The way Rebel Wolves promoted The Blood of Dawnwalker and its myriad choices got me thinking: What does it really mean for your choices to matter in a video game? Typically, we think it’s a good use of branching narratives when you have a properly big, dramatic effect on how things play out or when you have hundreds of endings. Just look at how so much attention on Baldur’s Gate 3 focused on the endings or, further back in time, how everyone tends to ignore the smaller ways the Mass Effect trilogy changed in favor of looking at the restrictive outcomes in Mass Effect 3.
Large-scale narrative branches are engaging for a reason. They’re satisfying, and they make you feel a sense of influence over events and characters you care about. Like with video game romance, however, they have become somewhat stale and predictable in form. So for this list, I decided to look at three games that use branching narratives in bolder and unexpected ways.
3
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies
Image: ZA/UM via Polygon
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is the rare piece of interactive media where your choices matter not just for how they influence the story, but for how they shape your actions, too. Hershel, the protagonist of the piece, is a spy. Or, was a spy. A series of catastrophic incidents happened, and she finds herself decommissioned, in a room with a comatose person, and without any idea how she got here. There’s a very dangerous game afoot in the fictional town of Portofiro, Zero Parades‘ setting, and your job is figuring it out and possibly even finding redemption. Maybe. If you can manage it.
Like its spiritual predecessor Disco Elysium, Zero Parades has standard CRPG elements like persuasion and knowledge, but unlike standard CRPGs, you’re doing a lot more with them other than picking locks and lying to folks. With higher points in certain social or mental skills, you have a better chance of passing certain checks in conversations that unlock entirely new perspectives on what’s happening. Sometimes, you just get a bit of extra lore. That’s usually like the consolation prize in video games, but Zero Parades‘ impeccable writing means these moments are just as rewarding as stumbling onto a new story path.
On other occasions, you fall down a rabbit hole of madness and form a bond with a drunken businessman over your shared delusions about the idea of a goddess trampling you underfoot (for example). Which sounds fun, and it is, until your delusion stat maxes out and you die. The same can happen with fatigue and anxiety stats. Just like real life!
Balancing your more extreme decisions with less tumultuous ones is a big part of Zero Parades, but whatever choice you make, it always takes a “yes, and” approach. Even when what you’ve done seems very wrong, possibly even fatal, you nearly always have a way forward. It might just be very, very different from the path you thought you’d take. It keeps you in a state of perpetual uncertainty, like you have no idea what the right thing to do is and just have to wing it and hope for the best. In other words, you’re thinking and behaving just like Hershel. I can’t think of any other game that uses choices to let you embody a character on such an important level — not even the (also excellent) Disco Elysium.
2
Slay the Princess
Image: Black Tabby Games/Serenity Forge
The duo at Black Tabby love pushing the boundaries of choice-driven narratives, so in the middle of making the massive Scarlet Hollow, they set out to do something more contained and experimental with Slay the Princess. You’re a valiant warrior, tasked with entering a cabin, descending to its basement, and slaying the princess imprisoned there. She is, the narrator assures you, quite dangerous. Not human at all, but a fiendish monster adopting the guise of an innocent maiden. What you do from here ripples out across the rest of the game in wildly unforeseen ways. Even refusing to enter the cabin is a valid choice, one that unlocks a whole new branch of the story.
When folks talk about games where choices matter, the conversation typically heads in one direction: how many endings there are. It’s the logical endpoint of wondering how your choices will or won’t matter. However, it overlooks other, equally important ways stories change based on how you interact with them. Slay the Princess embodies the best of both philosophies. The many and varied branches eventually resolve into a fixed set of potential endings, but the outcome is only half the story, or not even half, really. Each path — even the ones that share the same outcome — unfolds around some new facet of the situation, or yourself, or the princess, or a combination of all those things.
You make your choices guided solely by your instincts and what you’re encouraged to believe based on other interactions. (E.g., if the princess murders you brutally in one run, you’re a lot less likely to believe her protestations of innocence the next time.) It gives these branches an intensity that’s unique to Slay the Princess and utterly impossible to have in a story where you’re just wondering who lives or dies based on what you do.
Scarlet Hollow, Black Tabby’s horror VN-slash-RPG-lite, is also very much worth your attention. It’s technically not finished yet, even after five very substantial chapters, which is the only reason it’s not on this list. But if you like good writing, unusual horror, good writing, top-notch art, a fresh take on romance, and good writing, you absolutely need to play it.
1
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Image: Too Kyo Games/Aniplex
You don’t even make that many choices in Last Defense Academy, but the ones you do make explode the game. Sometimes almost literally. The gist of it is that a group of kids get whisked away to a weird school after cuddly-looking murder monsters invade Tokyo. A strange ghost guy saved them and is now their headmaster-slash-military commander, and instead of lessons, they get blood magic that grants them superpowers so they can fight the monsters. That’s just in the first 30 minutes.
For 30 hours, it forces you down a linear path with no branches, and the game ostensibly ends. Then it’s back to the start, only this time, you can change how events unfold. It introduces this feature in a very dramatic way that signals just how big your choices are now: A single action transforms the entire storyline and the lives and trajectories of everyone in the school. Not always for the best, either.
It’s like developer Too Kyoo took expectations about choice-driven games and decided to push them to their most extreme conclusions in every way imaginable. Last Defense Academy has 100 endings, and none of them are “canon.” The absurd joke endings — there’s a whole tree of story paths considered the “humor” path — are just as valid as the more serious and traumatic ones, even if they occasionally outstay their welcome. Who lives, who dies, and whether the ending is happy or sad all become moot points, replaced by variations of “what the hell could possibly happen next?” You’re making the choices, but you have absolutely no control over what they lead to.
Imbuing a single choice with that much power and influence while taking most of the control from the player is just such an unexpected, even radical, thing to do in interactive media. It almost bankrupted Too Kyoo, so projects of that scale probably aren’t the wisest ideas. But the way it defies expectation and turns the established relationship between the game and the player on its head is just superb and a big reason why it was one of our favorite games last year.
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