See also Beware The Slenderman Review True Crime and Urban Myth Collide Basically, if a game starts with the protagonist having a cute or romantic moment with his love interest, it’s a pretty safe bet that the love interest will be in a coffin (or the plot equivalent of a coffin) before the tutorial is over. But as demand for higher quality video game narratives has grown, the industry has been rising up on wobbly, coltish legs to try and meet the challenge.įirewatch initially elects one of the cheapest and most common tactics for creating character impetus: give the protagonist a wife or girlfriend (it’s almost always a wife or girlfriend – husbands and boyfriends are the extremely rare exception to the rule), spend the minimum amount of time possible establishing a relationship, and then kill/maim/kidnap the wife or girlfriend. After all, it’s not as though this task is a prerequisite of the format Tetris didn’t require the player to really care about the wellbeing of the L-block, and when Mario falls down a pit in Super Mario World the player’s anguish is directed at the fact that they have to start the level all over again, not at poor Mario’s demise (no offense, Mario).
Sure enough, in no time at all Julia gets struck down with early onset dementia and, depending on the player’s choice, either gets shipped off to her family in Australia or shipped off to a care home.Īs a relatively young medium, video games are still trying to get to grips with the science of eliciting emotion from the player – at least, an emotion that isn’t aggression or excitement or some combination of the two. Over the next ten minutes or so, the text prologue hurries through Julia and Henry’s relationship with a series of touching anecdotes (they decide to get a rescue dog from the pound, they talk about having children etc.) until it’s glaringly obvious that the whole exercise is leading up to Julia dying or having something equally horrible happen to her. Fortunately she is charmed by this, and soon she and Henry are dating. The player is told the story of how they meet Julia, and embarrass themselves in front of her by being drunk. Julia is the future wife of the game’s protagonist, Henry.
You Are Reading : Firewatch Review Grappling With the Challenge of Video Game Storytellingįirewatch, the new mystery exploration game from Campo Santo, opens with a text prologue in which the player is introduced to Julia. Firewatch Review: Grappling With the Challenge of Video Game StorytellingĬampo Santo’s new game Firewatch casts players as a middle-aged man who volunteers as a fire lookout in a cast Wyoming forest.
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