Potemkin
Should be settlement instead...
The player encounters the town of Potemkin at multiple preset locations throughout the game, which are all positioned outside of eyeshot from one another. Potemkin is a picture-perfect medieval town - in the sense that authentic medieval squalor has been painted over with paint. Smiling NPCs grace every shop window. Authentic peasant clutter is placed on display in pre-selected spaces. (With docent marker.) Well-tended, repetitive flowerpots grace most windows with 8-bit regularity. See Stylized Modular Medieval Town Pack for the vibe.
As the player walks toward the shops, a small squad of peeves execute a formation of cartwheels, banners unfurl, and playful music blasts from tiny, ornate phonograph horns at the end of metal piping. See Playful Scherzo.
The town's NPCs greet the player in a dance that is at once impersonal, exuberant, and shamelessly scripted for tourists. This charade continues until the player confirms in dialog that they are broke. At that point, the dance stops, the peeves go on break, and the NPCs answer your questions brusquely. When the location changes, this is reset.
The dialog ultimately suggests to the player, that the town is being torn down and rapidly reconstructed to anticipate the movements of possible customers. See Potemkin Village. This allows us to reuse the assets and NPCs throughout the game, making self-reference jokes (but also requiring less assets). It's also a literal application of the idiom.
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