Recently, I’ve been obsessed with Stardew Valley. If you’re familiar with Harvest Moon, it’s that- but better. In this game you start as a new farmer who was given land in a small town after your grandfather passes. You learn more of the story through getting to know the local townspeople, through interacting with them, giving them gifts, attending town events, even your relationship with one townsperson can shift your relationship with others. Conversely, you have the options to make them hate you depending on how you choose to behave. You can choose a bachelor/ette to marry, you can have children. You can divorce them, you can cheat on them, you can magically turn your children into doves. 

Throughout all these in-game relationships progressing or regressing, you make your living farming, raising livestock, mining, etc. You can unlock new areas of the world as you make community upgrades (an island nearby is unlocked faster if you choose to lead your town down a capitalist route rather than a semi-communist society), or create friendships with the townspeople, who will tip you off to how unlock these things.

There are mini-games throughout, fishing, fighting monsters in the mines, arcade games in the bar.

I think this game is what you want to make it. If you don’t care about “advancing” you can live a simple farm life. Or, like me, you can try to get everything you can out of it. I try to befriend every single person, I want to unlock every achievement, I want to get every single item that I can. I want to complete the community requests and all the event scenes. Most of all, I want to humiliate the town mayor, who is hiding his relationship with one of the townspeople because he thinks she’s not good enough to publicly date. Marnie, you deserve better, girl.

Sammy

One of my favorite examples of storytelling in videogames is Bloodborne- The impact of the narrative would be largely nullified if translated to any other medium. The game depicts a Victorian city infested with supernatural beasts and Lovecraftian horrors, and only a vague sense of player motivation. 

Almost every storytelling beat feels more decipherable than discoverable- the characters are alluring but cryptic, the world rich but merciless. The depth of each encounter scales with how much you as the player are willing to invest in the world- are you slaughtering a nameless animal, or have you in some way committed an act more insidious? 

The motifs of the game are noticeable but subtle- Futility, hubris, femininity and childbirth- they’re all present but never overt. The gameplay is as fittingly oppressive as the world you’re thrown into, fraught with (of course) blood and repeated deaths. 

The harsh nature of the game makes the quiet pockets of optimism that much more impactful. The moon is dripping red with blood, but it is also a thing of beauty- the diametric ideas of horror and beauty intersecting are buttressed by the strong gameplay and player agency.

One of my favorite video games that I’ve played is Assassins Creed Black Flag. I don’t usually play narrative driven games, but the Assassin’s creed series is one that I’ve followed for a while, and Black Flag is one of the strongest stories that I’ve experienced. There are parts of the story I personally feel are irrelevant, like the Animus storyline which shows that you are a scientist visiting the past through the blood of historical or important figures associated with the “Brotherhood.” What I think is strongest about this story is when we follow and experience the life of Edward Kenway, a poor man turned privateer, and then turned pirate, during the1600s. The story starts with his backstory, about how he dreams of being rich and wants to sail at sea with privateers. The story uses this flashback over the course of the game because it shows his love interest, and to show someone who he would fight to get back to. Something we see over the course of the game is that he doesn’t want to go back. There are hundreds of side quests once you become an Assassin, and most of them add to the game in a narrative way, as well as an excuse for strategic gameplay. The overarching narrative for Edward’s part of the game is there is a machine that can see everything in the world, and the fight between men over who gets to use this machine is what this game is about. Even combat adds to the narrative. When you are in combat with important characters, there may be information that they say or show to you that adds to it. Something else that adds to the worldbuilding is the fact that you can interact with npcs, like at a shanty or bar. There might be people who want to pick fights with you, or you can sit down and play a game with someone.

Majority of games I like to play are driven by narratives and a personal favorite of mine is Bravely Default. It’s an rpg turn based game that was inspired by a game from the Final Fantasy series (same company, different series). So far it has one direct sequel and another addition to the series.

Gameplay is about as simple of a turn-based rpg gets, but it can be heavily exploited. The main characters fight bosses that have the game built upon story arcs and backgrounds in order to gain jobs that will help out later in fights. There is the function of stopping times. Stopping time in fights allows characters to break the damage limit from 9,999 to 999,999 and even send that damage to other players through the street/spot pass system the 3DS has. Sending and receiving different versions of the main characters would later be important in the story, but in the early game it’s seen as a handy tool to have when needing extra help on a boss.

Bravely Default takes place in a fictional world of Luxendarc where there are 5 main areas with 4 of them housing a crystal of either water, fire, earth, and wind. The main characters are made up of Agnes, Tiz, Edea, and Ringabel. Their main goal is to awaken the 4 crystals in order to prevent world destruction. At least that is what Agnes is told by a fairy named Airy. I personally started gaining emotional attachment to these characters as they face personal struggles as well as enjoy comedic turn of events. The game values character relationships and character thoughts through the use of party chat in which you can watch a short conversation between the main party about either a boss you had just defeated or events that had occurred throughout the game. It gives a sense of what the world is like through the character’s eyes and provides background on the area without needing to leaf through a glossary. It builds up into the final few hours of the game when it starts to get repetitive and the feeling of “if what you are doing is correct” starts to settle in. Beginning of the game, you have a journal that have strange passages and drawings in them with no correlation to the main casts. The game will start giving you more information about Airy’s true nature, how to break the crystal and that the notes in the journal were confirmations of the information holding true. At this point the player is left to either act upon this information or to follow through with whatever Airy says. Hence why there are two endings, a true ending and the idealized ending. 

My most favorite narrative game would be Majora’s Mask, this entry in the Legend of Zelda series is the most off-mold of the titles. Link has arrived in the land of Termina and it is going to be destroyed in 3 in game days, which to the player takes 54 minutes. Obviously you cannot save the world in under an hour so you are given the power to reset time, and with it the entirety of the world. Your money, your arrows, your actions, your progress, is all reset except for a few key items, but most importantly your knowledge is NOT reset. After a number of time loops you start to learn the inhabitants’ routines, schedules, hopes and dreams, and that is the most important aspect of the game to me. The game isn’t really about saving the world and being the hero, it’s about getting to know the people and learn that everyone has problems and everyone reacts to the end of the world differently. Every time you reset the loop everyone will forget you, even the dungeons will reset, so you need to figure out what you need to do to gain the power to save these people. However, not everyone CAN be saved. There are multiple people you interact with who are going to die or have already died. This game is considered to be the most adult Zelda game there has been, there are multiple instances of characters with depression, kidnappings, alien abduction, and abandonment. The aspect of the time-loop introduces something no other game I’ve played does, a sense of futility. Everyone you help, or hurt, will forget you. I would argue that the strategic gameplay drives the narrative in this case, you have to prioritize what you will do, where you will go, who you will help, each loop to create progress in the game. Each major location in the game is dealing with some sort of tragedy in their own way, in the jungle monkeys have kidnapped a princess, the rock-people are waiting for their elder to save them (who you have found frozen solid) from an eternal winter, the fish-people have had their young stolen, and the canyon area is experiencing the dead rising. The most important though is the hub town, here everyone is dealing with the impending apocalypse in their own way, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and on the last day acceptance. The game is really about how people deal with grief, and how everyone experiences it differently. This game may be my favorite game of all time.

Brayden Sathrum

4/4/23

DTC 354

I enjoy playing many narrative games, but one of my favorites is Spiritfarer. In it, you are a young girl with her cat who are chosen to be ferrymasters that find spirits and fulfill their final wishes, eventually taking them to the afterlife. Spiritfarer has a relaxing atmosphere despite the narrative and is often defined as a “cozy” game. A part of the management genre, the goals revolve around building up your boat with new rooms, collecting resources, exploring islands, and fulfilling quests. Besides mini-games, there are no time-sensitive tasks and no way to get a game over. The music and art style are soft and playful, adding to the peaceful ambience.

The plotline mainly comes from the spirits that you meet and bring onto your boat as you travel. Each one is a different animal with their own unique personality and backstory that you learn about as you complete quests for them. The conflicts in the story are minimal or have occurred in the past and are explored through dialogue. Every island adds lore to the spirit world and creates a more immersive experience. In these ways, the mechanics help drive the storyline forward. However, the game itself hinges on the plot and characters, as it is the reason behind all of the tasks you must complete.

I think Spiritfarer is a strong example of weaving storytelling with gameplay. Both sides are intertwined and illustrate how video games can explore complex themes like death. Overall, I think Spiritfarer is a lesser known model of how a game can tell a strong story.

Storytelling in video games has a rich history. To this day, games are proving themselves in the world of narrative, standing alongside the media giants of television and movies.

A recent personal standout is Elden Ring. The player experience begins with an intro cinematic that presents some of the lore of the game. Grandiose and mystifying, the cinematic tells of the shattered Elden Ring, slain gods, and introduces a group of powerful Tarnished characters, the player being the last of them. It sets the whole game narrative in motion brilliantly.

Once the gameplay begins, the player slowly reveals more of the story. Bits of lore are discovered through item descriptions and dialogue. As the player moves through the game, they push the story forward as well, as defeating bosses has an impact on the world and progression. This adds to the beautiful sense of wonder established by the cinematic, and only seems to grow.

I want to give props to another smaller game, too. The storytelling in Journey is also beautiful and engaging. This game has no dialogue or text, which leaves the worldbuilding much more up to the imagination. In this game, you play as a humanoid creature set to wander around a desert and various other environments. The beauty in this game’s worldbuilding is in its openness to interpretation. The player sees a few different cutscenes in the game when moving between areas. These are wordlessly shown in animated scenes reminiscent of cave paintings or something similar. A sense of the ancient world that was there before the player emerges through the game experience. Wonder and beauty are what pique the interest in this game’s story.

I haven’t played many video games, but I have watched other people stream their gameplays. One of those games that caught my attention was Undertale, an indie video game with an innovative story that allows the player to have choices that will impact the game’s outcome. The storytelling and the characters are memorable, especially when there are multiple endings. The story follows a human child that falls into an underground world, a place full of monsters that were sealed underground away from human society. Is the player’s choice to decide if they want to fight the monsters or become friends with them. The gameplay uses the character’s soul to fight those monsters, the player needs to avoid the enemy’s attacks and decide if they want to fight or spare them.

The interactions between the player and the characters can become either comedic or horrible, especially if the player decides to fight the monsters. There are also puzzles in the game that you need to solve to be able to get through. What amazed me about this game was that saving, loading, and resetting are both game and story mechanics. Which makes the story more interesting.

Not only is the story engaging, but it has many secrets that the player will have to figure out along the way. The character designs are unique to each character, which can be memorable to the player. The design goes well with their personalities, and even though these characters don’t have voice acting, the sounds that are used to imitate their voice is a lovely touch.

tommy o

Narrative games are my favorite so it was hard to pick. BioShock is among my top hits list, though. The world of BioShock is the crumbling undersea remains of the city of “Rapture” built by a rich elitist to escape the confines, and the rules, of the world above water. As a genre it’s been labeled an “Immersive Sim.” It could be confused for a shooter game but that is only a navigation mechanic.

The game itself is driven by the exploration of the underwater city that is collapsing under the weight of age and ruin after the fall of the society of social and scientific elites that founded it. And, through genetic experiments outlawed on the surface, its “evolved” citizens devolved into the remnant monsters left behind that are so hungry for the chemicals that course through their bodies that they cannibalize one another in order to get more to sustain their genetic enhancements. The story of Rapture, and its founder, is discovered by exploring the sunken tomb of the once magnificent city. Discovering what they learned through their experimentation, what they created in themselves, and the madness they found which splintered and destroyed their society.

Game play is tied to the story from the moment the main character crashes in the ocean and swims to a beacon in the middle of the sea, to his discovery of a way down to this first miraculous then eventually horrifying place. Yes, you have to shoot and puzzle your way through the sections of the city, but this is all driven by the unfolding of narrative which includes the discovery of two rival groups fighting over the control and fate of Rapture and illuminated by discoveries such as audio logs that reveal pieces of the puzzle of how Rapture came into being, who the two groups are, and how the city came to fall. All of this while the player negotiates the rotting and cracking structures as they fail to keep the seawater at bay and threaten to collapse entirely in the midst of fighting through the remnant population.

These are the elements that push and pull the player on through the story, the physical collapse of sections of the city, and the discovery of new information that slowly reveals the story of it all.

tommy o

I chose “Book from the Ground: from point to point,” by Bing Xu because it uses only indices and icons, which was very off-putting at first. I kind of hated it. When I have such a strong reaction to something I tend to want to explore it more because it has communicated something and I want to understand my response to it. It took a little work to get into the story.

When I took the time to focus on the story it was very clear and needed no words (symbols) to interpret it, and no sound. I respect the work that it takes to make a clear narrative this way as I am already fascinated by visual stories using a series of still images juxtaposed with one another to tell a tale. How do the signs help the narration? In this case the signs are the narration. How do they help the presentation of the story? For me, it was intriguing, like breaking a secret code in order to understand what on the surface is first a bit annoying but then at the same time ordered and mysterious. The presentation of indices and icons sucked me into the idea of a secret. I enjoyed this work.

How might I use different types of signs in my own project? As I see it, my inclination toward the visual is directly related to signs especially in the use of icons in the form of realistic imagery. I’m already doing it and am enjoying continuing the work.

I think that this introduction to the difference in symbol vs index vs icon is blowing my mind a little bit. I really loved The Forever Club. I think the videos recorded of the characters were an example of an index in this story, as you could see the actual person/thing being referred to. In their messages and emails, icons with their faces were shown to help the viewer/reader understand who was speaking, and symbols were used in the form of text to tell the story. The use of signs in this story helped to create the narrative of a group of friends who willingly go along with one of their antics, who regularly craves chaos in a world that is so often disappointing and boring. While the friends know that, they humor her, as it brings them entertainment as well. Through the use of signs, you learn about the characters, their backgrounds, and their relationship with each other. I loved how many different signs were used, email, text, the front page of a newspaper, flyers, memes, emojis, videos, animations, etc. There was no shortage of methods used to tell this story. It showed me that you really have the whole world at your fingertips when it comes to telling a story, it’s just a matter of using them in harmony. I think this story did that very well

Sammy

(I’m sorry for the watermark, this was the only decent video editing program I could get on my laptop and can’t afford to pay for the premium)

https://youtu.be/XyEvXwPiFMc

Hello! Hope you enjoy!

Sammy

Hello everyone,

The game that I am going to be talking about in this post is the 2019 science-fiction game “Outer Wilds” (not to be confused with the RPG, “The Outer Worlds”). Outer Wilds is a space exploration game. You play as a young astronaught. It’s your first day on the job, and you’ve been given a small ship that you can use to explore the solar system.

At the start of the game you are free to explore the entire solar system in any order. You can go anywhere you want, and the game does not force you to go down a linear path. After exploring the system for about 20 minutes, the solar system’s star goes supernova, killing you and everyone in the solar system. You then wake up again–where you started at the beginning of the day–realizing that you are stuck in a time loop, and that you need to explore the solar system to figure out how to break the loop.

Outer Wilds is essentially a “space archeologist simulator,” as when you explore the solar system you will uncover ancient alien ruins full of texts for you to decipher and artifacts for you to find. The story is completely tied to the gameplay, and without the story the gameplay would not work. This is because the ancient civilization is tied to the time loop and you need to discover who they were, why they came to the solar system, and how they are connected to the time loop in order to break it.

This game always gives me a sense of wonder and awe every time I play it. The feeling of piecing together the narrative yourself by exploring the various planets and connecting the dots together is nothing short of amazing.

– Gibson

A couple video games that stand out to me in terms of storytelling are God Of War (2018) and God of War: Ragnarok. These are reboots of the beloved franchise God of War that was first release on the Playstation 2. The reboots take the story to the land of the Norse instead of Greece. Kratos, the main character used to be a God killing monster that was consumed by rage. Now that he has moves away from Greece, he has a son names Atreus that he has to raise on his own and teach him not to be like he was. This story revolves around a dad and his son and the gameplay reflects that. Atreus is a great combat companion and he can hold his own. Every main quest and side quest directly influence this main theme of Father and Son. Kratos does the main portion of the fighting but that doesn’t mean his son can’t. Atreus can support his father but stunning enemies and sometimes even defeat them. Over the game’s main storyline, both father and son trust each other more and more, directly strengthening their own powers outright. The next game Ragnarok furthers this narrative by showing Atreus’ need for independence and Krato’s journey to trust and let him go. Overall, these games have a great narrative that is compelling. It also ties in all of its content into that main central theme of father and son. This is what the future of gaming will be and it is an exciting to see where it goes!