this one doesn't happen all too often anymore. Not that it's completely dead and buried.
How are you expected to absorb yourself in a game's story if the characters make reference to the fact you're playing a video game? Sometimes, they're intentional fourth wall breaks, so you can afford to throw those ones a bone for obvious reasons. Other times, characters just spurt out the most jarring of phrases and then act as if everything's totally normal. Oh yeah, sure it is - apart from the fact you've just ruined all my investment in this story!
"Press X to do this." "Press the Action Button to do that." "Press the power button to turn off the console and find something better to do." These are things you should never hear the actual characters in a video game saying to you. They shouldn't know they're in a game, and if the story is a particularly serious one, it's even sillier when they start telling people to press buttons to jump instead of actually, you know, jumping.
Call me old-fashioned, but when I don't know the controls, I don't assume the NPCs around me know either.