This post contains spoilers for Photopia and Galatea

Last time I looked at two examples of contemporary interactive fiction that were iterations of the classic text adventure genre. If I can borrow from Scott McCloud’s Six Steps of Art from his book Understanding Comics, those games sought to adjust and play with the craft and structure of their chosen medium. Photopia and Galatea are not iterations, but something entirely new that happen to use the same form. The two games I want to talk about now dig down and look at what the form of interactive text can accomplish and focus instead on the story and form levels of McCloud’s same steps.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been absorbed in Persona 3. The fourth in the Persona series is usually credited as the one that left the biggest impact on its players (Leigh Alexander, “High School Memories”, Polygon, 4 April 2013), but, though I’ve only played halfway through its predecessor, I can’t imagine any game improving on Persona 3. It’s a truly excellent game, and it’s disappointing that it seems to often get lost in its successor’s shadow.

Persona 3 casts the player as a newcomer to a Japanese private school, where a hidden “dark” hour after midnight puts all but a few students into stasis. During this hour, cracks in the world open up and allow monsters to emerge and suck out people’s minds while they’re vulnerable. The power that the player character and his classmates uses to defend the town, their personas, grows as the player builds friendships with people in everyday life.

There’s an old Ikea commercial about a woman getting a new lamp. She gets rid of the old lamp, placing it out on the sidewalk with the garbage in the rain, and from outside, we watch through a window as the woman turns on her new lamp and sad music swells. Then a guy steps into frame and says, “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you crazy. It has no feelings, and the new one is much better.”

It’s a funny commercial that makes us consider the emotional efficacy of the tools of cinema: shot placement, setting, lighting, music, etc. When these tools are used correctly, we can be manipulated into feeling sad for an inanimate lamp.

Games have their own unique tools of storytelling, and Thomas Was Alone uses all those tools to a similar effect as it crafts a shockingly moving story about a bunch of rectangles.

The end is in sight. Even as I write this, people are chipping away at 22cans’ Curiosity: What’s Inside the Cube? Block by block, they’re inching towards revealing what Peter Molyneux has described as a potentially life-changing experience for the person that reaches the inside. It’s the type of sentiment so outlandish, so classically Molyneux that it preemptively parodies itself. There has been a lot of talk about Curiosity: whether it’s a game, whether it’s a scam, and (of course) what’s in its center. Maybe I lack faith or imagination, but I think the story around Curiosity is its most interesting feature. Regardless of how you feel about it, Curiosity is a case study of some of today’s most important industry dynamics:

This isn’t my first time through the metro.

I played through a goodly chunk of Metro 2033 on its release, and I was impressed by much of what others have observed about the game.  The world of Metro is incredibly beguiling, a rich, detailed post-apocalyptic Russian underground whose craftsmanship is hard to ignore.  Like games like Bioshock, the world of Metro is one in which it is a pleasure not merely to run-and-gun through, but one that begs to be closely looked at and appreciated for the authenticity of its scars and ruin.