You knock over a barrel of oil near your opponent, then cast a fire spell on the spot, engulfing them in flames. Maybe you push a monster into standing water and hit them with 1,000 volts instead. Or, you freeze them with a glob of icy sci-fi plasma, then smack them with a hammer, shattering them into a million brittle little pieces.
You can do all of those things in games like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Genshin Impact, and Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon. Whenever a game lets you play around with the elements, even if it's a bad game, it becomes a pretty good game for just a moment.
I'm thinking about this because I just played through Scars Above. Though the opening hours are a little slow, the third-person sci-fi shooter from Mad Head Games gets continually better as it unveils more and more elemental attacks you can use to take down your enemies. The game's world is fairly drab and looks cheap in comparison to its triple-A competitors, but it's continually enlivened as your hero, Kate, turns the battlefield into a chemistry set.
Monsters have big glowing weak spots on their bodies, which is obviously standard video game design. But Scars Above is different thanks to how those weak spots correspond to the color of an elemental attack in your arsenal. If an enemy has a sparking electric blue spot on their chest, you need to pump that sucker full of lightning ammo. There might be an electric orb on the battlefield that you can hit to shock all nearby enemies. A memorable boss fight tasks you with hitting the spindly opponent's elbows with fire, which causes a swollen blue sack to flop out of its mouth — your cue to start hurling lightning attacks until the sack flops out of sight. It's basically combat Bop It.
These elements tie into the world too - when it rains, enemies become easier to freeze. So, when you notice sky droplets flying by a monster's head, you can lob some ice at them to freeze them in place then wail on their weak spots. Similarly, there's a flammable liquid you can throw on enemies or on the battlefield, then light it on fire. The game is bursting with elemental possibility.
The best games are often the ones that invite you to express yourself through their systems. Many games are designed to be played in just one way. You can play well or badly, but ultimately there is one metric for success. Games like Hitman and Dishonored and Breath of the Wild, though, offer you tools and leave it up to you how you use them.
Games with emmental systems combine this painterly possibility with the simple mechanics of rock, paper, scissors. Breath of the Wild taught me that the area surrounding Eldin Mountain is very hot. It also taught me that you use fire to cook meat. But it let me discover on my own that combining Eldin Mountain's scorching rocks with a dropped cut of Prime Meat would result in inadvertently seared steak. These games ask you to learn their simple rules — lightning is effective against water, fire burns grass — and then set you free to create beautiful chaos within those confines.