Concept: region in an open-world video game that’s just intensely toxic, to the point that the player character needs a special magic item to prevent the air from melting their skin off when they go there. The plantlife is all throbbing tumerous pods and venom-dripping thorns. The Evil Overlord’s soldiers go about in hazmat suits and gas-masks. The sky is literally green.
Then you defeat the local boss and it turns out that it’s not a parable about the environmental cost of industrialisation, and in fact the bad guys have nothing to do with the region being like that – that’s just how it naturally is, and the inhabitants, a bunch of poisonous toad-people, like it just fine. The actual reason they sent for the hero’s aid was the Evil Overlord’s economic policies.
(Also, the poisonous toad-people have an incredible performing arts scene that goes largely unappreciated in the outside world because nobody else can safely go there to take it in. They produce some of the best opera singers in the world.)