Storytelling

Top 10 Games with Stories

1. The Last of Us
The story is about a man named Joel who loses his daughter at the beginning of the apocalypse caused by a virus know as 'Cordyceps'. After 20 years, Joel has shielded himself from people, but when he has been given the job to take a 14 year old girl named Ellie, who is immune to the virus, to a group to find a vaccine, but then he starts to open up and they form a relationship like he had with his daughter. Ellie, at first feels the same way about Joel, but then she starts to open up to him as he saves her and she saves him. They lose quite a few people along the way, such as people being bitten, shot, or just left behind.


2. The Walking Dead: Season One
When the zombie apocalypse starts, Lee, a man convicted for a crime, meets a little girl named Clementine, and throughout the game, you are to try and protect her from the dangers around her and teach her how to protect herself. A game based on your decisions, you decide which characters die, or who you want to save and deal with conflicts in the group. People look up to you (Lee) and hope he can make good enough decisions in order to save everyone from dying.

3. The Walking Dead: Season Two
After the events of the first season, you play as Clementine after having lost Lee, and control her decisions as she fights off walkers, enemies, and try and work with a group full of over emotional adults and their children. From the beginning of the game, we are told that we are trying to get to a place called Wellington, a place that is very cold and slows down the walkers, but, whether or not that is true, you'll just have to wait and see.

4. Her Story
You, at first, play an unknown character who is working on a computer, looking through 20 year old video clips of a woman being interviewed about her husbands disappearance, later murder. You have to search through the database words that the woman says throughout her interviews and find out the hidden truth behind everything she says. The story is very original, finding out things that make you second guess everything she tells the police.

5. Outlast
You play as an investigative reporter called Miles Upshur. He is given a hint by an anonymous person, who works at an asylum run by a company funding experiments disguised as charity, to investigate and expose the company for what it really is. When Miles gets there, he is greeted with dead bodies from more or less the start of the game until the end. It is revealed that the project the scientists were doing on the patients backfired and caused a riot, and everyone being scared of an entity called 'The Walrider.' Throughout the game, Miles is attacked by patients and doctors, and must survive to get all hidden secrets. In a DLC of the game, Outlast: Whistleblower, you play a man named Waylon Park, the man who told Miles about the place. We find out that Murkoff found out about his betrayal and force him into volunteering into the 'Engine Program,' (forcing him to become a patient).

6. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
You play as the last person on Earth. No one knows for certain who you are, but most people would believe you are an American woman named Kate in a 1984 British village. As you walk around the village, you see lights who are revealed to be people, as you follow them around, you start to understand their stories, until you come to their final moments and then go onto the next character's story. Each character has a unique story, such as being worried about your children, affairs, religion, widowers, children being confused about situations, and most importantly, death. An unknown danger appears in this town and Kate, a scientist, tries to communicate with it, but as she does this, it starts to make people disappear.

7. The Wolf Among Us
Based on the popular comic book series, 'Fables,' the story about fairy tale characters living in a small community in New York. You play as Bigby Wolf, previously known as 'The Big Bad Wolf,' who is now an investigator for Fabletown. When a prostitute's head is left in front of his apartment building's front door, it is up to Bigby and Snow White to try and solve the murder before any mundies (humans) find out. Whilst investigating, Bigby realises that there is something bigger happening than just prostitutes being murdered.

8. Beyond: Two Souls
You play as Jodie Holmes, a girl whose memories have been reordered, so you play through her entire timeline from the age of 8 to 23 all bundled up. Making decisions along the way, you see that Jodie is attached to an entity called Aiden (pronounced eye-dun), and even though she doesn't want him there, whenever she thinks she's lost him, she realises she wants him back. Jodie has been through a lot, such as being bullied be others as a teenager, forced into the military, almost getting raped, being hunted down for treason, tricked into committing treason, etc. It is made quite obvious that Jodie has been through some pretty emotional things. and considering you make decisions, it makes you feel bad that you think you caused all this madness.

9. Among the Sleep
This is quite an original game, in which you play as a baby celebrating his 2nd birthday, and because of his age, more or less everything you see in the game is all the baby's imagination, but as you play, you can see all the clues that let you piece together everything from the real world. The game deals with what its like to have an abusive parent who drinks, whose parents are going through a custody battle, etc. The scenery in the game is based off of what is going on in real life, such as beer bottles lying all over the place, drawing the baby made about his mother, which look pretty terrifying, and the monster looks like a giant tree with extremely thin branches as legs, wearing a long coat., obviously representing someone in his life. At the end of the game, it is made clear as to what is happening and the child is then taken away from his abusive mother.

10. Five Nights at Freddy's
This game series is where you play someone working security at a restaurant (except the 4th game) and you have to stay alive until morning. At first, Five Nights at Freddy's didn't seem to have a story, but if you dig deeper, then it is found that very strange things have happened to these chains of restaurants, such as children being murdered and stuffed into animatronic suits, who are given free will from 12am to 6am. A suit malfunctioning and biting off a child's entire frontal lobe, known as "The Bite of '87,' A lot of theories might prove that the entire game series is just a child's dream who has been having nightmares about the restaurant mascots, because he was the victim of the 'Bite.' But it's a split opinion whether or not people think it is really a dream or that it really happened.


Games without a Story

1. Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird is a simple game where you play a bird who doesn't have the ability to fly like other birds, it relies on you to tap the screen every second so that it doesn't fall the ground or bump into pipes along the way so it doesn't die.

2. Tetris

Tetris is a game where you have to sort out shapes neatly so that you don't over flow. If you get an entire line, without any gaps in between shapes, then that line will disappear and you can carry on playing until you lose or get bored.


3. Pong
Pong is a game, which you would usually play with someone else, where you play a simple line trying to hit a ball from left to right with your partner, it is basically a bird's eye view of an air hockey table, from the side.


Difference between stories in games and stories in a book or on film and TV
In a TV show or film, you are watching other people do everything for you, you don't need to do anything but listen to the speakers. In a book, you are reading every little detail of what is happening, so you can understand it a bit better that TV and Film. In a game, you feel more involved in what's happening because you can control the pace of the game until a cut scene occurs, you control the playable character so you feel more like you are a part of game.

Linear and Non-Linear Game line? What does this  mean and how can it impact on storytelling in games?
A linear story-line is a story that starts from the beginning of someone's story, whilst a non-linear story-line could be telling the same story over and over again, but in different character's point of view, or using flashbacks/flash-forwards. By using linear story-lines, people see the story in order, without getting confused. Using non-linear story-lines, then you can have a flashback to see why a character acts the way they do and understand the story in a different way.