Games With Strange Storytelling Methods

06/05/2024

Dive deep into unconventional storytelling methods in games like Her Story, Sunless Sea, and Dark Souls to unlock their captivating narratives.
Games like Life is Strange and The Hex offer unique experiences with time-hopping drama and a story within a story, keeping players engaged.
Explore thought-provoking narratives like Before Your Eyes and Not For Broadcast that challenge players to reflect on life, memory, and control.

As video games have evolved, gamers have slowly expected more and more intricate stories from the titles they play. Fans of huge sprawling narratives, like those found in Baldur’s Gate 3, or those who enjoy the slow build character development found in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 have their choice of hundreds of quality games that tell beautiful stories and are inarguably pieces of art.

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These video games do an extraordinary job of making the players themselves feel engaged and part of the story more than any other title.

Some games, however, take different approaches to telling their story. Whether through hidden content, time travel shenanigans, or unconventional gameplay, some games come into their own by using strange storytelling methods, as the following examples illustrate.

Her Story

Playing Desktop Detective

Her Story

Platform(s)PC, iOS, Android, macOSReleasedJune 24, 2015Developer(s)Sam BarlowGenre(s)Puzzle, Simulation, Adventure, casual, Indie Games

Her Story, developed by Sam Barlow, is a very peculiar game. An FMV game that stars one actress as a suspect in a murder case, players take on the role of somebody sitting at an ancient desktop computer and clicking through police interview tapes, trying to use the right keywords to uncover more of the story and chronologically assemble a narrative, as the suspect has told it over a few different interviews.

The performance of the lead character, Viva Seifert, is captivating, and the way that her story changes and melds into a complex web of lies and deceit always keeps her on a razor’s edge between being the villain or the victim in the story. Piecing a story together can be confusing, but with each step toward an answer, players will feel a sense of accomplishment as the truth starts to form.

Sunless Sea

A Macabre Adventure That Reveals Its Hand Slowly

Sunless Sea

Platform(s)Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PC, iOS, Android, Linux, Xbox OneReleasedFebruary 6, 2015DeveloperFailbetter GamesGenre(s)Shooter, RPG, Adventure, Indie Games

Set in the expansive universe that was first founded in Fallen London, Sunless Sea is part ocean exploration and part survival horror. Set in a London that has fallen into Hell itself, there are nods to classic Satanic iconography, the Cthulhu mythos, and traditional pirate stories. The story of Sunken Sea isn’t so much told as it is explored. Players captain a ship across the ocean and try their hardest to survive against the weird and the terrible.

Along the way, while searching for riches – or while surviving a lack of supplies through gleeful cannibalism – players will encounter missions that fill out more of the world and the lore of the horrors around them and how they came to be. These missions can be explored or left to focus on the genuine threat of starvation, insanity, or death to one of the strange crab creatures circling the ship. Sunless Sea reveals its hand slowly, but surgically.

The Dark Souls Trilogy

Players Piece Together The Story Through Observations & Item Descriptions

Dark Souls

Platform(s)PS3, Switch, PS4, Xbox 360, PC, Xbox OneReleasedSeptember 22, 2011Developer(s)From SoftwareGenre(s)Action RPG

It is easy to see why fans are enthusiastic about Dark Souls storytelling. FromSoftware leaves the plots of their games intentionally vague. Characters in the Souls series usually begin as undead wearing scraps of clothing and struggling against others like them. As they progress, players will uncover some of the secrets of the world they inhabit by speaking to friendly NPCs and doing elaborate quests for them.

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Often, this content can be entirely missed by an unobservant player. And even more lore and story about the importance of the quest that the player is taking is hidden in item descriptions that have to be trawled through to start to put together how doomed the world is and what the player’s goals truly mean. It is no wonder that fans have made countless hours of YouTube videos explaining the lore of such cryptic and haunting stories.

Life Is Strange

Time Hopping Drama

Life is Strange

Platform(s)PS3, Switch, PS4, Xbox 360, PC, iOS, Android, Xbox OneReleasedJanuary 30, 2015Developer(s)Dontnod EntertainmentGenre(s)Adventure

When Life Is Strange was released, it was highly praised for the moving story that brings Max Caulfield home to Arcadia Bay. The heartfelt tale about returning to one’s childhood home is full of nostalgia and a wish to go back to the way things were. So when Max unwittingly manages to move backward through time, retaining her knowledge of how things should be, her world starts to come apart. These time-hopping adventures lead Max to a series of missing person cases, her old best friend Chloe, and a dramatic conclusion that throws the whole story upside down.

Piecing the story together is often left to the player, with Max’s powers letting her see things in different ways. Max even slips into a different reality: one where her friend is injured. Max falling through her past and ending with a future she doesn’t want makes this story a mind-bending romp.

The Hex

A Story Told By The Games Themselves

Platforms: PC
Released: 2018-10-17
Developer: Daniel Mullins Games

A game that slowly evolves as players work through it, The Hex is a title from Daniel Mullins that is just as unnerving and elaborate as his other titles. It begins on a stormy night in a run-down hotel bar. A Crash Bandicoot-esque character orders a drink and players then control him, seeing the events that brought him there by playing through some platforming levels. From there, players are given control of a series of characters in flashbacks; a character from a fighting game, an RPG wizard, and a survivor from a game that looks a lot like the Fallout series.

Each of these characters has been wronged and there are elements of horror and heartbreak in each tale. By telling the story of a developer through the eyes of his creations, players are given insight into a dark world where creativity gives way to money and fame. The Hex plays out slowly but the jumping between different genres and styles makes it unforgettable.

Before Your Eyes

Blink And You’ll Miss It

Before Your Eyes

ReleasedApril 8, 2021DeveloperGoodbyeWorld GamesPlatform(s)PS5, PC, MobileGenre(s)Adventure

Before Your Eyes’ story is conveyed through a unique mechanic. Audiences play as Benny, a man who finds himself floating on a boat toward the afterlife. The ferryman asks him to recount his life before he is judged but warns that he will pass through his recollections whenever he blinks. Using eye tracking technology, the game perfectly captures the idea of memory – there are moments that players will want to cling onto but the second that they blink, they will jump to the next point in Benny’s life.

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Passing through the life of a child who falls in love and has big hopes and dreams but falls ill, Before Your Eyes manages to tell an important story about living life as big as possible all while forcing players to blink through the whole life of someone who has died. It can be very hard to keep from blinking if players are tearing up, but fans will often find themselves falling victim to Benny’s tragic tale.

Not For Broadcast

Propaganda Simulator

Released: 2022-01-25
Developer: NotGames
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

While indie darling Papers, Please could easily deserve a place here, Not For Broadcast takes the cake for depicting an authoritarian government taking control through propaganda and subtle control that quickly becomes overpowering. Players are tasked with controlling what is seen on TV, cutting between cameras and censoring anything unpleasant. At first, this seems straightforward enough, but players can use this to support the politicians that they choose, advertise products that they have a stake in, and ensure that opponents to their beliefs never get screen time.

When the player is creating the news, they can decide what that news is. The control and tiny changes that are caused by the player in this way quickly spiral as they can topple the authoritarian government, or hold it up despite their crimes. More and more of what is going on in the world is revealed to the player, but the story as it will be perceived by the world is chosen by the player.

12 Minutes

Groundhog Day Murder

12 Minutes

ReleasedAugust 19, 2021Platform(s)Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, Switch, PS5, PS4, PC, Xbox OneDeveloper(s)Luis AntonioGenre(s)Adventure

A star-studded game that wants to be played and replayed until it is solved, 12 Minutes opens with the player in an apartment with their wife. The character they play seems happy, and his wife reveals that she is pregnant and the pair begin to celebrate. The husband, the player character, is voiced by James McAvoy, and his wife is voiced by Daisy Ridley. However, things turn sour when a policeman, voiced by Willem Dafoe, bursts into the room claiming that the player’s wife killed her father. The policeman kills the husband and the husband.

It is a time loop akin to Groundhog Day or Deathloop. The player is not expected to defeat the policeman but rather to protect his wife and uncover the truth about the claims. Playing through the same situation while changing bits and pieces to see how the story unfolds makes for an expertly written plot. Players who reach the ending and discover what really happened will be left awestruck by how effectively the unconventional storytelling was used to tell such a confounding and chaotic narrative.