My secret favorite "genre" are games that span across multiple time periods, allowing you to see how the world evolves over time. 13 Sentinels is a game that does this... sort of. It is 90%-ish a visual novel and 10% RTS style combat. You play as a fuckton of Japanese teenagers mainly living in the mid-1980s as they uncover a bunch of conspiracies about their lives. It's odd, I would actually say that this game doesn't really have any new sci-fi concepts, but instead includes ideas from every sci-fi movie you can think of. Terminator. The Matrix. E.T. Westworld. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Groundhog Day. Alien. War of the Worlds (this one they actually call out by name, thanks public domain!). Each character has their own different bizarre events going on which, together, allows the player to understand the overall plot. Each character's story is broken up into chapters, which does lead to some odd transitions between chapters. For example, there are times where a character has uncovered a huge truth about the world they live in, shattering their perception of life. Then when we pick them up in the next chapter... they're just back at school. There are a number of cases where this happens, and it almost lead me to think there was another big mystery going on, but no, it's just weird storytelling. The game does also rely heavily on non-sequential events to hide important facts from the player, but it actually works well with the systems they provide to you.