Narrative Engine

Write it like you stole it

- JON INGOLD

Today I played a game set in a mysterious world, full of wonderful hints of a forgotten past that were never clarified. I remember vividly the first time I played a game that did this it was Team Ico's Shadow Of The Colossus, 20 years ago, and my friend and I rode around its empty landscapes on horseback assuring each other that, since they'd gone to all the trouble of building this vast space, it must have something to say.

It didn't. It was just vibes, y'know; perhaps the legacy of cut content. And while I loved that experience, I found I couldn't do it again when That Game-company's Journey came along a few years later, I enjoyed the mechanical play but I didn't buy the world at all. There was no lost civilisation, no buried storyline, nothing to be understood. It was all vibes to me: sound without music.

But that makes it seem like I want everything explained and detailed, and that's not right either. Take, for example, the famous case of the murdered chauffeur in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's a side murder in a detective novel and yet it's never solved, and Chandler admitted years later that he didn't actually know whodunnit.