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Lets get a few things established first.
Games and story are not mutually inclusive. Plenty of fantastic, compelling and exciting games have no plot at all and sports games are naturally a large part of the gaming marketplace.
Likewise games with a narrative don’t need plot, characterisation or any of those elements to be fleshed out to still be good games. There are numerous examples, I don’t think I need to go into them, but the highest scoring games year in and year out are often criticised for having a shallow or nonsensical plot.
But there's no denying that games have evolved as a narrative form since the first time someone thought to ask why exactly those invaders from space were invading in the first place. There are games out there with above average stories to grasp the player and hold their attention and encourage them to play. Not to mention games like Heavy Rain and Alan Wake just around the corner that promise to play like mystery and horror novels come to life.
For games to really flourish when it comes to story telling, in my opinion, just crafting a good plot to centre your game around isn’t enough. You need to use the medium of games and the potential non linearity of their structure to create a new way to tell a story.
Well, in no particular order, here’s seven games that stand out in my memory for having brilliant well executed storytelling and actually make use of the medium.
(Spoiler warning: This is your one and only warning, we are going to be talking about the plot and events as they unfold in games and it’s hard not to do so without discussing spoilers so if you haven’t played a game and what to remain spoiler free you might want to skip ahead)
1. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus
These two can be wedged together because they come from the same creative team and the games are, it’s revealed during Shadow’s conclusion, actually linked together. Team Ico use gameplay and setting to tell melancholy fantasy tales about tragedy, responsibility and sacrifice.
But what’s most impressive is that the games manage to tell their story with barely any dialogue and very little information. It’s almost all accomplished by visuals and gameplay and in a staggering feat for game storytelling it really works. The characters and events of the games stay with you for months (or in my case years) after the games have reached their conclusion when, honestly, you know about as much about the little horned boy Ico as you do about the crew of the brave triangle at the centre of asteroids. But the atmosphere and the mood of the game sucks you right in and you absolutely must find out what happens in these games when you play them. Think of your fondest memory of a fantasy film from your childhood, maybe it was Krull or The Dark Crystal, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus both outdo those experiences.
Team Ico accomplish this feat primarily by keeping the story lines of both games relatively simple, they draw on classic fairy tale concepts that anyone who ever had a childhood or saw a Disney film is probably familiar with. Not to say that Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are in any way reminiscent of the syrupy treatments Disney gives to classic stories, quite the opposite, tragedy and grief seem to be constants in Team Ico games. Yet they still manage to present a world that feels enchanting and mysterious and characters that are engaging while telling us almost nothing. If there's a bar for storytelling in games then Team Ico are the ones setting it.
2. The Darkness
Here’s a game with a plot that will simply rip your heart out. Seems only fair as you spend a good deal of the game literally ripping the hearts out of other people. The game is another stellar outing from the fine folks at Starbreeze studios and based on an American comic book series. While the comic book was exploitative gore and boobies with plenty of black humour, the game is decidedly unhumorous, uber violent, but with a mushy, tender centre. A lot like a burnt steak, in fact thats the best analogy for The Darkness ever, The Darkness is burnt steak.
You play as young mafia enforcer Jackie Estacado, an orphan that has found his way into organised crime and seems to be unnaturally gifted at killing people. Unfortunately his Uncle Paulie, a paranoid sadist, has decided to cut Jackie out of the picture courtesy of a bomb on his 21st birthday. Unfortunately for Paulie your birthday is also the day you manifest the Estacado family curse, an alien power called The Darkness that grants you all sorts of crazy powers, including surviving getting blown out a window.
What anchors your character to humanity is his relationship with childhood sweetheart Jenny. They grew up in the orphanage together and as adults look after each other. Jackie trying to protect Jenny from the world he’s immersed in and Jenny struggling to convince him he’s a good person at heart and not the monster she isn't aware he has become. The couples moments in the game don’t feel like a tacked on romance, they feel like the centre of the story, the heart around which all the mafia, supernatural and side story plot lines spin.
The conclusion has to go down as one of the best and worst conclusions to a games storyline ever. I’ve heard wildly diverging responses to the plots conclusion, both condemnation and admiration. To me that’s a sign of a damn good story coming to a conclusion, that it can create such a difference of opinion.
3. Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 has a storyline that will screw your head of your shoulders, scoop out your brain and replace it with a rusty bucket of dirty water. When they say adult concepts on the box they aren’t kidding, we’ve got murder, euthanasia, child abuse, suicide, it’s an adult concepts smorgasbord. The developers have even pointed out that the creepy, sexually suggestive manner of the some of gruesome monsters in the game are manifestations of the main characters James subconscious sexual frustration while caring for his terminally ill wife. Yes, it really is messed up.
The Silent Hill games started off with terrific storylines, hitting the high mark with Silent Hill 2 and then sadly sliding in quality until the recent rubbishy Silent Hill: Homecoming. Silent Hill 2 saw you playing as everyman (or so you imagined) character James, recent widower after his wife Mary dies of a long debilitating illness. This makes things a bit confusing when he receives a letter from Mary asking that he come visit her at Silent Hill. Cue fog and creepy music.
The game uses a number of psycholigcal elements to keep the engaging plot stuck to you like a slimey film over your skin and that's pretty much how you feel as you control James. Especially when you find out this tragic widower isn't quite the every man you thought he was. He has secrets, sinister secrets. As you venture into Silent Hill you come across a few other mysterious strangers that have been summoned by dead relatives and all of them have equally damaged or sinister pasts as well. Most distrubing of all is the enigmatic Maria who looks and acts like a tarted up version of your dead wife and spends her time helping and taunting you in equal measure, frequently getting killed only to reappear again. By the half way point you'll be questioning your characters sanity as well as your own, forever questioning just how much of the events and characters in Silent Hill are reality and how much is happening in your characters head. Subtle variations in your actions throughout the game can lead to one of several different conclusions, some of them answer your question and others leave you feeling hollow. Just how the game wants you to feel.
If you have ever read a good horror novel, the kind that makes you stop and look over your shoulder as you're reading, then you know what kind of story Silent Hill 2 has. That really classic Stephen King style of story that uses violence and gore to lower your expectations and then slips in a big syringe of psychological terror that goes straight to the brain. You might not be a scary game fan, but you owe it to yourself to play Silent Hill 2, it’s the barometer for scary games and it’s the game Heavy Rain and Alan Wake will be most compared to when they finally release.
4. Uncharted 2
Cinematic is used quite often to describe games that provide really sweeping visuals, a tight story line and interesting characters. But somehow comparing Uncharted 2 to a film feels like a disservice when the game is much more exciting and fulfilling than 90% of the crap on at the megaplex. Compare Uncharted 2 to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and you'll find Harrison Ford's rusty antics wanting compared to the digital actions of Nathan Drake.
The first Uncharted: Drakes Fortune was, story speaking, a little unspectacular. Our three heroes Drake, Sully and Elena were a pitch perfect trio of characters for the action adventure style story, especially Drake’s balance of machismo and goofy charm, Naughty Dog put a lot of work into making Drake as much of a smart ass as possible without letting him turn into an asshole and succeeded in fine form. But you need balance and goals to make a story and the bad guys were almost completely forgettable, with the head villain, whose name I can't even remember, getting bumped of before the plot climax and his brooding henchman stepping into the spotlight and completely failing to make an impact as anything other than another guy to kill.
Uncharted 2 is leaps and bounds above its predecessor from its breath taking out of sequence opener, its expanded cast of interesting characters and a story line that keeps you involved without losing any of the pacing. It’s got all the adventure and humour of an Indiana Jones film with a firm base of Bourne style ass kickery. It’s one of those games that should never be made into a film, go ahead and make an Uncharted movie, for sure, but don’t make an Uncharted 2: Among Thieves movie, because it would never fit into a two hour format and taking anything away from it would be a crime. For a game that runs into more than a dozen hours of gameplay the plot still feels lean and like a good book, its impossible to put down when the action gets rolling.
5. Metal Gear Solid
The first and best MGS game on the Playstation 1 was gripping and thrilling for the most part, but even replaying it recently I noticed the game slipping into the ridiculously indulgent cut scenes and lengthy and dull expositions that have me weeping tears of utter boredom. Even Liquid’s meandering sermon atop the Metal Gear’s head before you’re bare chested brawl seems short and to the point compared to some of the stuff in MGS2. Has anyone else mentally blocked out the segment where Snake and Inuit mini gun wielding giant Vulcan Raven talk about ear pulling and eating contests? *shudder*
Metal Gear gets a spot for being high concept, seamlessly mixing state of the art military technologies with bat shit crazy fantasy. Characters like Psycho Mantis and Meryl Silverburgh are among the most recognisable in game history. In reality the game was just a series of terrific moments strung together with a plot that was at times, pretty sketchy. The areas you traipsed through often seemed specifically designed for the bad guy you were confronting there rather than the bad guy having chosen that particlar ground to fight you. There’s no shortage of cringe worthy moments, like Snake and Otacon giggling when they tell each other their real names as they ride of into the sunset. Of course nothing as bad as Otacon confessing to bumping uglies with his step mother while blubbering over his sisters corpse, Raiden and Snake having the worlds most uncomfortable silence in the background, in MGS2.
But, in all honesty, it’s the quirkiness of the series that makes it what it is and why fans keep coming back for more.
6. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
How the hell does GTA get roasted over the coals by game haters for its violence and Splinter Cell: Double Agent gets a pass? For Christ sake, you join a terrorist organisation and to keep you in the good books you need to execute a hostage for them, an innocent man! So much of Double Agent’s shady and sinister story line has stayed with me long after other games have been forgotten. While the gameplay wasn’t a big step up from Chaos Theory and the multiplayer bummed a lot of series fans by pairing down the spy versus mercenary games, the plot in the single player was gripping Alistair Mclean, or Tom Clancy even, espionage action.
Sam Fisher has just had a bad mission, his new partner got himself killed and he’s just been notified that his daughter was killed in a car accident. Fearing he’s going to lose his marbles he requests to be put in deep cover so he can lose himself in his work. After a short stint in prison you manage to insinuate yourself into the Jim Brown Army, radical nationalist nut jobs who want to overthrow the government. So basically you play the entire game between levels inside the enemy base, getting harassed and questioned at every turn. Trying to do enough good deeds for the NSA so they don't think you've gone rogue and enough bad deeds for the JBA so they think you're one of them.
The game gives you several opportunities to make a moral choice, often between betraying your mission and betraying the new friends you’ve made. But usually, whatever you’re choice, people get hurt regardless, so it’s a kick in the nuts either way. Spoiler alert here, but one level has you setting a bomb on a cruise ship, at which point you can choose to sabotage the explosive. When the nasty leader Emil goes to detonates the bomb and nothing happens he gets pretty pissed and accuses the nice lady terrorist whose been helping you out of being the traitor.
Before you can do anything he draws his pistol and executes her. So to recap your choice was to kill dozens of people you didn't know or get someone who had helped you and looked after you killed. Later in the game I realised I was going to need her retina scan to pass a security door and with a growing horror realised I was going to have to go down to the furnace where they kept the corpses and scan her eye ball. That’s not a moment you forget from a game.
7. Grand Theft Auto IV
There’s a reason it’s one of the highest scored games of all time and it’s not the sprawling open world, or improved vehicle physics, or realistic pedestrians. It’s because the Shakespearean cast of characters that make up Serbian immigrant Nico’s world are captivating. Everyone who goes to Liberty City comes away with a different experience because of the game and its versatility.
My favourite thing about the plot is that it can become either a story of revenge or redemption depending on how you want to play things out. GTA IV makes the violence far more nihilistic and gritty than previous GTA games, at times you even feel sorry for Nico when killing is all he seems to do well. He desn't particularly enjoy it, most of the time, but no matter what he tries to do violence seems to seek him out.
The random encounters with characters around the city add another layer to the experience. I’m yet to speak to someone who has had the random encounter with Mrs. Faustin, long after you’ve killed her husband, where she asks you to chase away a man who’s stalking her daughter. I killed him and she was furious by the way.
Plenty of crime movies can be a bit hit and miss when it comes to laying on the gravitas or trying to tell a morality tale with amoral characters, but Rockstar carry it out flawlessly with GTA IV and even leave space in there for some good old black humour. The first Episode, Lost and Damned, was a whole extra weave in the fabric of liberty city, telling a tale about the fragility of brotherhood, the Ballad of Gay Tony seems to have chosen Michel bay inspired explosion and destruction focused plotting over the previous story lines but at least you're never short of some interesting, and often despicable, characters.
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Comments
Just what i needed, Another tease that I havnt played Ico/Shadow of The Colossus...
Good list though mate.
Here's my take on all the games on that list that i have experienced myself:
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus - Ico is the first game that made me want to play anything on a Playstation console. I bought this to play on the girlfriends PS2 and later on got SotC upon release day. There is something magical and deep that i found in both these games and the sole reason for me picking up a 60GB PS3 just in order to complete them (esp. with the third installment - The Last Guardian on its way).
As for my fondest memory of a fantasy film from my childhood, it WAS both Krull as well as The Dark Crystal (now out on Blu-Ray ;) Extra points for linking the games to these movies as i feel they all provoke similar emotions while playing and watching them.
Lorrie, you're missing out mate.
The Darkness - I jumped on the Dark bandwagon a bit in its late cycle, and for some reason just did not get into it. however, reading through your appraisal of it i must agree. I distinctly remember that scene in the apartment with Jenny and the emotions that it provoked within me. When having the option to tell her the truth or 'keep her safe' - i chose the safe option and stayed with her, cuddled on the couch watching the tv. That whole experience i found very 'human' and it probed my mind on what i would do were i in his shoes. That whole experience was and still is very memorable. There are not many games that i can say do the same.
Uncharted and Uncharted 2 - when i first saw my friend load the first Uncharted at my place on his PS3, it took about a whole 5 seconds into the game for me to get hook, line and sinkered! My mouth literally dropped and soon forgot all about the Ghostbusters review that i had to do on his console.
From the cinematics, to the story and the dialogue - brilliant. The full HD and dolby surround didn't hurt either. Finally, a game of this type that i had always dreamed of - a truly great interactive movie and awesome gaming experience. Digital bliss! No more shitty MEGA CD type inspired games for me. Uncharted started the trend and Naughty Dog EXCELLED themselves with the sequel, setting a new standard that way too many companies will fall short of. For may people, this is the sole reason for owning a PS3 - an Uncharted 2 adapter for their TV.
Grand Theft Auto IV - First of all, Kudos for recognizing Niko being Serbian as opposed to being generally mislabeled as a 'token-Russian- bad-guy'. While not having sunk my teeth too deep within the GTA bone, i did experience the gameplay and was sucked into the story from the very beginning. Perhaps its my background and experience from a former Eastern Block country, but i found myself connect to the story and character. There was something that just seemed very real and tragic in a way. Yet, like in life, you either quit or you soldier on. This was the very first GTA that really impressed me (though i did have a little fling with Liberty Cities on the PSP).
Speaking of Niko Bellic, i should post the pics of me dressed as Niko at the ThumbPad / Level 3 End of Year Party last December. I think that may have to be my new ThumbPad profile pic. Mick - check your Inbox! ; )