Do you play these type of games ? If so what are your likes and dislikes of this format of game ?What do you all think of this genre? Do you enjoy it or does it feel too passive for you? What games in this style worked for you, and which ones fell flat and why?
By interactive film games I mean the kind of games that can almost be watched like a movie or TV show. For example, there is the horror game Until Dawn and another by the same studio called The Quarry. Both of these games are set up like your almost watching a tv show or movie and you mostly have control of the character during Quick time events. The choices you make during the time you have control can be the difference between all the characters surviving the night or then all dying .There is also a newer one called Dispatch heroes . This one is made by some some former Telltale developers. The game is set up again like a TV show but you can control things and make a few choices that slightly change the plot. This game is even being released in an episodic manner to as a gimmick if you bought the game it only came with two episodes and the rest were released afterwards on a week by week basis . This was a silly gimmick but did help build up hype for the game .
A lot of these types of games have minimal actual gameplay and can be pretty linear, but Until Dawn and The Quarry stand out to me.
They are structured in a way where the main story still plays out, but the key difference is that you control who lives and who dies. The choices feel more meaningful because the cast can change a lot between playthroughs depending on what you do. Detroit: Become Human is another game that goes even further with branching outcomes. It supposedly has something like 85 different endings, and as far as I know I have never seen a streamer or YouTuber who has actually managed to show all of them. The original Telltale games fit into this category too, but they were usually far more linear. In some of their games, almost every major character was guaranteed to survive no matter what, which is the complete opposite of something like The Quarry where literally everyone can die.
Gameplay wise, I think this style is interesting because the focus is less on skill and more on tension and decision making. You are not really mastering complex mechanics, you are mostly just choosing dialogue, exploring small environments, and occasionally reacting quickly during panic moments. Some people say that makes these games feel more like movies than games, but I think that is part of the appeal. The interactivity comes from emotional stakes rather than traditional gameplay.
My only dislike is these games essentially only work if you are engaged with the story . If not then by default you are more likely to view them as bad . Also depending on the title you can watch the game on YouTube like a movie/tv show so less incentive to pay for the game if itâs aggressively linear like the tell tale games .
Netflixâs Bandersnatch was an interesting experiment. An interactive episode of âBlack Mirrorâ. They developed the tools to create more of these but relented when they realized it requires the resources of producing several movies to create a single movie-length experience that includes content that many people wonât replay to see.
Allegedly Bandersnatch contains a total of 5+ hours of footage, only 40-90 minutes of which might be shown in a typical interactive watching session.
The main obstacle to âinteractive filmsâ is basically that. The original 1983 coin-op Dragonâs Lair is essentially a choice narrative if you think of button and directional inputs as choices to move or attack. It contained lush animation by Don Bluth. They saved on creating extensive alternate animations by making wrong choices usually result in quick death. Each scene scenario could basically play in random order as the character explores the castle, and only once a sufficient number of scenes were successfully completed was the player shown the finale. It was a rare thing to see for someone to make it into the end in the arcades of my youth.
With new technology and motion capture, this production can be streamlined somewhat since the footage can be somewhat re-mixed with different camera angles and different locations on the fly. Supermassive does this by having motion captured actors against a green screen which are replaced by detailed avatars of the performers and CGI locations which are both pre-rendered and also assembled live so it alternates between story scenes and standard console exploration with a realistic avatar of the character.
Some of the original Lucasarts games like the Monkey Island series had extensive dialog scenes but played in-game. As time went on and tastes changes, the actual graphic adventure interactivity started swapping long interactive dialog and interactive cutscenes with pre-rendered animation.
Other interactive films are available. Sam Barlow created the IF one-move classic Aisle and then has been experimenting with commercial interactive film games that tend to play as a puzzle-database where you try to gather all the information about an event or events.
I missed bandersnatch I had on my watch list for so long. Now I canât watch because Netflix removed it .I wanted to watch just for the novelty aspect of it .
Wow that animation reminds me of how much I miss hand drawn animation . Only time I like 3d is if itâs stylized like Arcane , spider verse , demon slayer I donât like it when they try and make it realistic .
Thanks k have some new games to check out. Interestingly enough some visual novels have full animation or full motion in them. I found a live action one where they had a real actors it was called Shibuya scramble 428: Shibuya Scramble on Steam
China also has one calked road to empress Road To Empress on Steam both of them were like interactive tv shows . I think the issue with the format is making it truly interactive. I know Shibuya scramble managed this and had some form of game play but road to empress the Chinese game didnât even thought it does have like 100 different endings.
428âs gameplay is still just based on making choices; its thing is that it has all these different PCs with storylines that branch individually, but in order to advance one characterâs storyline you sometimes need to get other charactersâ storylines into a certain state to change the options the one character has available, so thereâs a puzzle quality to âwhat choices do I need to make in storylines A through D to open up new options in storyline E?â ⌠if that makes any sense.
One thing considering this has made me think about: a personâs definition of âinteractivityâ will change their interest in different types of interactive fiction.
If a player wants to be able to change the actual plot so it time-caves, that is the most difficult type to author because there must be material the player will opt not to see.
The oft-repeated mantra âyou can do anythingâ is is a complete myth: ideally no player is doing things that werenât put in a game by the designers. Itâs when a game has enough content that a player wonât see it all is when a player truly experiences agency - to not interact with the entire work. You canât do everything in 80 Days, but no two trips around the globe will happen the same way simply because there are so many possibilities. QBNs, like RPGs, likely offer the most âplot freedomâ due to planned randomness and a large map that doesnât require you to visit every square and verb the correct frob to reach an ending - essentially open world, to an extent. 80 Days offers an entire globe, but you wonât travel to cities they didnât intend for you to!
That may seem to conflict with âyou donât want to write five books worth of content for a one book experience,â but putting more detail into a mainline story with one major conclusion, or several reasonably varied outcomes is much more productive than managing that level of detail in a time-cave.
TL;DR: Interactivity neednât be confined to branching paths - though this becomes more difficult stepping from text into media production.
But does allowing the player to change the actual plot necessarily lead to a time cave?
How precisely are you defining âput in a game by the designersâ?
But do you not want that and is that what youâre producing? Itâs only a one book experience if the reader only reads through it once. If a reader reads through it more than onceâŚ
The point I was making was that if people wonât replay it to see more content, youâve failed to create a compelling experienceâand this is not a problem of time cave vs insert-your-preferred-structure-here, since the same problem could occur under any structure (and to play devilâs advocate for the time cave, it might be less likely to occur under the time cave than, say, branch-and-bottleneck where youâre going to have to play through several rounds of similar content in order to gain access to the new stuff)
You canât edit together video as easily as you can have text change based on this or that variable, for instance. Text being cheap continues to be one of the benefits of using a text-based medium.
We have crossed into a different era. Bandersnatch itself may no longer be available on Netflix, but YouTube has many playthroughs published by the kind of channels who do movie reaction videos, like this one.
@Dissolved I like tell tale but one of the main criticism and flaw of their model was so many ppl would literally just watch the game on YouTube and never pay for it . The games essentially were seen to have no replay value. Even in their subreddit they had tons of fans who never actually purchased a game they would just watch on YouTube .
I hate that Netflix removed bandersnatch because while you can see bits on YouTube. It does not work the same way Netflix originally made it in.
I suppose that was the result of those games being very linear, though? No point replaying something where choices seem to have little effectâŚ
Thatâs why I said âlimited degree of preservationââit preserves (some) content without preserving form; itâs a static slice of an interactive experience rather than the interactive experience itself.