The Narrative Games of IndieCade East 2015

“Our hurdles are design related, not tech related.” So says Thomas Grip of Frictional Games at his keynote during IndieCade East. The whole of IndieCade East was devoted to talk about narrative in one form or another. Whether it was the structure of how narrative is conveyed in the medium like in Grip’s talk or the craft of delivering narrative information or discussion of what narratives get told by games, these were the topics of the talks. Additionally, and more important perhaps was discussion about what narratives get lost in the industry.

Consistently the most interesting part of IndieCade East is the Show & Tell exhibit portion on Saturday and Sunday. There indie developers get to show off works in progress, little experiments, games that are ready to play, or something you won’t ever get to play in any other environment. Generally, narrative-based games don’t show well in a convention-like environment, but here’s three that caught my eye.

Knee Deep

The game’s developers describe Knee Deep as “a swamp noir in three acts.” It takes place at an off-highway Florida tourist trap that is decorated with insulting American Indian paraphernalia. For instance, the water tower is shaped like a tee-pee. The player will inhabit three characters investigating the death, Romana Teague, a clickbait blogger, Jack Bellot, a print reporter, and Detective K.C. Gaddis. All of this is presented to the player as an enormous stage production, complete with an opening curtain, huge Broadway blockbuster-style rotating sets, and spotlights that highlight different actions in different locations.

Based on the Telltale style approach to the adventure game, Knee Deep distances itself further from its item-puzzle-based brethren, but it also moved from a room-based structure to a scene-based one. It’s more like acting a part in a play than it is like playing a game. You take on the roles of these characters. You do not build their identities yourself. The demo that I played featured three scenes with Romana Teague. Even in only three scenes, I was able to get a handle on Teague’s character, a person that is idiosyncratic and who expresses herself through a frustrated faux cynicism. I may not like her as a person, but I definitely appreciate her as a character.

She starts in her car on the way to the tourist trap, but is stuck in traffic. After a phone call with her editor, the lights dim and Teague gets out of her car. With the aid of a spotlight, she walks between car props to a cutaway room where she sits down in what turns out to be an FBI interrogation room. The UI dutifully informs us that it is now three days later. I was not in control of that transition. In fact, movement has been removed from the player’s agency altogether. What the player is left with are dialogue options, presented as a tone of response rather than as full sentences. Additionally, I get to decide how to frame the news posts that she uploads to her blog.

There are “factions” in the game and your blog posts will determine how various groups will behave towards you. The actor’s co-workers, his church (a Scientology-alike), the diner’s management, and an American Indian protester are all looking at what you say about them online. You can sensationalize a tidbit of information for the clicks, but it will sour your reputation with the people that it’s about and who you still have to deal with. Or, you can present facts in a more measured way or fully take on a “just the facts, ma’am” attitude. The storyline itself is fixed, what changes is how your behavior affects the people around you.

That’s nice and all, but it’s the style of the game that drew me in. One of the developers, Colin Dwan, noted their inspiration as being somewhere between that of The Wolf Among Us and Kentucky Route Zero. You can see these influences in the design of the world and its visual style. A rough and dirty reality bumps up against the more fantastical nature of the “fourth wall indifferent” nature of the delivery. On loading it up, the player is presented with the image of a curtain that has still not been drawn open, and options are presented as the sorts of things that an audience member at a play might do before the action begins, like look at program or listen as the orchestra tunes up. Only after that, does the curtain open on a rather enormous stage, and a spotlight shines on a water tower revealing the aforementioned dead actor. The background is a huge watercolor mural of a Florida landscape. The stage is highlighted by large empty spaces, giving the impression of an off-highway dive. There’s one point when Teague walks up to a circular platform at the front of the stage, so that the entire stage can rotate behind her, dropping her off in a new location.

Dwan says that his crew is almost finished working on the game and just have to add in more detailed animation for the characters and figure out some smaller details of the user interface. Knee Deep‘s style and implementation is really doing it for me. It’s coming soon, so there wont be much of a wait.

Liege

I’m not one for JRPGs. I tend to get into fights over them. They’re fine, I guess, but I’ve never had the rapturous experience that the genre’s defenders seem to have had with them. Instead, I tend to tune out while playing them and my brain begins to shut off, so I don’t bother with them anymore.

Yet, for the little there was to see of it, Liege caught my interest. It was designed and developed almost solely by one guy, John Rhee (he contracted out for the sake of some of the game’s art assets and its music). I was pretty impressed by the systems that he had put together. He was inspired by the feelings and storytelling of old school JRPGs, but he has combined those elements with a modern presentation and a tactical combat that is a little more reminiscent of the recent Shadowrun games (though Rhee cites The Banner Saga and Transistor as inspiration for the tactical combat design).

The game features an isometric camera, grid-based movement, and turn-based combat. The player cues up the party’s moves, and then, once they’re set, the entire team executes the actions. This system depends on using action points of varying costs costs that are associated with different kinds of actions. The player can test different things out before committing to their set up, as they can just select “undo” at any time during the planning phase. The combat looks more like Shadowrun‘s or The Banner Saga‘s to me, but the function of planning attacks is very much like Transistor‘s combat system. Among the options in combat are moving characters, attacking, or setting a character to parry moves coming from a certain direction. The latter option gives the combat a feel sort of like fencing and means that there is more to success than simply choosing what weapon to hit the enemy with. Likewise, different weapons lead to different tactics being available as options for the player. Some can be more advantageous given the position and terrain, though it does cost an action point to switch weapons.

The display demo mostly showed off how the combat is working so far. I hit a bug that stalled the demo, so it’s still a work in progress. The basic premise of the game, though, is that your character is an important person, there’s a coup, and you have to escape a castle to some boats. This plays into a larger civil war plotline in the wake of a king’s assassination. Some of the ideas that Rhee explained to me regarding how the story will connect with the combat were interesting and rather ambitious for a solo dev. Save for the story’s central character, dead means dead. If you lose any character during combat, they’re gone. The loss wont affect the main storyline, which he wants to be focused with little to no faffing about, but it will affect being able to interact with those characters later, like at reunions in camps or in the availability of a few side quests Rhee plans to implement.

While the story itself feels a little typical, I’ve had some really good experiences with similar combat systems in games that I have played recently. I feel more involved and engaged in a situation where I have to plan out my moves instead of just mashing the attack button like many old school JRPGs require or even modern action RPGs for that matter.

Moonshot

I had to have the premise of Moonshot explained to me twice, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which humanity was wiped out by aliens, save for one city that is loyal to the aliens. The government of the city wants to keep technology at a certain level so as not to possibly attract the alien’s ire once again. To that end, the city governments set up an agency to keep things in check. The player plays an agent of that force, and it’s your job to find and destroy ancient technology — ancient to them, but clearly simply modern day appliances and the like to us. The world is set to be trapped in the Victorian era or something like it. Also, agents have esper powers and are ranked according to the colors of the rainbow, indicating also what type of powers they have.

Got all that? Because I probably messed up something in there. Here’s the kicker. This is a visual novel styled in the vein of the Ace Attorney series with design decisions lifted from L.A. Noire. It’s also doing some interesting things with its artistic presentation. Given the color based nature of the agency, only people appear in full color. Backgrounds are sepia toned. This presentation is meant to represent the subjective perspective of the main character. Don’t know if this will go anywhere, but it’s a nice style choice. It also works to evoke the psudeo-time period the story is trying to work with.

I skipped over an investigation sequence and went straight into an interview of a murder victim’s daughter. Violet, an empath, listens to the daughter’s testimony while monitoring her emotional state, represented here by a series of bars labeled things like sad, angry, happy, or confused. If the emotional reaction doesn’t match with the testimony being given, you can “Doubt” that part of the testimony. “Questioning” allows the player to press for more information or clarification. Or you can “Present,” which is to confront a contradiction with physical evidence. There’s also a counter that measures how many mistakes you’ve made. Five mistakes and you’re out.

It’s all simple enough. I don’t know if it was because of my training with the Ace Attorney series, but I got through the whole thing without tripping up. Though the person behind me wasn’t as lucky in figuring out the logic. Remember how I said narrative-based games don’t do well on a show floor? This is partly why. The atmosphere isn’t conducive to absorbing information or considering complex detail. Additionally this game also suffered from simply being way too wordy. But then again, there is a difference between standing at a table surrounded by onlookers and sitting alone at ease at one’s computer.

This combination of things is just weird enough that I’m curious by default. Like Hatoful Boyfriend, I need to play the end product just to see how this all turns out.

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Though the theme of this year’s IndieCade East was narrative, plenty of games didn’t fall under that banner. I’ll detail a few more indie games next week, looking at a different aspect of game design.