Creativity is at the heart of the human experience. We are expressive creatures by nature, forming communities and making art to show we’re all feeling something so powerful in this world that we have to create something new to show that. After many millennia of existence, that hopeful expression ended at video games.
Though many different talents go into creating games, and other mediums as well, of course, writing falls at the heart of so many of them. Words can exist on a page, but what do they mean? Games have oftentimes struggled to express themselves in more typical writing alone, but writers of other mediums could at times learn from how games themselves utilize writing so uniquely.
Remedy has never shied from the inspirations behind their works. David Lynch sits at the forefront of them, and other crime thrillers and noirs as well.Alan Wakeis seen as the ultimate achievement of the studio, blending the very act of writing into the storytelling of the game itself.
Take the original game for example. It is a story Alan has written himself, and as such you can gather the pages of his manuscript to reveal to you what comes next. Yet rather than ruining the surprise, this just adds to the surrealism of it all instead. It’s a fascinating confidence.
9Pyre
For Those Want The Outcome Known From The Beginning
Supergiant’s crown jewel, Pyre is already a marvel of a game but a marvel of effective writing as well. Blending sports games with visual novels and RPGs, it is a game unlike many others, and each and every action is made by you with full awareness of what they will achieve.
You take the role of a Reader, yet you are also the one writing this tale. Every match you win (or don’t), every person you free (or doom), every waning moon and waxing sun, you know the outcome of it all. You just need to decide what’s best. Having such a clarity of writing that lets you understand a character and their actions upon hypothetical decisions is a form of writing that deserves to be praised.
TheMetrogames are renowned in the survival horror genre, blending claustrophobic metro tunnels with spare open areas that can easily leave you disoriented. It is a well-known fact thatthey are adaptations of the Metro novels, though less discussed is why exactly they are such effective translations across two mediums.
What the Metro games achieve so well is distilling the core themes of the books into a game setting. Certain events change, others are removed, and aspects are lengthened or swapped around. They are in many ways transformative, yet retain what makes it work. They show that writing is more than the words on the page, but what meaning those words hold.
7Odin Sphere
For Those Wanting To Play Across Mediums
Launched by Vanillaware in 2007, Odin Sphere is a sidescrolling beat ‘em up RPG with a strikingly unique style. It is presented as a series of stories all read by a child from a storybook from a narrative perspective, yet are rendered as stage plays from a gameplay view.
It is a beautiful game visually, though wastes nothing when it comes to using its style to depict its tale. Fairy tales and folklore are remembered less for the pure events depicted within but more for the grandiosity afforded to them by the narrator. Any tale can be grand and memorable with the right depiction, and Odin Sphere shows that tremendously.
Some would write offCrusader Kingsas a game effective at telling a story, but that would be denying it the credit it is due. Though a finely crafted tale can be a gorgeous thing to witness, giving players freedom to create the story they want can be just as rewarded.
Regarded by some as a storytelling engine, Crusader Kings doesn’t exist with any narrative goal but the one you set for yourself. It’s a great example of how tools can create a wonderful story when the writer gives the reader even to push them to do the things they want.
5Where The Water Tastes Like Wine
For Those Who Want The Prose To Be The Heart
Stories are the lifeblood of our existence. No one exists without history, and to deny someone their history is to deny they ever existed at all. This is a fact, and one that Where The Water Tastes Like Wine understands.
Taken in a literal sense,the game is about walking. You travel across the US, gathering stories from strangers all along the way. Then you pass those same stories on to others. The story is no longer yours, yet it does not belong to who told it first, either. Stories are formed by who tells them and who heeds them, and that usage is an amazing study of how to write characters without saying anything about themselves at all.
Ah, but of course the game inspired by a famous Tabletop RPG had to be featured. Not only isBaldur’s Gate 3an amazing game in its own right, but it also shows in the digital realm the strengths of something like DnD, and tabletop RPGs as a whole.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will always reach the same ending, no matter the player. You will have permutations, and your impressions will be different, but the end will, ultimately, be the same. So what’s the magic here? It’s the sheer ability of the game’s narration to be able to account for just about any way you may have reached that ending and still have it narratively work. That is a monumental achievement in writing.
Tunictook the world by storm. Heavily inspired by the likes of early Zelda games and the manual that came with them to help you on your journey, Tunic expects the same of you. Oh, except the manual isn’t in English.Or any real languagein the world, actually. You have to piece it together yourself.
There’s a confidence exhibited here. The confidence that players won’t simply drop your game when even the tutorials aren’t in a language anyone can read. Though the manual will become more legible as the game goes on, for much of it players will simply have to intuit meaning. It’s a brazen tactic, but one that should be noted for the satisfaction it can offer those who interact with it.
Wildermythis a game about legends. Whose legends? Your own, of course! All legends must start somewhere, and that is the core function of Wildermyth. Over the time of your adventure, you will play as countless generations, building the legacy of your family, your friends, and the world around you.
At its core, Wildermyth is a game where you make the story. Events will repeat over time, yet they take on a new context with your own growing legend. It is this contextualization of the world that makes it so effective, and that is an important method of storytelling to note.
In many ways,The Stanley Parableisn’t a game that wants you to play it. It wants to tell you a story, and you keep going out of your way to disrupt the narrator. It’s like upsetting your DM during a game and they decide to punish your character in retaliation.
The Stanley Parable’s narrator of courses fails to keep you contained. It is a game thriving on its own meta-contextual awareness. You are Stanley, and you are not. You are being told a story, and making your own. You are a nuisance, and you are the plot device. It’s a wonderful way of looking at the bones of a story and what actually makes it and how very, very easy it is to stray off-course.
