The silence in that car conversation, one more time and then I will stop

I have written about this twice and I want to be specific about the thing rather than the feeling.

One of them says something. The other does not answer immediately. The car keeps going. The radio is low. Nothing on screen changes and nothing is signposted.

In a game, a pause costs money. Somebody has to animate the non response, hold the camera, resist filling it, and trust that the player will not think the audio has broken. Every instinct in game development says put a line there.

They did not. That is the whole reason I think this is going to be different from the last one.