Thoughts On Inside and Playable Stories

It is easy to view Inside (2016) as "just" a puzzle game with nice graphics. Many seem to overlook how incredibly good the game is at letting you play a story. Inside manages to craft an engaging narrative through gameplay in a way that few other games do. I think this is quite the accomplishment, and I've seen way too little written about it. The playable story is what I love about Inside, so it's what this essay will be all about.

To start things off, it's important to explain what this narrative aspect of Inside is all about. It's very easy to only see narrative in very concrete things like dialogue, the text you read, or in film-like cutscenes. However, when talking about stories in games, we have to stop thinking like this. Instead, we should consider what sort of narrative we experience as we actually play. After all, that's what interactive storytelling is all about.

To make this distinction clear, let's compare Inside to another puzzle platformer. For this discussion I'll pick Unravel (2016) since it's recently released and has many similar aspects to Inside. I don't aim to prove that Unravel is a bad game by any means - I liked it quite a bit myself. It just lacks a number of the narrative elements that Inside has, and by comparing the two, it should be clearer what it is that Inside does so successfully.

Instead of relying on a connecting story to tie things together, Unravel is built more around "flavored mechanics". You have a range of objects that you can interact with and all of these are somehow connected to the environment you are in. For instance, in a level taking place in a garden you can push apples around and use them to get up to otherwise unreachable places. But while these things are nicely woven into the graphical style of the level, there isn't really any narrative connected to them and they don't tell you anything about the game's story when interacted with. Neither are these objects, or your interactions with them, an important part of the narrative that unfolds as you play. They are simply there to serve the central mechanics of the game.

Inside (and Playdead's earlier game Limbo (2010) for that matter) is very different in this regard. The various objects that you interact with are not only part of the world visually, they are key parts of the narrative as well. Interactions that you take part in at one point in the game will be of great importance to later events.

To make this clearer, let's compare how both games start out:

Unravel (see clip here):

Yarny exits a house and enters a garden. He  is surprised by a couple of butterflies, and then runs out of yarn. He lassos a length of string so it gets stuck on a sundial, and by tugging the rope he manages to tip it over. This lets him gain access to more yarn and he can continue moving forward. A box of flowers is in the way and he climbs over it. Two buckets now stand in his way, and by using some tricks with his yarn he manages to get past those as well. There are more obstacles in his path, and by throwing out a piece of string and letting it attach to some glowing objects, he is able to swing across them. He eventually gets to a tree stump that can only be got past by throwing out strings of yarn and swinging forward.

And the game continues like this. It should be pretty evident how, story-wise, nothing really interesting happens. The game simply presents a sequence of obstacles for the player to get past. Also note that there are a bunch of things that doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, why are all the conveniently placed pieces of yarn spread out across the world? And why does Yarny simply not just run around a lot of these objects? In terms of playable story, this game is quite weak.

Again, let me make it totally clear that this does not make Unravel weak as a whole, nor does it mean the game is totally devoid of story. For instance, Unravel has a lot of thematic connections between the photos you can find and the art of the levels. But this is also why Unravel is so interesting to compare to Inside. For while Unravel has story in it, almost none of it is playable. And focusing on playable storytelling is what Inside does best, and what this essay is all about.

Inside (see clip here):

The boy jumps down from some rocks and enters a dark forest. He comes across a fallen tree lying across a chasm and carefully balances across it. Further down the path he comes to a blockage with barbed wire and climbs through it. In the distance a truck can be seen and as the boy comes closer he starts sneaking. It is clear that the boy doesn't want to get spotted. Inside the truck he gets a quick glimpse of some weird figures, but before he can make out what they are a man shuts the door and the truck drives off. 

The boy travels further into the forest; mysterious metallic pods are scattered in the background. One of the pods has a light turned on, and next to it stand two men. As the boy gets near, the men hear him and turn on a flashlight. The boy must now hide behind a rock so the men don't spot him. Eventually they leave and he can continue. He now comes across a long wall with barbed wire on top of it. Someone is obviously trying to keep people out. Various junk is scattered around the wall, and by pushing an old fridge up next to the wall, the boy manages to jump across.

And, for most of the time, this is how Inside continues. Unlike Unravel, there're a lot of interesting story events in this sequence. The protagonist is also an active part of the story, climbing past two obstacles, both of which make it very clear that we are entering a restricted area. So not only do these small puzzles give us an idea of the story (that we are closing in on a place we are not supposed to enter), but by being the one that manages to get past them, the player also becomes the one that moves the story forward.

On a purely mechanical level, there isn't a lot of difference between Inside and Unravel, but the framing of their mechanics is vastly different. From the very moment the game starts, Inside paints a vivid narrative and makes the gameplay a core part in it.

Here are some other examples how Inside manages to craft a playable narrative:

At one point the you come to a platform near a large body of water. A man arrives in a submarine and as he climbs up a ladder, you need to hide. Then at the right moment, when he is distracted talking to a college, you can sneak past and steal the submarine. All of this is framed as a puzzle, so the player must be the one that realizes the man is a threat and that the submarine can work as a means of escape. It's not a very complicated setup, but it makes a big difference in terms of perceived narrative. If the next level had simply placed the player in the submarine, without any playable section in between, the player would just have experienced a change in gameplay. By making the transition (stealing the submarine) into part of the gameplay, the player gets to be an active participant in the transition of the narrative. The player gets their personal story to tell: "I sneaked past a man and stole his submarine". This is a lot more powerful than simply having something like: "And when the level started, I was in control of a submarine". Inside is great at crafting these sorts of transitions. A submarine ride is not just another type of level - it is a new part of a narratively coherent journey.

Another great example is the pig encounter. This scene starts as the player walks past a seemingly dead pig, only to see it twitch. The pig then rises up and starts chasing the player. From this section the player will learn that there are parasites that can take control of animals, which is a bit of lore that will be of great importance later on. The player learns most of this through play. The pig's aggressiveness is apparent from the need to avoid it. Pulling out the the larva is something the player does through gameplay, and doing so results in the pig becoming friendly and thereby usable for a puzzle. So the two core ingredients in this lore bit - the different behaviors of the animal, and the worm causing it all - are both deeply rooted in the gameplay.

A final example is the imitation puzzle. Here the player finds themselves dumped among crowd of mindless "zombies". These have been controlled to walk in line and are forced to perform various tasks in order to (or so I at least guess) check that the mind control has been properly imposed. The only way for the player to survive is to act along according to orders, effectively becoming a zombie themselves. Again, this also lets the player discover a bunch of story through gameplay. And not only that, you also get to step in the shoes of these zombie people. In all it is a really neat way of bringing the player into the game's world.

One could argue that this isn't anything new. Point-and-click adventure games have had this kind of gameplay for decades. You are faced with a puzzle that is directly connected to the story, and in solving the puzzle you move the narrative forward. But the big difference (and a big problem with adventure games, I think) is that the player lacks a lot of agency. Most adventure games (especially the ones of the point-and-click variety) thrive on constraining the player both in terms of what actions are possible and how they are carried out. In a point and click adventure game the player merely suggests the sort of action that should be taken, and it is then up to the game to determine whether it will allow it or not. For instance, if the player wants to enter a cave, the protagonist might respond that she doesn't feel like it. On top of that, the structure of these games is such that it can be very hard to guess what actions are possible. Actions that seem possible are often not, and actions that were possible in one situation is not in another. Because of all this, I have never felt that I properly played a story in a adventure game. I always felt more like a semi-active observer.

Side note: This is not the only reason why playable stories are problematic in adventure games, but this essay would go on for too long if I were to delve into that. If you are interested in finding out more about this, I have written about it here.

Inside is very different though. In this game you basically have control from the beginning until the very end. There are a few cases where you lose control of your character, but all of these make narrative sense. For instance, you lose control at one point when the character passes out and so on. Inside doesn't even feature any loading screens; from the moment the game starts until the bitter end, it is one continuous narrative. The game also features extremely intuitive controls and has a really good set of affordances. Because of this, you're almost always sure what actions are possible. This gives you a great sense of agency, strengthening the feeling that you are the one moving the story forward. Combined, these two things make a world of difference in how the playable narrative is perceived in Inside compared to a point-and-click adventure game.

Side note: A lot of the lore in Inside is extremely vague and ambiguous, and one could argue that it makes the game's storytelling worse. However, apart from a bit about premise at the end, I won't discuss that in this essay because it doesn't feel very relevant. While there are some instances of vagueness that help the game a great deal design-wise (such as how some levels are connected), for the most part it is not a crucial ingredient. If the developers wanted, there's a lot of lore and background information that could have been much more understandable, without much difficulty development-wise. It's pretty clear to me that the vagueness in Inside is a conscious choice by the developers. Because of this, it feels better to just focus on what Inside does best: storytelling through play.

One thing that makes all of this come together is the adaptive animation and action system. When the boy is in a place where he needs to sneak, he is animated in a way that makes this very evident. Because of this, the game implicitly tells the player what sort of things to expect, and the player can shift their mindset to match that of the boy's. In a similar fashion, the game also changes what actions are possible to performing depending on the current state of the boy and the game world. The best example of this is when you pick up a torch and use it to keep aggressive dogs at bay. The boy will automatically start waving the stick when a dog is near, and this lack of control feels totally OK to the player because it matches what they would like to happen. Partly, this is possible due to just mentioned adaptive animations. The other big factor is the setup of the situation itself and the previous hour or two of training the player has had in expecting actions to subtly change depending on the state they are in. On top of this the game also creates a credible setup that constrains the torch to a small, closed-off area. This makes sure that the player can't get it into another place where it feels like it could be useful, but where the action is not supported by the game.

Another interesting part of Inside's storytelling is how it handles its "cutscenes". Instead of taking away control from the player, these cutscenes take place in the background, allowing the player to keep playing as they occur. This is a pretty common trick in games, but what sets Inside apart is that these background events can often be dangerous if the player is not careful. For instance, if the boy gets spotted by some people in the background they'll chase and capture him. This provides a certain "realness" to the background events, and instead of just being some sort of decor they become a proper part of the game's world.

In order for the active narrative in Inside to work at all, the game obviously needs some gameplay. To achieve this Inside has settled on using puzzles.  Now it's worth asking the question: Why puzzles?What is it about puzzles that make them so suited for a game like Inside? At first this question sounds a bit weird. Inside is a puzzle platformer, so obviously it has puzzles. But that's only if we see inside as "just" a puzzle game. If we instead approach it as a game with a certain story in mind and with the goal to tell it in an active fashion where the player is always in control, then the question isn't as trivial anymore.

There are two main reasons why puzzles are such a good match. One is that they allow the game to implicitly force the player into taking part in certain activities. The other is that puzzles allow the player to make mental plans, which is a crucial factor in making the gameplay feel good.

Using puzzles in order to "trick" the player into doing certain actions is something I've written about before here and here. In summary the core idea is that a puzzle allows the designer to direct the player's behavior by crafting a puzzle in way where the problems, goals and solutions make the player go through with the desired actions. The crucial part is that the player doesn't feel like they are pushed along a trail, the idea is that the player should feel as if they came up with it all on their own. They should feel as if they chose to act in a specific way themselves, even though it was exactly what the designer intended. When this works, you have, for narrative purposes, a great puzzle. Any time it feels like you need to guess what the designer is thinking, or are being handheld along a set course, you've got a bad puzzle.

In order for it all to feel like you're part of the a narrative, it's vital that the sequence you take part in feel story-like. If all you do is solve one sliding puzzle after another, it won't be a very interesting narrative to take part in. You have to have actions that are story-like. This is a big problem when a narrative game relies on combat for the core gameplay. While combat systems allow designers to set up scenes that make the player behave in a certain fashion, there is only so much story you can tell about taking down hostiles.

Puzzles on the other hand are much more versatile as they don't rely on a central mechanic in the same way as combat does. A puzzle is simply a framed problem for the player to solve. It doesn't rely on a set feedback loop or on particular system dynamics. The player just needs to know: the boundaries that are in place, that the problem is solvable, and what goal state to strive for. As a player you are constantly on the lookout for these things, and this works as the core mental play state, in the same way as "locate enemies and neutralize them" does in combat-oriented gameplay. This allows for a game like Inside to set up all sort of story-like sequences and have that be the core of the experience.

The other aspect that makes puzzles such a good way of making playable story is that, if done right, it allows for a lot of planning.  The sort of planning that we are after here is not just grand strategy like you get from a game of Civilization. Rather, the important bit is that the player is able to look ahead and plan their next course of action and then, to a high degree of accuracy, be able to execute those actions. Crucial here is the ability to, by glancing at the environment ahead, forecast what sort actions are possible to perform, and what the result of doing them would be. I wrote about this a bit in an essay about Until Dawn (2015), where it hit me that the inability to plan is a critical reason why many interactive movies don't feel like proper games. This was especially evident in Until Dawn as due to its reliance on multiple characters and a "anyone can die at anytime"-setup, it sometimes allows for quite a bit of planning. And when it does, it has a big effect on how the game feels to play - it suddenly feels much more like "proper" gameplay.

Because of this, if a game aims to have a narrative built around its gameplay, it is crucial that planning is allowed. Puzzles can allow for this, but it doesn't come automatically as it would in a game about combat. Just recall the discussion above on point-and-click adventures; while based around puzzles many of these games lack the feeling of having "proper" gameplay. A fundamental reason for this is something that I've touched upon earlier: point-and-click games often suffer from a lack of consistency. It isn't possible to know ahead of time what you will be able to do and how the world will be affected if you do. These games often rely heavily on constant trial and error as you slowly discover the boundaries for each specific scene. Compare this to a game like Super Mario World (1990). which I think we all can agree has "proper" gameplay. When you come to a new area in this game, you can instantly mentally simulate what courses of actions are possible, even if there are elements you have not seen before. For instance, if a new monster has spikes on, you can be pretty certain that you won't be able to jump on it. Much of the time, point-and-click adventure games just lack this coherency, and the gameplay suffers from it.

Inside, on the other hand, is much better in allowing for planning. When at its best, you can enter a totally new scene and still have a pretty good idea of what options are available to you, what you need to do and get plausible ideas on how to achieve it. This is when the gameplay feels at its best. In other cases a new area can be more opaque (in terms of possible actions) at first. But as you do some simple trial and error you get a grip on how things work, and you can quickly start making plans based on that. This initial trial and error is impossible to get away from entirely, even games like Super Mario have it, and when used correctly it can be for the better. Figuring out how things work is a fun thing to do and for a game like Inside, plays a crucial part in the experience. Problems tend to arise when this trial-and-error becomes an integral part of the moment-to-moment gameplay, or when it interferes with the control of the player character. For most of the time, Inside avoids these issues and maintains the ability to mentally plan ahead and execute your actions. This is central to what makes the game fun to play.

When the story-connected puzzles and the ability to plan comes together, Inside works amazingly well and it feels like you are playing a story. This is the part of the game that I absolutely love, and there are way too few games that manage to do this,

However, things are far from perfect in Inside. While the game is filled with moments of utter brilliance, there are also plenty of times when things don't work. At these times you are pulled out of the game's world and narrative, and the game feels much more like your standard puzzle game. These moments are well worth discussion as it shows what things to look out for, and suggests ways in which we can take playable stories further.

Despite being a fairly short game (around 4 hours) Inside hasn't manage get rid of all the filler material. Time and time again the game throws you a puzzle that is similar to one that you have already completed and that, more crucially, doesn't provide anything interesting story-wise. The reason these parts exist is fairly straightforward: coming up with new and clever puzzles that fit the story is really hard and time-consuming. I doubt Playdead added these sections because they thought they were perfect as is. Instead, they were probably just the, at time, the best and simplest ways to solve certain issues like pacing, gameplay set-up for tutorial-purposes, and so on. Whatever their reasons for being there, they stick out like sore thumbs and degrade the story-like feel of the experience. If you want to make good narrative through gameplay, it's crucial to minimize moments like these as much as possible.

This is far from a simple problem, of course. It's also something I've written about in the past here. The difficulty of building story-connected puzzles stems from the fact that there are so many different threads that need to fit together into a coherent whole. One approach to tackling this problem is to break it into many smaller, more manageable parts. My own suggestion for a solution is based around having a framework that helps you build your moments in a layered fashion. This approach, which was developed together with Adrian Chmielarz, is called called 4-layers. It's just one possible way of solving this problem, and there are bound to be other ways to address it. Whatever the solution is, it's important that any filler material is removed or changed, so you constantly have a feeling of being inside a story.

For most part the world of Inside has a sense of reality and coherence to it. The buildings, machines, and vistas all have an otherworldly feeling to them, but it still feels like a proper place and you could imagine people actually inhabiting the world. Crafting a world like this is key to making a good playable story. The goal should be for the player to mentally represent the game's environments, characters and objects, not just as thin façade, but as actual things. The player should imagine not just what is on screen, but what kind of things might lie beyond, and to consider it all as one big world. It's when the player start thinking like this that they stop being an observer of the story, and instead become a part of it.

In order to pull this off, it must be possible to take the game seriously. For instance, if the player comes across a hatch, they should be allowed to wonder: "why is this hatch here?" and there should be some sort of plausible explanation to be found. Because if the player can't do this, the game stops taking place in a living, breathing world, and instead is degraded to a simplistic play space.  No matter how fancy the graphics and animation are, in the end it is the player's imagination that brings it all to life.

It's easy to believe that we take in reality "as-is" and what we perceive and feel is this unfiltered flow of information from our senses. This is far from the truth. First of all, our sensory organs are heavily flawed and various systems in our brain need to make up for this fact. For instance, our eyes can only have clear focus on a small part of our field of vision and have to constantly move around to scan the full field. Despite this, we perceive vision as if we have a clear picture of everything in front of us. This is all basically due to the brain guessing what it should be like in the blurry patches. So the raw data that comes in is severely lacking and we need to make up for this. The way this is done is by learning rules of how the world ought to work, and then extrapolating any accessible information to get a full picture. It's not just vision that works like this, but every single one of our senses (note that these go way beyond sight, smell, hearing, etc. and also include things like balance and sense of time).

Secondly, the information that comes in from our senses is not very valuable in its original form. At its very basic level, vision is just a list of dots and a value of how bright each one is. On its own this doesn't tell us anything. In order for it to be useful it needs to be processed. The human visual system first breaks the information down to things like borders and shapes. When this is done, it can start recognizing certain patterns and eventually figuring out what sort of objects are in front of us. Before we get a conscious experience of what's contained in our field of view, all sorts of work has to be done. This work uses data not just from what we can see, but also takes into account all sort of other related information. A simple example of this is the checkerboard illusion:

Squares A and B are the exact same color (check here for proof), but seem like they're different because one of them is lying in shadow. The brain has taken into account the green cylinder and its shadow when evaluating the squares, and similarly any other related information will alter how the final image is perceived. And do note that we're just talking about the "pure" act of perception here. When you want the player to feel as if they're in a living, breathing world, that's something which takes place at an even higher level, relying even more on correlating information. The end result is that everything which you put into your world affects the final perception of it.

As stated earlier, most of the time Inside does a good job at this. But there are a few moments where it doesn't work very well. For instance, at a couple of places there are pressure switches that open doors and control various machinery. Given what sort of people are supposed to work in the building and the level of technology they have, this doesn't really make sense. This makes it very hard to take these pressure switches seriously. Instead, you end up thinking of them as abstract puzzle devices. This is okay from a gameplay perspective, but if you want to make a playable story it's quite problematic. The player can't form an interesting and coherent narrative from using these devices. They have to go from "I am living through a story" to "I have to solve a puzzle that the developers placed here" and they are pulled out of the narrative aspects of the game. The world is no longer "real", but just a convenient place for puzzles to take place. The boxes that can be triggered to shoot into the air pose a similar problem, and there are a few others like this.

In order to have the best possible playable story, it's crucial to keep these situations to a minimum.

Another related issue is the trial-and-error gameplay of Inside. Now, in Inside, just like in Limbo, having the player killed a few times before completing a puzzle is key to how the game is supposed to play. So it doesn't feel entirely fair to point out a very intentional core feature of the game as a problem, but nonetheless, if the goal is to make a good playable story, trial and error pose a problem. The reason for it being a problem is rooted in how the player perceives the game. As I stated earlier, the final perception of a game is the combination of a lot of different data. The goal is for the player to think of the game as "real", but a designer will always face a problem: the game's world is an imperfect simulation. The trick is to never let the player notice this fact and it's here that trial-and-error becomes an issue.

There is one important rule all magicians have: never show the same trick twice. Why? Because on the second go, the audience know what's coming and is much more perceptive to all the tricks they'll be using. Almost all magic tricks rely on either false premises or misdirection, and it's rare that these will work as expected twice in a row. Games work similarly to this. For instance, the dog that's chasing you in Inside is not a real animal - it's just an animated mesh controlled by some relatively simple code. But if you show it to the player in the right way, they'll see it as real. However, every time the player gets to replay a section, they'll notice more and more discrepancies. The player will have additional information about the underlying mechanics that drive the dog, and this information will feed into their final perception of the whole scene. Repeat the same sequence enough times, and the dog will go from a "ferocious, dangerous beast" to "gameplay object that needs to be passed".

On top of that any fiction requires a certain suspense of disbelief. The player must be a willing participant in the events that unfold and have a certain level of roleplaying for it all to work. This is active work for the player's part and if they choose not to do it they will see the experience as "just a game". Trial-and-error wears down on the player's stamina; their ability to concentrate falters and they will become increasingly unwilling to roleplay. Not only life-or-death scenarios have this effect, but puzzles can too. If a puzzle is too unclear, or just too complicated to execute, the player can be forced into a trial-and-error loop that erodes the immersive qualities of the game's world.

Overall, Inside does a good job making sure that this doesn't happen very often, and that's despite the game's focus on trial-and-error scenarios. It seems to me like the developers have been more conscious about this issue than in their previous game Limbo as most challenges are fairly easy to complete on the first few attempts. But from time to time you do get trapped in trial-and-error loops, and since otherwise Inside is so good at crafting a playable story, it's extremely interesting when it happens. Pretty much all games have this issue, but in Inside it is especially evident as to the sort of narrative issues that it causes.

It's worth bringing up that trial-and-error is not always bad. Sometimes this type of gameplay is crucial to get the right type of behavior from the player. It needs to be clear to the player what sort of things to fear and having a life-and-death puzzle challenge is really good at this. Forcing the player to redo certain actions until they do it right also teaches them what sort of play styles this game favors. This can often be crucial to the player's enjoyment. For instance, if the player doesn't understand when to sneak, and can just sprint through stealth sections, a large part of the experience is lost. Finally, trial and error can also force the player to take the world more seriously. For example, the above mentioned background cutscenes are made more palpable by having certain gameplay effects on the player. The player learns to view things happening in the background as not just fluff, but crucial to their survival. In the end, this makes the world seems more real and increases the sense of being inside a life-like world. Keeping a fine balance here is key, and more than most, Inside does an excellent job.

Another important thing worth mentioning is that Inside doesn't have any superfluous actions. Pretty much any action that you can do in the game, every box, lever, button, bridge and so on, has a gameplay purpose. This has a huge benefit for the puzzles, as the player will always be aware of what the constraints of any situation is. They can just ask themselves, "Can I interact with it?" and if the answer is yes, then they know it will be needed in order to solve the puzzle. This allows the game to have lots of "out of the box"-type of puzzles without coming off as overly frustrating. Since the constraints are so narrow, the player is bound to come across the solution sooner or later. This makes the aforementioned trial-and-error-loops less likely to happen and you get a better narrative.

However, all is not perfect with this approach. By making the game's world all about gameplay, it also removes a certain sense of authenticity from it. As explained earlier, what creates the final perception of a game is all of the aspects taken together as a whole. Inside doesn't let the player freely explore the world, and because of this you lose a whole swathe of information that could have improved the overall perception. For instance, the player could learn more about the inner workings of the machinery or get a better understanding of its various inhabitants. Inside's interaction focus also forms a player role which is all about overcoming whatever puzzle is in front of them. While the player, in a certain sense, does explore the world of Inside, this is more of a side effect. The mechanics of the game almost never encourage the player to explore for pure, intrinsic reasons. Apart from a few scattered secrets Inside constantly revolves around solving the current puzzle at hand. This gives a certain sense of the whole world revolving around the player, and takes away the feeling of the place having an agenda of its own.

Side note: Adrian Chmielarz has a great article on how the most immersive games around all treat the player as an intruder. It is well worth a read as it goes over a lot of the issues that you can find in Limbo. Read it here.

A particularly big problem that arises because of Inside's straightforwardness is that the game's spatial representation suffers. When you go through a game, or any location really, you continuously build and update a mental model of the place. At first this mental model will be very sparse and lacking, and you won't really have an intuitive sense of the place - it just "exists". But as you traverse the world you start to understand how everything is connected and your mental model goes from being very simplistic to actually becoming a virtual representation of the place. It's when the mental model becomes sufficiently detailed that a world starts feeling real. As an example, compare quickly riding a car through a town and actually living there for a few days. In the former it's just scenery; in the latter it's an actual place. Not having this mental model is big problem in Inside. You always quickly pass by the various locations and never get to know them spatially. As such, the game's world never forms a cohesive whole in your mind. And without a proper mental model of the game's spaces, the final perception of its world suffers.

Again, just like the trial-and-error design, this is a bit of an unfair critique. The walk-forward-to-progress mechanic is part of the core of what kind of game Inside is. But that also causes issues to arise and it becomes easier to pinpoint narrative shortcomings.

Finally, another thing that that I think is worth bringing up is that Inside never properly introduces its protagonist. Early on there's a bunch of stuff done to get better a feel for the character we are playing, such as animations and the deadliness of the world. But there's never a shred of information as to where the boy is heading and why he wants to go there. This becomes problematic when your brain tries to weave a cohesive narrative through the game. At some points there are concrete urges that push you onwards, such as trying to escape some danger. In these instances, a story-like sequence will form in your mind and the journey feels like a proper narrative. But at other times there's no intrinsic reason for you to push onwards, and you only do it becomes the game tells you to. Once again, the makes the game go from playable story to a "just" being a puzzle platformer.

It's obvious that the developers intended for the boy's background to be vague, but I think they could have provided some more information. At least Limbo has "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters Limbo" as a description, which at least gives us a clear goal: "find your sister". Inside has "Hunted and alone, a boy finds himself drawn into the center of a dark project," instead, which lacks a clear motive. And playing the game, I can't remember that I ever felt drawn towards something from a narrative perspective - the game itself compelled me to move onwards. It's fairly obvious that the developers intended the premise to be vague, but I think it's damaging to the game as a playable story. When we have a proper premise we can latch onto it is much more easily to create meaning around the various events. It also gives the player directions on how to roleplay and as a direct continuation of that helps enhance the perception of the game as a whole. A good example of this at work is the opening to to Last of Us (2013), where first a cinematic and then a playable sequence gives us a great setup for the character we are about to play for (most of ) the remainder of the game.

Note that Inside is far from a failure in this aspect. As I mentioned earlier, the animations and general setup helps a lot in setting up the character. I just felt the game left a bit more to be desired. And I find it annoying how many games skip over the the intial setup and start the game without any real sense of who you are playing. Interactive storytelling relies heavily on roleplaying, but without any defined role to take on this is very hard to achieve. Because of that I thought it was extra important to point out.

And that sums up my  thoughts on Inside and playable narrative (for now at least!). While I might have come off as a bit harsh at the end of the essay, it's worth making it clear that I still think Inside is an amazing game. In terms of being a playable narrative Inside is really great - sometimes even genius - but that doesn't mean it's the best way to do things. As I've hopefully outlined in this essay, there's a bunch of stuff that can be improved. But it's also evident to me that Inside is on the right track. If we want to make proper interactive stories, Inside shows the way and is one of the best examples that currently exists.

Thoughts on Until Dawn and Interactive Movies

Introduction

Before starting Until Dawn my hopes for the game weren't very high. I thought it was going to be a half-baked and campy interactive movie filled with unlikable characters and cheap jump scares. However, it turned out a lot better than I could have imagined and it now stands as one of my favorite horror games ever. Sure, the game can get really campy at times, and it has its fair share of jump scares. But it also features a clever script, an excellent setting, amazing atmosphere and (to my surprise) also managed to be extremely tense and scary at times.

The game knows that it is a B-movie horror, but it takes that at heart and instead of hiding behind satire it's determined to be the best B-movie possible. This works a lot better than I'd expected it to and the result is an engaging ride that channels other (in my opinion) great B-horror like The Descent, Saw, Dog Soldiers and Evil Dead. It takes itself just seriously enough for you to overlook the sillier aspects yet still feel emotionally invested in the fates of the characters.

Until Dawn is not without its faults of course, but it does a lot of things incredibly well. I have grown quite tired of the interactive movie format over the years. Playing through over three seasons of Telltale games have made the experience feel samey, and I am always frustrated with how little I get to actually play, explore and shape the narrative. Until Dawn far from reinvents the interactive movie genre, in fact it's fascinating how alike all of these games are, but it changes just enough to make the experience feel fresh again. This is where I think things get really interesting, because while the changes aren't anything major, they have a huge impact on the end experience. 

Now it's time to take a closer look at the inner workings of Until Dawn, and to do so we have to enter spoiler territory. I will try to stay away from larger reveals, but it will still be enough to ruin a lot of the fun. Until Dawn relies a lot on uncertainty, so if you haven't played the game (which I really recommend you do) and want the best possible experience, go and play it before reading more of this essay.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let's start with the things that Until Dawn does really well:

Multiple Deaths System

First up is the most prominent and possibly the most effective feature of the game: any character can die at any time. Well, to be fair, in practice they can't - but it sure feels like it. Some characters can be killed pretty early on in the story while some can't die until the very end. The trick is that the first time you play it you can never be sure. Whenever things start to get dangerous for a character you always feel that there's a chance that a bad choice or a missed quick time event can lead to their death. And since Until Dawn saves after every important choice, there is no going back. Any death is basically permanent.

Heavy Rain did a similar thing a couple of years back, but Until Dawn takes it to next level. The main reason for this is that death feels like a possibility from almost the start through to the bitter end. In Heavy Rain the scenes that feel like life-or-death-moments are pretty spread out, but in Until Dawn they permeate the entire experience. Early on in the game, most of these turn out to be the characters playing pranks on one another, but because of how it all is setup you can never be sure.

The game also helps to build up this tension by very explicitly telling the player what's at stake. It also uses a lot of filmic tricks, such as showing us, through the eyes of the monster, how the characters are being stalked. Normally I don't like this sort of thing in games as it lessens the feel of it being "my story", but here it works really well. It points out that the characters are now in danger, and together with the game's initial warnings, it makes it very clear that you have to be on alert. 

The final aspect that I think makes this work so much better here than in Heavy Rain is that Until Dawn is a proper horror game. The tension and uncertainty built from knowing that any character might perish goes hand-in-hand with the the game's thick atmosphere. Both of these constantly reinforce one another and do a great job of making you feel vulnerable and under constant threat. A great way to test this is to simply replay the game. Once you know a certain section poses no actual danger for a character, much of the tension dissipates and the scene goes from scary to feeling tame. It's like turning off the music in a horror movie - without all necessary elements in place the effect is lost.

This system is not only a way of making the game scary, it's also a great way of keeping the narrative going. There's almost never any chance of getting stuck and thereby having to repeat the same section over and over. This makes sure that frustration is kept to a minimum, letting players be focused on becoming immersed in the narrative. If players become stuck trying figure out how to progress, immersion is quickly decreased, and lot of the horror along with it.

By not having a game over screen, you also get rid of the feeling of having seen the worst the game has to offer. In Until Dawn it is almost the opposite; once you have seen a character meet a horrible death, you know anyone can be next. Normally the death scene is a relief for the player, but here it raises the stakes instead.

Finally, by letting it be possible for every character to die, you earn your outcome in a way that you usually don't do in interactive movies. Normally, because branches tend to quickly collapse, your choices are more about pondering the decision, and less about the outcome. But in Until Dawn, your choice will determine who lives and dies, which gives you a much more palpable feel to your decisions.

It is pretty clear that this kind of system is close to optimal for a horror game. So why doesn't every horror game use it? The most obvious answer is that not every game is able to support a large cast of playable (and killable) characters, but there's another reason that's much more difficult to get around. In a fully playable game, the number of places where the player can die skyrockets, and it becomes really hard to make sure that each one is satisfactory from a narrative perspective.

Until Dawn gets around this by relying a lot on "successful failures". For instance, if you fail at a quick time event when a character jumps across a chasm, the game can show a clip of the character fumbling and just barely making it across. So you get feedback for failing the challenge, but your character didn't die and the narrative can continue along the same path. In a fully playable game, this is simply not possible. If the player fails at a jump the mechanics says they will fall down. It isn't possible to give the player any help (e.g. a push in the right direction) to make sure they complete it, either. There are simply too many ways to perform an action, and besides it would quickly become glaringly obvious. This means that not only does a fully playable game have to deal with many more possible deaths, it's also a lot less predictable how they will unfold.

Side note: I wrote about this as a potential death system over six years ago. One of my suggestions was to have a Cube-like setup, which is pretty much exactly what Until Dawn does, and it worked much better than I'd expected it to.

Ability To Plan

The ability to make plans is part of what it means to be human, and there are good reasons to think it's one of the biggest reasons for us developing a consciousness (more info here). When we plan we get to flex our most advanced mental muscle: the ability to simulate future outcomes. Thus allowing us to make plans is an vital part of human expression.

Most games allow planning in some form. And not just any sort of planning, but meaningful planning where you can weigh your current data, plot a future course of actions, execute on those actions and then feel like you get a measurable outcome in the end. In Super Mario Bros you need to plan what path to take and how to avoid upcoming obstacles. In an RPG you need to consider how you spend your money and experience points to build up your character to suit your style of play and that character's effectiveness. There are tons of examples like this in games, and most games feature it in one form or another. Allowing for good planning is a one of the core features that make a game feel engaging.

However, in interactive movies, it's all about reacting to the events that unfold. There's not really any planning involved. You sort of live in the moment, and don't have much say in what happens next. For most of the time, the playable characters do what they feel like and let you occasionally take control to react to dangerous events or to make a tough decision for them. Sure, sometimes you can makes up plans to support certain characters so that they'll side with you later on. But all of that is pretty fuzzy, and mostly it won't be very useful to you. It is often hard to get a sense of what you near future possibilities will be at all. You might plan to do A, B and then C, only to have the game take control after action A and do something completely different. This means that, for the most part, it's impossible to plan ahead; in fact if you plan too much you will most likely be disappointed. It is often best to just go along with the flow. I think this lack of an ability to plan is one of the key reasons why many people feel that interactive movies are not proper games.

Side note: I think that the inability to plan and over reliance on reactive play is also why many people feel walking simulators aren't proper games. It is often stated that it depends on fail-states and the like, but I do not think that holds up. I will get back to this a bit more at the end of this essay.

Until Dawn shares the basics of this problem too, but because of the way certain things are designed it's possible to do a certain level of planning. This is something that I can't recall seeing in another interactive movie style of game, and it made the experience a lot more engaging to me.

The first thing that allows this are the totems. These are items that when picked up give you a brief glimpse of a possible future happening. Sometimes they show you how a character dies and sometimes they give you hints on important choices to make. For instance, in one totem you see that giving a certain character a flare gun gave you a good outcome. Now you know that you need to find a flare gun somewhere and make sure that a specific character gets it. It's not much, but what it does is that it forces you to guess how scenes might unfold, and you try to match up the current events with the totem visions you have seen. This forecasting gives the game a certain sense of strategy and forces you to consider current events more carefully. It's not a major game changer, but it's enough to give that extra sense of engagement.

What I found to be even more effective in allowing me to plan was in guessing plot-points which became a crucial part of the decision making. The most prominent of these was figuring out who was behind the torment of the other characters. I theorized quite early on who it was, and could then make a bunch of choices based around that. Connected to this is the fact that this is probably the only game I have played where it turned out to be beneficial to be a skeptic. I suspected that the movements of a spirit board was due to someone messing with it, which (together with a couple of other pieces of evidence) then led me to believe that certain ghost appearances couldn't be real either. All of these conclusions turned out to be true and allowed me to make much better decisions. In the end, the whole revelation is a bit implausible and very Scooby Doo-like. But it went quite nicely with the B-horror tone of the story and more than any other interactive movie I've played it made me feel that my understanding of the story mattered.

This doesn't mean that Until Dawn does planning perfectly - far from it. But it does show that smaller design changes can make a world of difference. It's also very important to note that a big reason why all this works is because of the Multiple Deaths System. Without having the very clear feedback of seeing your characters die or survive, and the tension that comes along with that, the features I've mentioned would have lost a lot of their impact.

Other Good Stuff
Those previous two points are what I feel are the major elements that make Until Dawn stand out from the crowd. But the good stuff doesn't end there. There are a lot of other interesting design choices that have a big influence on the experience.

First, exploration bits feels much better than in other interactive movie games. Often when you're given control over your character, the pacing often gets messed up. But in Until Dawn it just makes the game feel more like Resident Evil without the combat. One contributing factor is that that there're a lot of clues and totems for the player to find. These provide a nice sense of the sort of "item looting" common in survival horror games, and since all the things you can find are a part of the narrative, it never feels out of place either. The other factor is that you never know when you'll encounter danger, so walking down a murky hallway can be incredibly tense. Combined, these two elements make these exploration segments very engaging and make them feel part of the overall narrative.

Second, knowledge of the game's lore can help you survive situations, meaning that you're rewarded for paying more attention to it. For instance, there's one moment where knowing that monsters can't see you if you stand still is crucial when making a choice. And in another, remembering that monsters can imitate the voices of their prey will help you avoid walking into a trap.

Third, each of the characters has meters that go up and down as you make choices. At first it feels like unnecessary fluff, but it actually helps you get a bit more "ownership" over the characters. It's sort of an extension of the "Clementine will remember this"-line from the Walking Dead, giving an indicator that your actions have consequences. But more than that I think it's a way to see that your character changes depending on how you play. And then, the effect is similar to how you get more attached to your character in X-COM as they level up.

Fourth, it constantly varies its environments. This is what I like to call the Super Mario way of location progression. It has long been a common thing in games to let the player linearly progress through various environments. You start up in the forest, then go to the swamps, then to the mountains and finally you arrive at the castle. Super Mario doesn't work like that. Instead it constantly swaps between the environments, keeping the locations fresh. I think this is a really good design principle that far too few games use. Until Dawn does it well, both by having a lot of different locations near each other, and by switching character perspectives throughout the experience. This means that normally kind-of-dull environments, like the mines, always feel fresh and interesting to be in.

Again it's important to note here how much the Multiple Death system plays into all of these things. For instance, much of the dread that makes the exploration and clue hunting engaging comes from the knowledge that any choice could be a crucial one. The same is true for the second and third points too. And the varied environments rely heavily on there being multiple characters to play.

The Not So Good Stuff
Now that I have gone over the good things, it's time to briefly cover some of the not-so-good things in Until Dawn. 

• The game often doesn't support a bunch of actions that it should have been possible to perform. For instance, there are doors here and there that it should have been possible to at least try to open. And far worse, at one point the characters turn away from a gate they could easily have jumped over. (You climb far more difficult things throughout the game). 
• A few of the choices in the game can lead to unfair dead-ends. For instance, one character is bound to die pretty early on if you haven't made a few specific choices earlier in the game. The big problem here is not that it felt a bit unfair, but that you can't see any reason why it happens. If you can just get a sense of what went wrong, you can learn from your mistakes and do better later. But when that's not possible, your sense of being able to plan is decreased, which is a shame when the game builds that up so nicely in other places.
• The settings in Until Dawn look great, but I always felt that I was unable to properly explore them. One reason for this was the locked camera angles which focus more on making the shot look nice than on providing a good play space. Another reason is that many set pieces are simply not possible to explore. The game just decides that the characters wants to do something else instead and has them leave the area. The game is excellent at building mood in many ways, but I felt annoyed at how the game seemed to constantly hinder me from taking it all in properly.
• It is very uncertain when the control over your character will end. The best is when a dangerous encounter happens or you reach another character. In these cases the control method switch (from full analog to quick time events or dialog) and the break in control feels natural. But on many occasions the game starts a cutscene when you don't expect it to. For instance, after going down some stairs, the game suddenly decides that your character should go into a home cinema room despite there being lots of other places to explore. From a design point of view I can understand why this happens - you need to make sure that certain plot events trigger properly. But as a player these things deprive me of my agency and some of the immersion is lost.

There are a few more of these things, and what they all have in common is that they are typical of, or even sometimes inherent to, the format of interactive movies. I really liked Until Dawn, but I can't help feeling unsatisfied by this style of games. Despite having gone over all the the things that Until Dawn does right, it still feels like there's something fundamental missing to it all. Most of the story is told through cutscenes, and for much of the game you are more of an observer than an active participant. I want interactive stories that I can play from start to end, not just a little now-and-then.

Interactive Movies And Beyond
I feel I have a weird relationship with interactive movies. As I mentioned earlier, after playing through a bunch of Telltale games I've grown a bit bit tired of the format. But despite that they keep pulling me back. I ended up liking Until Dawn a lot more than I expected. Shortly after I also gave Life Is Strange a go and while it wasn't as good as Until Dawn, I liked it quite a bit too.

So why do I like them? I think there are three major reasons:

• They have a proper setup that defines who you are and why you are there. I am so sick of games, and it's especially common among horror games, that just throw me into an environment and expect me to care without giving me a reason to do so. Interactive movies (well most of them at least) work hard to provide intrigue and mystery from the get-go, properly setting me up to enjoy the rest of the story.
• The main focus is on telling a story. I don't mean this just by them being very linear and movie-like, but more that just about every choice is made in accordance to intended narrative. For instance, Until Dawn has collectibles but puts a lot of effort into making sure that they are connected to story. This creates worlds that feel more "real" and are easier to become lost in.
• They lack the fluff that that is so common in other games. The uninspired shoot-out sections that are obviously just there to make the game longer, extensive weapon upgrading, narrative-wise meaningless collectibles, filler mini-games and so forth. Interactive movies aim at giving you a specific experience and make sure that all of the game's aspects help fulfill that goal.

When other much more gameplay-focused games try to do storytelling it often just gets in the way. I always get annoyed by action games that start with overly long expositions, and just want them to get to the point. In fact, in other games it feels like the more overt storytelling actually gets in the way of the narrative the game is "supposed" to be telling.

It might seem like I'm heading towards the good old "gameplay vs story" discussion here, but the point I'm getting at is a bit different. I don't think that gameplay is something inherently opposite of story. In fact, in the way I see story many of the classically super-gameplay-focused games like Super Mario have a ton of story in them. As you board an airship dodging cannonballs while trying to get one of Bowser's sons, a very rich narrative is created.

Instead, the problem lies in controlling the player's mental model of the game. That is how they perceive the game's virtual world to work, and what aspects that become most important in shaping how decisions are made and emotions evoked. When you want to focus on story you have to cut back on a lot of useful gameplay methods. The biggest issue is that you need to make sure that players do not end up optimizing for best possible progression, but act according to the intended narrative. There are also a bunch of things to consider in order to keep players immersed in the world. (For more information check out this essay). In the end it all comes down to storytelling games getting less gameplay per buck, as you can't rely on a fun and addictive gameplay system being core of the experience.

We found this out when creating SOMA. It's the one of our games that has got the most praise for its story, but it's also perceived as the one lacking the most in the gameplay department. Recently it occurred to me that one of the major things that make people feel the game lacks gameplay is because most choices are made as reactions. This even includes many of the puzzles, which have been designed with the focus to be streamlined and coherent with the narrative. This makes the game lack that proper feeling of being able to meaningfully plan ahead. So despite there being lots of things to do in SOMA, it feels like something is missing gameplay-wise.

The problem here is that we simply cannot increase the gameplay in any trivial manner. That would cause a whole bunch of other, worse, issues. So the way forward is to find other ways in which to increase the sense of "playability". And here I think there are at least two vital things that can be learned from Until Dawn:

• To find ways to, in a story-focused fashion, ramp up the tension and sense of accomplishment. The Multiple Deaths System in Until Dawn does a fantastic job at this.
• To allow players to make plans based upon how the narrative unfolds. The player should not just react to events as they occur but be able use tactics and long term planning in a way that feels meaningful.

How to do this in a gameplay-focused experience is far from straightforward. You can't just make a game with multiple characters and call it a day; most likely the effect of the Multiple Deaths System will need to work in a quite different manner. But what I find encouraging is that if we simply focus on increasing the ability to plan, it will allow us to view the problem from different, and probably much more fruitful angles. I feel there is something very much worth exploring here, and it will be interesting to see what can come out of it.

Thoughts on Alien: Isolation and Horror Simulation

Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie.

Before we can properly discuss the game, we need to talk some video game history and design theory. Over the past, there has been two different schools of horror games. One that has a horror wrapping on top of standardized gameplay (horror wrapping) and one that tries to recreate the happenings of a scary movie/novel (horror simulation). The former is quite well known and started with games like Lurking Horror (1987). Mechanically, the game played like other contemporary adventure games, but took place in a scary setting with events meant to frighten the player. The latter one is a bit harder to nail down precisely, but I would say it started out with a 3D Monster Maze (1982), a game that is neatly captured in its name: the player is trapped in maze and needs to escape a monster (in this case a heavily pixelated T-Rex).

While the horror wrapping design has thrived over the years, being a design corner stone for games like Phantasmagoria (1995, an adventure game), 7th Guest (1993, a puzzler) and Resident Evil (1996, an action shooter), the horror simulation is much rarer. After 3D Monster Maze, the next game to do it somewhat properly was Clock Tower (1995).

It is now time to dig into the distinction between these two types of design. What sets Clock Tower apart from Resident Evil is that its core mechanic is not there to entertain, it is there to put the player in the shoes of a protagonist in a horror story. Clock Tower does this by having a single monster (little guy with giant scissors) hunting the player in certain scenes. The player can choose to hide in closets, under beds and hope that the monster does not find and kill them. Compare this to the core mechanic of Resident Evil, where the player needs to scavenge for ammo, weapons and health potions and then combat the monsters encountered. Resident Evil's gameplay could really work with any sort of theme and setting, while the one in Clock Tower is much more focused on being a horror experience. It is important to mention that Resident Evil does tons of things to crank of the level of scariness; scarce ammunition, inventory management, limited saves, etc. But none of these give rise to any specific horror scenarios; the game is still all about shooting various enemies in order to progress. There are very few sections in Resident Evil would fit a horror movie or novel, but Clock Tower is filled with these moments.

The core difference can be summed up as Clock Tower being focused on having plenty of verbs that are related to a horror movie: hide under bed, looking into mirror, run away, push monster, etc. As the player plays the game, they reenact scenes of horror simply by following the rules set out by the gameplay. Resident Evil hardly does it all, the focus being much more on standard tactical combat with certain scariness attached to it.

As a horror simulator, and really horror game in general, Clock Tower is not very successful though. First, much of the gameplay is actually pretty standard adventure game affair. Second, the actual chase moments are quite clumsy and frustrating to play, rarely resulting in any proper feelings of dread and terror. Despite these, quite major shortcomings as a horror simulator, Clock Tower is well worth studying. If you look past its flaws, there exists a focus on making horror elements playable that just didn't exist in games at the time. In fact, it is really hard to find similar games until quite recently. Hell Night (aka Dark Messiah, 1998) has the player running from a single monster and features cool stuff like a look-behind-you-button and having to carefully choose a companion. But it also suffers from lots of problems and is often a very frustrating experience.

Even such horror classics such as Silent Hill (1999) have little focus on trying to do proper horror simulation. Most of the game is based around solving puzzles and fighting enemies (while running is sometimes advisable, most encounters are best handled through combat). Instead a lot of your typical horror moments are not simulated, but put outside of the player's control. For instance, in Silent Hill 2 (2001), when the protagonist hides in a closet it happens in a cutscene. Remember, this is a scene that played out through gameplay in Clock Tower. If you look at the large body of the gameplay the player does in a Silent Hill game, little of it resembles what you would see in a novel or film. In fact, it resembles little of how a rational person would behave in similar scenarios. This does not make the games bad by any means, but it is a crucial concept to keep in mind. The games heavily rely on standard, often narrative-wise nonsensical gameplay in order to create the foundational engagement for the player.

The next game, after Clock Tower, to really give horror simulation another proper go was Siren (2003). Here the player's actions are a lot more aligned with how it makes sense for them to act. For instance, it features a map without any indicator of the player position, and also allows you to see the world through the monsters' eyes. In all, it creates a much stronger sense of being inside a horror story. The problem with Siren, like Clock Tower, is that this focus amounted to a very frustrating experience, which in turn easily diminishes the overall immersion and scariness. Once again, this type of design didn't gain any traction.

I now need to briefly discuss a design concept called "mental modeling". A concept that is closely related to the difference between horror wrapping and horror simulation. When you play a game like Resident Evil, every encounter is a very tactical and precise decision. You look at what kind of opponent you are facing, what weapons you have, the current ammo supply, health levels, etc. The model in your head is much less about the appearance of the creatures, and much more about pure numbers. This can be very stressful, and combined with a horror thematic the total experience can feel quite scary. But on the whole very little is left to the imagination and narrative-related intuition. In a game like Siren however, you are much more worried about what you cannot see, and your mind is racing with trying to predict future happenings. Combine this with a map that forces you to think yourself as part of the environment, and monsters that you mostly keep track of by inferring their position, and you get a mental model that is far more horror-like and vivid. The problem is that since you lack the sense of numerical certainty that Resident Evil supplies, it becomes much harder to formulate correct tactical decisions. This is a fact that I think has a part in making these kind of games so frustrating. It is clear that the mental modeling that Siren has is better suited for a horror game, but it was not yet working properly gameplay-wise.

Now back to game history again. The release of Siren marks the beginning of the end for what I would like to call the golden age of survival horror. It had brought us gems like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame (2001), all of which brought a very fresh take on the horror experience. But after that, the well seemed to dry up and horror games got increasingly action oriented. Resident Evil 4 (2005) really got this trend going. One reason for this change in focus is partly diminishing sales and increasing production costs. Another major – and connected – reason was almost certainly the lack of evolution in the genre. All of the big games had been based on horror wrapping, with most of the gameplay being quite standard. The wrapping did not allow for much change, and when the focus was put on the underlying mechanics, the horror rapidly faded.

It took a while before anything new came along, and this is where we enter the picture. When we released Penumbra: Black Plague (2008), we made our attempt at doing a game without having any weapons. It had a bunch of issues, but showed promise in how it changed the player's perception of the game's world. The decision was based on lessons learned for Penumbra: Overture (2007) and from the linage of games discussed above. The following year sees the release of another combat-free horror, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009) which also puts emphasis on crafting more of a horror simulation, but also manages to get a bit too frustrating. Upon releasing Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), there is one thing I am especially proud being part of creating. Simply by using the game's basic system, we can get the player to hide in a closet and fearfully watch as a monster pass them by. It felt like we basically managed to recreate, through gameplay, the closet cutscene from Silent Hill 2, and properly simulate one of the main mechanics from Clock Tower. I feel way too biased to say how much effect – if any – this had on horror games in general though, but for me personally I feel it is one of our biggest contributions to the genre.

Two years later, the short and free game Slender (2012) is released and this what I think really kickstarted the horror simulation. Slender is a simplistic game with not much in terms of standard gameplay. The player is simply tasked to collect a few notes in an open, but still slightly maze-like environment. Where the game gets all of its engagement from is how it manages to simulate its horror. You cannot look at slender man, you have to move carefully, you cannot use your flashlight too much, you need to stay away from spooky sounds, etc. All of these gameplay elements are quite vague and together they give rise to a rich mental model. The end product is that you got a very engaging horror experience from almost nothing. Remember that Slender has very little story and interesting goals. It is all about existing inside a certain virtual space. It is all about raw horror simulation and little else. While other indie games like Hide (2011) have done similar things in the past, Slender proved it was really a viable method of making a game. If you just make things vague enough, and allow the player to play based on that vagueness, you can make engaging games of pure horror simulation. In some ways, Slender is sort of like the Super Mario Bros or Wolfenstein 3D of horror games, a distillation of what makes the genre work into its purest form.

Since then a bunch of similar a games have followed, one of the most successful being Outlast (2013). The story in Outlast is paperthin: A journalist enters an old asylum where experiments are rumoured to have taken place, is met with the place being overrun and now has to escape. There are no puzzles, no standard gameplay, it is all a bunch of levels where you run or hide from insane inmates. Also included are a few breather levels where you simply walk to (or try to find) the next destination by going through some spooky environments. Scattered around are also documents detailing background lore, but you gain very little from reading them. You can pretty much go through the whole game ignoring them and still get a coherent narrative. What makes the game engaging is the situations that it puts you in. Hide from monsters in lockers, sneak past them as they talk gibberish, walk past weird looking denizens not knowing if they will jump you or not, try to make out dangers using grainy night vision camera, and so on and so forth. Almost any gameplay scene that plays out could be directly baked into a horror movie or novel. Outlast is a pure horror simulator, and a narrative naturally arises from the situations the game throws you in.

And now, finally, we get to Alien Isolation. This is the latest breed of horror simulations, and a very successful one at that. The big feature in this game is that there is only one monster that can appear at any time. In many ways, it is really the 2014 version of 3D Monster Maze, in which the whole game was built around trying to figure out where the monster was located and how to avoid it. Alien: Isolation obviously has complexity far beyond that, but it is striking how similar the basics are.

There are bunch of elements that all work together to craft a mental model that perfectly fits the game and make Alien: Isolation really scary. First off, like in any other horror game, the sound is vital and you need to constantly listen for clues. This can be cues from other survivors (who are hostile towards you), malfunctioning androids, or the alien monster itself. Not only do these paint a terrific ambient soundscape, but they are also very important for you in order to progress. You also need to be conscious about how much sound your own actions are causing. The game warns you to not use the notorious bleeping motion scanner too near people as they might hear you, and after that you get really paranoid about any sounds you might be making.

On top of that, the save stations, which are crucial to locate, give off a faint and distinct beeping noise. As the environments are dark, and the stations can sometimes be found in a hard to spot location, you have another reason to listen carefully. The difficulty level in the game is quite harsh, and the tiniest mistake can lead to sudden death, so you are always eager to save the game. This leads you to listen extra carefully when you have gone a long way from a save, making you vulnerable to any other sudden noises. Remember those jump scare videos that told you to watch or listen extra carefully only to throw a spook at you when you least expected? It is sort of like that that, but without you feeling annoyed afterwards. Add to the fact that the Alien can really appear anywhere in the game, and you get a mind model that is primed for picking up and seriously considering even the slightest sound.

Because the alien feels so random in when and how it appears, it is hard to get a grip on what sort of signs to watch out for. The mind model becomes vague, and more prone to paranoid imagination, which is obviously great for a horror game. This is combined with the fact that unless you have one of the beefier weapons, if the alien spots you, you are dead. With no possibility to run away, the player gets very conscious about their movements, the alien's possible location, and – yet again – the sounds that they hear and might be causing.

Combined with all this is an assortment of items (noise makers, flares, a revolver, etc) that all have pros and cons (eg flares light the dark, but also attracts attention) along with a certain interplay between the different types of hostiles. For instance, if there is a room with human adversaries you could throw a noise maker in among them, attract the alien and then have that kill them off. But that also means you now have an alien in your vicinity, which might prove more dangerous than the humans. And since the systems are vague, it is hard to predict outcomes and you live in this constant uncertainty.

Another aspect I love is how the alien monster forces you to sneak. It is quite common in stealth games that you can simply lie in wait and club down patrolling hostiles, and that that tactic is far better than the (narrative-wise, better fitting) approach of sneaking past them. But in Alien: Isolation, you do not want to risk any sort of alarm, and staying hidden almost always feels like the better option. In turn this makes most humans that you encounter seem more alive. You mostly only see their vague outlines and hear their conversations from afar. In your head you a build much more vivid picture, since you are never pushing the game into displaying their often immersion breaking behaviors that occur when they are up-close.

All these actions available coupled with the resulting mind model lead to gameplay spaces that properly simulates horror. Sometimes even unscripted horror shows play out in front of you eyes. For example, a band of survivors can be caught off guard by the alien as you hide in a locker and you end up staring at the onslaught terrified that the monster will come for you next. And like with Outlast, just about any scene that plays out would be fitting in a book or movie. A horror story unfolds as you play and is affected by your actions. And unlike similar games based on horror wrapping, eg Dead Space (2008), the actions that you do feel sensible and realistic. Apart from some more gamey mechanics like the save station and scrap collection, you behave just like a character would do in a movie or book version of the same story. This is horror simulation at its best.

But this super focus on being a horror simulation, also starts showing cracks in the game as a whole. For instance, just like in older games of the same genre, Alien: Isolation can be very frustrating. The tension built up from being 20 minutes from your last save, quickly turns to anger and frustration when you are killed seemingly out of nowhere. While still vague (which is essential for giving rise to the right mind model), it is predictable enough for you to be able to get past any threats if you are just careful and cunning enough. Still, this part is divisive, as can be seen by the review scores and I have myself felt extremely frustrated with the game from time to time. There is a certain sweet spot in how to approach situations properly. Too aggressive, and you will die a lot. Too passive and the game's pacing gets messed up. The trick is to be able to move forward at a steady pace and still be cautious enough to avoid death. A way to fix this would have been to make the alien AI better adapt to the player's style, so if they hide a lot in lockers, it backs off quicker and keep things interesting and the pace at the right level. The developers should have probably focused a bit less on challenge alone to provoke a certain mindset and also have had some elements to dampen the difficulty for players that were behaving properly, but are being a bit too passive to get a good experience.

While the frustration and bad pacing are clearly issues, I do not think they are that bad and, as noted above, it should be relatively easy to fix. What is a much bigger problem is how these system gives rise to a very simplistic narrative. The first part of the problem are the save stations. Having these are a crucial part of making it all work, partly based on the simple reason that after a little while you get too comfortable around the alien for it to be intrinsically scary. There needs to be some gameplay aspect that keeps the tension up, and keeps you in the right mindset. The save stations does just this. But the side-effect is that the save stations become the biggest objective for you as a player. Finding the power station that you need to activated is not at all as important as finding the next place to save. This means that your personal narrative becomes dumbed down, and ends up being a simple hunt for loot and save locations, without any thought on what the higher level fiction behind your actions really is.

The problems with objectives does not stop there though. Another issue is that they are all extremely simplistic and without any interesting narrative significance. They are all about powering up things or finding keycards. It is old school mission design with a thin layer of narrative coating. While these sort of boring objectives are pretty common in games, I think Alien: Isolation has an especially hard time getting away from it. Because the game is constantly so dense with information that you need to keep track of (save stations, motion tracker, alien signs, loot, resources, etc) you really cannot manage to keep any complex objectives in mind. It is also crucial that the player has a good idea of where they should be headed, because too much disorientation and the mind model starts breaking down. This leads to basically decent objectives (eg find a keycard on a dead doctor by figuring out what rooms he has visited) becoming very handheld experiences, as the game constantly marks your next destination. The simple reason for this is that less hand holding would have made it too frustrating. You can see similar mission design in Outlast, and while I think there was more room for improvement there, it is a design decision that probably stems from the same issues.

Another connected issue is that the notes and audio logs you find in the game never really feel that relevant. It is another issue similar to Outlast, although I find that the content was way more interesting in Alien: Isolation. But the real issue is that you cannot really have too much important information in these, because accessing terminals means a danger to the player. It is really hard to explore and think about the environments and backstory when you are constantly worried about the threats the game might throw at you.

As you look closer at these flaws in Alien: Isolation, it becomes more clear that it really is just a pure horror simulator, like Slender or 3D Monster Maze, just with more sections to play through. The aim of this game is not to tell a longer horror story. The aim is to put the player in different scenarios involving hostile human survivors, creepy androids and/or an alien. Any interesting narrative then arises from how these scenarios play out. It has no real story at a higher level apart from the basic "get the hell out of there". There is nothing wrong with this of course, and the basics of the game works fine as is. But Alien: Isolation's issue is that it just goes on for too long. If you (like me) want to get some sort of deeper narrative experience from your game to keep going, the game wears thin after just a few hours. This is a bad thing for a game that last for at least 15 hours. Outlast takes about 5 hours to complete, and that feels like a better fitting length for this sort of gameplay.

Alien: Isolation has another big problem. If you went in hoping this would be an interactive take on the first movie, you will be disappointed. Rather than being some sort of video game adaption of the original film, it is more like a version of Alien 3 or 4. The first movie is the birth of a monster, it is a long build-up of a creature followed by a final confrontation. It is much more about discovering some hidden lovecraftian horror, than about people fleeing for their lives from a well-established creature. So what the game ends up being about; sneaking from place to place, just constitutes a minor part of the movie, and is a far cry from replicating the experience.

It is hard to blame the developers though. In order to deliver a similar narrative they would have had to rethink the alien quite a bit, and most likely diverge from the source material. Something that I wouldn't think Sega or 20th Century Fox would not be too happy about, as the creature is the game's foremost selling point. But even if we disregard that, it would be very hard to use the game's given form to emulate the make-up of the movie. If we trace the game's gameplay lineage way back to Monster Maze, we see very little about the other things that make the movie so great. All of these games are about putting the player in a predefined situation and to let that play out. The great strength of the genre is to provide the thrills of being the hunted, and to have a super focus on this.

Alien: Isolation does do some attempts to better replicate the source material. For instance we are taken on an expedition to the iconic derelict spaceship, but for me all of this falls flat. The eggs, facehuggers, and all that are already so well established that you never get a sense of mystery from it all. Worse still, this section differs so much from the movie – which comprises of sneaking about – that there is no tension. The game has trained you to look for save stations, be aware of your resources, listen for certain sounds, etc in such a specific way that when you are taken out of this space, the game loses a lot of its impact.

I think that horror simulation is the sort of design we want to strive for when making horror games. I love how it is possible to set up scenarios where the player gets to experience terrifying scenes, fitting for a horror movie or novel, simply by playing. This is the sort of storytelling that we want from games, and I do not think going back to merely using horror as a wrapping is a good idea. However, it is pretty clear that there is a big problem here. Horror simulation as it is currently done, is very limited in what it can let the player do, and what higher level narratives it can tell.

We had similar issues in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. When playing the game, all you do is go from room to room, solving puzzles and avoiding monsters. But as you read about the backstory you hear about opening tombs in the desert, the first visit to the Brennenburg castle and much more. All of these are moments that an ideal horror game should have let the player play, not just read about in some diary entries.

The issue is not just to recreate these sort of scenes, but to make sure the experience is fitting. As can be seen in Alien: Isolation, the trip to the planet lacks the immersion that the sneaking around has. When you try and hide from the alien, your mind model is aligned with was happening and you act like a protagonist would do. But when visiting the derelict spaceship, you could have just as well been watching a cut scene. There needs to be something more in order to properly bring this sort of scenes into the standard that proper horror simulation has set.

First of all I think there needs to be more restraint on how much of the basic gameplay is used. Even though Outlast takes about 5 hours to get through, it has a hard time keeping the gameplay fresh and the tension up throughout. For me, the game started to feel slightly drawn out the last third or so. Amnesia also suffered from this. Enemy encounters got pretty predictable and less scary after you had gotten through half the game. While the exact time at which this sort of gameplay stops feelign engaging is highly subjective, I think most can at least agree that the less practice you get with the encounters, the more intense they feel. Therefore lies in the best interest of a horror game to use its monsters sparingly.

Second, there needs to be much less reliance on difficulty in order to build the proper mind model. The way that games like Alien: Isolation and Siren are set up really increase the tension, but it does so at the cost of making the game's scope very narrow. As explained above, it is hard to have much else going on in order for the player to enjoy the experience. Also, as soon as you remove any of these elements that rack up challenge (like save stations) a lot of the tension goes away. What games like these are after is to couple the sensation of stress of losing progress together with a firm horror setting. The psychological effect is that the player takes the tension they are feeling and projects it on the frightening visuals and sounds. But building purely on this is a fragile structure as it means you always need to present a mechanical device of stress to the player, and this leaves out a lot of horror scenarios.

I think that the answer lies in having some sort of uncertain outcome as an ingrained gameplay device. Instead of having the player fear "what if I lose my progress?" they should be thinking "what if I affect the world in a negative way?". This is a kind of thinking that can be applied to a much wider range of things. Probably the best example of this in action is the Walking Dead (2012) series. Here one can clearly see the range of scenes that can have tension, purely based on an uncertain outcome. And what I especially like is how personal the choices can be, eg deciding between which person gets your trust. The most apparent problem with this sort of gameplay though is that it requires branching, but this is not as big of an issue as it seems. Walking Dead has in fact very little branching, but even if you know this, you still feel tension by the choices. There is still enough uncertainty for you to feel immersed and care about the decisions.

However, Walking Dead is quite different from how a horror simulator works- In a horror simulator the player needs to be in control most of the time, and cutscenes should be minimal. So it is not possible to just rip out the mechanics and apply them as is. What we need to do is rethink how choices can be set up and what the effects can be.

We did some very early testing of this in Amnesia: Dark Descent and its free extra story Amnesia: Justine (2011). In The Dark Descent we have no proper choice, but there are some slight consequences to failure. If the player is killed by a monster, the world is slightly changed. This was not enough to be on the level of the tension gained from fear of losing progress, but it gained a certain level of uncertainty that helped to keep some of the fear. In Justine we also tried having optional puzzles, that resulted in a person getting killed if you failed. This also worked pretty well, and it meant that puzzles – a previously pretty separate element of gameplay – got more of a horror simulator feel (somewhat recreating scenes from movies such as Saw).

These are just small things though, and the big problem is to have it work on a larger scale in a smooth, coherent manner. I think the first step is to see if you could remove the penalty of death from standard sneaking gameplay, but still retain the same sense of tension. There are three big things to gain if this can be achieved. First, to remove a lot of the inherent frustration connected to the "fear of progress loss"-design, and have less risk of breaking immersion. Second, it will allow for more integration of exploration and more complicated objectives, as you remove the forced repetition coming a design based on difficulty. Third, it will give us a glimpse of how we expand the horror simulator and have it cover things beyond sneaking by and hiding from monsters. My hope is that we then could take a stab at making a proper horror simulation, a recreation of experiences like in the original Alien movie.

This is what we are currently experimenting with in our upcoming game SOMA. Since I do not want to spoil the system I cannot go too in-depth on our approach, but I can give a basic outline. The idea is that by having choices inserted directly into the game world and have the way you chose to handle these change how the narrative unravels. These choices can simply be whether you interact with a certain object or not, or it can be more vague things, like how you behave around a certain creature. The narrative effects will not be any sort of heavy branching, but smaller things things like making upcoming sections scarier (eg by removing lights), killing people you encounter, changing the way you perceive a character or even how you feel about yourself. Our hope is that by having these sort of decisions as an integral part of the game world, that the player internalizes them and makes it part of their mind model. Then, just like the tension you feel by wondering where the next save station is in Alien: Isolation, you will feel tension by pondering what ramifications a certain set of actions might have.

This is just a little step forward, and until we release the game, we will not know how well it works. I do think it is crucial that we start to think about these things though. Just as the horror genre stagnated in the mid 2000s, because horror was merely a wrapping, the same might happen if we fail to move beyond "chased by monster" scenarios. While there is nothing wrong with these sort of games, I think it would be foolish to be satisfied with just that. There is so much more to explore in horror, and the success of recent horror simulators gives me hope that video games can handle it.

More to read:

• My article about the 4-layers approach towards narrative design, has more on mind model stuff.
• Before playing Alien: Isolation I wrote an article and the problems it might have, that should be interesting to read too. I think some of my predictions, but I really underestimated how scary the alien could feel despite being a well-known creature.
• Chris Pruett's 2-factor theory on horror, ties into some of this stuff. Check out the basic background here and how it applies to games here.