About the nomination
In this nomination, we celebrate games in which the plot and/or the method of presenting it is much more priority than the gameplay directly. In such projects, a strong story can outweigh any disadvantages.
Fifth place – a Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale gameplay was quite average: in some places the action sags, in places, on the contrary, rushes gallop. But the incredible atmosphere of dying Europe with an easy share of mysticism is doing his job. And most importantly – we see all this with a pure and irritable gaze of two children who grow up before our eyes. Sometimes the “director” tries to catch up with the player horror with banal and hackneyed methods like mountains of corpses or whirlwinds from rats (sic!).
But the game clings anyway, sorry for the pun, completely not childishly an amazing and terrible story about children who are forced to be cruel in response to the cruelty of adults. If this was not a game, but a book – it would have turned out a mix of "Lord of Flies" and the novels of Viktor Hugo with an easy admixture of Lovecraft. And yes, it is difficult to recall at least another game in which the children were so convincing and alive (including vulnerable), and did not look like a “younger version of adults” who can do everything and look at a nightmare that reigning around them with cold calmness.
Fourth place – AFTERPARTY
The ability to build a story that surprises and touches, and give it so that the player does not miss a minute, studio Night School Demonstrated in Oxenfree. And in AFTERPARTY The developers were able to repeat the advantages of the predecessor, not repeating in general. It was easy to turn the story of students who died https://sister-site.org/giant-wins/ mild and who fell into hell, into a horror or tearful melodrama. However, Night School told her with irony and thin black humor, without canceling the ambiguity, depth and wise thoughts.
Characters, like local hell, are opened gradually. Interesting and ambiguous ones came out that young sinners, that demons living in a bright neon underworld, where the noise of discos and drunken parties does not subside until the morning. The shy Milo and the stubborn Lola will have to make a complex moral choice more than once; And although the general plot canvas in any case will come to a happy finale, only the player decides what conclusions the heroes will draw from what happened and which cockroaches will be thrown out of their head.
With repeated passage, there is every chance of getting a new plot, choosing another wig and a way to achieve goals: what are only hellish cocktails that open Milo and Lole new remarks in dialogs, making them bolder, rude or smart! Looking at the local swill, I just want to try everything-the benefit of Afterparty is a little longer than Oxenfree and runs in 7-8 hours.
Third place – Judgment
When developing Judgment Scriptwriters Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Faced with a difficult task: enter into a reckless world Yakuza deliberately serious heroes and tell a gloomy, plausible story. And they coped with her perfectly! Having pushed back the jokes, absurd situations and romance to the background, they managed to create a tense detective with original turns and unobtrusive morality.
Judgment holds the intrigue until the finals, at an ideal pace, revealing new circumstances of the investigation and simultaneously revealing the characters of the characters. Police and Yakuza, detectives and lawyers, informants and noble street hooligans, are full of actors here, and the story of each of them is carefully woven into a common plot canvas. No extra details and not shooting rifles: the connections between events that at first seemed to be unimportant or introduced purely for drama are obvious to the finale. And the heroes during the passage become practically native. The cinematography of the narrative and a talented acting game that rare television procedures can boast of this is a lot.
Second place – Telling Lies
In 2014, Sam Barlow, author Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, released Her Story – a unique game consisting of hundreds of videos and search line. The rules are simple: you can search for any word spoken in the video, but the system will give out only four chronologically the first result. And this means that the player must independently delve into the essence of the narrative and try more accurate, specific requests. Remember the names and topics of conversations, make a chronology of what is happening in the head, to carry out, in fact, the work of the detective. Unique experience.
For five years that have passed from the Her Story release, no one else began to develop her ideas, so Barlow himself took up this Telling Lies. By mechanics – in fact, the same thing, but by setting – heaven and earth. Her Story was about a single woman during interrogation; Telling Lies consists of records of video calls of four people throughout their lives.
In other words, in this game we have to compare dialogs, the communication of two characters – to follow who, with whom, what is talking about; who is sincere and who is lying; What will this lead in the future. We see heroes in a variety of situations, often very everyday and even intimate ones – and their conversations are so vividly written and blestly played that it is impossible not to believe. Telling Lies not only gives us another rare opportunity to reveal ourselves as a detective through a search engine, but also shows that a video with living actors still has a huge undisclosed potential in games.
First place – Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium The devilishly smart. The script simply shouts that he was written by aesthetes who thought about each situation and every line of dialogs for more than one year. The concept is already ambitious: what if every emotion of a prick-loser will have its own voice? That if the nervous system of the protagonist, exhausting from a terrible hangover, can intervene in the interrogation of the witness? Or, for example, his clumsy tie with an equally loud character?
In words, this idea sounds too grandiose, but by some miracle it works. With all its literary talent and ornate game with words and topics, studio ZA/UM For a minute he does not forget what story wants to tell. Disco Elysium is a story about a sick, broken person who lives (survives) in the same sick and broken world as he himself. From the inside, the load of his own mistakes and the forgotten past tearing it out, and on the outside – a bite for power, where each faction is not averse.
At the same time, the developers do not even expect that you will come out of the water dry. They know that you will be mistaken more than once, but do not punish these mistakes, but beat them – as a master leading the party in D&D. When the hero proves that he is a truly brilliant detective, you are worse for him; когда он творит абсурдные вещи и спотыкается о все грабли на своём пути — над ним смеёшься. In principle, it is impossible to play “wrong” in Disco Elysium: in any case, you will be waiting for the most thoughtful, inventive and memorable story since the time Planescape: Torment.
The main thing is do not listen to a tie. He does not understand the devil in women.
And what narrative games this year you remember? What stories sunk into the soul? Write in the comments!
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