When Gameplay Mechanics Serve the Narrative

Spoilers for Tactical Breach Wizards, Hades, and Hades 2 ahead

You’re a Wizard Navy Seal with the power to see one second into the future. You’ve been dispatched on a mission to rescue a hostage with your most trusted comrade. When you get to the hostage, a mysterious monster appears and kidnaps your comrade. You have a choice. Rescue the hostage or save your comrade? You have to make a choice. You have to make a choice. You don’t make a choice. You freeze, locked in a loop, seeing your failure over. And over. And over.

Sound familiar? Then you too have played the incredibly funny and surprisingly gut punching game Tactical Breach Wizards. In this game you follow a squad of, well, tactical combat wizards, as they attempt to stop a world altering imperialist plot headed by former wizard soldier Liv Kennedy, the comrade I mentioned earlier. One of these wizards, Zan, has the power to see one second into the future, which serves as a handy plot justification for the ability to undo the actions you take on your turn if you find they had unforeseen consequences. It’s a useful ability in these types of tactical squad combat games that you can also see in games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, allowing you to plot your turns far more effectively.

However, this ability takes a dark turn in the scene I discussed above. Zan originally believed that, in that mission, he had saved the hostage and let Liv get captured. He believes it so strongly that it even serves as the opening mission and tutorial for the game. It isn’t until later that he is confronted by Liv and realizes that he had instead frozen and saved no one. Your available actions change to hesitate, freeze, and panic, while commit to a decision is grayed out. You don’t foresee your turn, you foresee failure. You don’t rewind, you regret. Tactical Breach Wizards takes the mechanics you’ve been using to play the game and turns them into storytelling beats, forcing you the player to sit in Zan’s failure, letting you endlessly rewind just as he did, unable to make a decision. 

It’s a fascinating use of game mechanics to not only play the game, but to heighten the emotional impact of the story as well. Rather than just tell you about how Zan failed, or showing you it in a cut scene, the game makes you play it out. You don’t just press F to pay respects, you play the level, and feel yourself failing just as much as Zan does. 

Oftentimes, gameplay and story are seen as separate, or at least not supremely inter-related. Skyrim’s open world doesn’t really change how you react and interact with the stories within it, nor does Darksiders hack n slash style fighting, while it is sick as hell, truly connect you to War’s struggle to redeem himself. These mechanics are integral to one’s enjoyment of the game, but they don’t do a whole lot to enhance the narrative within these games. Tactical Breach Wizards decided that instead, the mechanics would actually be the narrative. 

Supergiant Games struck gold in a similar manner with the game Hades, utilizing the Roguelike structure of the game (See last week's article for a brief explanation of Roguelikes) to build the narrative of Zagreus’s escape from the Underworld to find his long lost mother, Persephone. Building a story into a roguelike game can inherently be difficult: How do you justify the same character canonically dying repeatedly and yet continuing to struggle, with all the NPC’s understanding what’s going on? It’s simple: you make the main character a Chthonic God who is forcibly returned to the bottom of the Underworld when he dies. 

We need you to have constant interactions with characters that are trapped or staying in one distinct location who lack either the ability or desire to leave? Let’s just make a game where you constantly have to retrace your steps through the same areas. Oh, your narrative is centered around trying to break free of toxic cycles and create a new paradigm for your home? How about we make the gameplay itself cyclical, constantly trying to overcome a Sisyphean task that, because it is a Roguelike, must always repeat? Hell, let’s just put Sisyphus in the game to really drive the point home! Supergiant structured the story such that it could only ever work in a Roguelike structure, and it becomes so much more impactful because of that.

Of course, it works both ways. Hades’s story is crafted specifically to fit within a roguelike structure. Characters like Sisyphus, Eurydice, and Patroclus are given concrete and understandable reasons for why they are always staying in the same place from run to run. Meanwhile bosses like the Furies or Theseus and Asterius have jobs within the underworld that are meant to put them in direct conflict with Zagreus, while also keeping them in fixed locations. Even once you have beaten the game, Hades gives you the task of continuing to test out the underworld's security measures, providing in-world justification for why you keep trying to beat up your dad, and why your dad keeps returning to fight you. Zagreus’s goals don’t necessitate permanently destroying any of these people, so you can have a satisfying conclusion to the narrative even as you go to fight Hades for the 500th time. The two systems work in harmony, reinforcing each other and creating  a beautiful game that has left an indelible impact on gaming culture as a whole. It is also the only game I have ever blue ribboned (completed all achievements for) on Steam.

You can also have cases where gameplay mechanics and narrative are incongruous with each other. For this, look no further than Supergiants own Hades II. They developed a narrative that, at least initially, is structured around permanently killing the main antagonist, Chronos, and returning the world to what it was like before he broke free and spread havoc. The only problem is, if you do return peace to the world, there’s no more reason to go on runs. If Chronos is dead and the House of Hades is restored, you don’t need to go on a death defying adventure through the underworld to reach the House of Hades and kill Chronos. 

To be fair (To be fa-y-uh) they come up with narrative justifications to fix these things but they certainly don’t feel quite as…natural. We get some weird time travel shenanigans and now Chronos is a good guy, but we have to keep fighting him so that “time can flow freely forth” by eliminating alternate worlds where he’s actually still evil. Even typing that sentence felt confusing. Add that to some questionable reasons for why characters like Echo choose to stay in the Fields of Mourning and the whole thing simply feels less cohesive. There’s still a narrative, and there’s still gameplay, but they feel inherently at odds with each other. We can’t free Arachne, Cerberus still has to go get tormented into becoming an Infernal Beast, Prometheus is still…doing whatever it is he’s trying to do, and everything stays in stasis. In Hades the characters staying in their spots made sense in the narrative. In Hades II, numerous characters would have been better served storywise by moving on, but they can’t because then their game mechanics wouldn’t be accessible. I won’t dive into a full critique of the story of Hades II (there’s a great video essay by Jay Castello that dives further in here) but I do feel like a lot of its shortcomings stem from the fact that the Gameplay and the Narrative aren’t just separate, they’re almost at odds.

Video Games provide such a unique medium for storytelling, and when they truly sing is when people realize that the story should be told not just through the writing but through the game itself. Just like how a game can use its difficulty to reinforce the narrative, it can also utilize its core gameplay loop to enhance it. These are not independent pieces that can be easily removed from each other, but instead a bunch of interdependent systems that rely on and strengthen each other into one cohesive whole. I don’t want to just play through a book or movie but now I can control the protagonist. The interactivity and interplay between gameplay and writing is what makes video game storytelling so unique and so beautiful. It creates a story that can only be captured by a video game, that requires the player to interact with the story for it to truly be understood on a visceral, emotional level. I want to feel the story in every aspect of the game, every killing blow dodged, every respite purchased with rosary beads, and every traffic warlock defenestrated.

 Fuck Steve Clark.