1) Spec Ops: The Line

Yeah, no surprise given how much I bang on about it.

Actually, I did run into some of the people who did work on it. They told me harrowing stories about how the game came together, how certain staffers went through hell so they could hit their deliverables and how it was chaos near the end of development.

Having lived through crunch, I know that pain and stress. I know how it can tear you apart from the inside out. I know it can ruin your health.

All that said, I absolutely would have loved to have been on the team to chart out Walker’s descent into hell and coming up with all of the ways SOTL played with the unreliable narrator. How did set up the twist? Was it there from the beginning? How did they come up with the multiple endings on top of other endings?

Also, this is a game that had a vision and never wavered. All too often, projects can lose focus and direction, leaving teams uninspired and it'll show.

Not SOTL. Nope. Misery all the way down. But a well-crafted one.

2) Resident Evil Village

Yes, the one with the Big Titty Goth Mommy. But that’s not the reason it’s here.

I got in a discussion about this game with another writer this week and, to me, it’s a touch better than 7, which is a great title. But Village felt more like I was coming home to RE’s apex, Resident Evil 4, with the mix of camp, body horror, and visceral moment-to-moment gameplay.

While 7 had an absolute banger of an opening, by the time you past “Dad” and get to the tar monsters, you’ve kinda seen all the game is going to throw at you.

Village, however, is a rollercoaster with a deft sense of you swinging from predator to prey status at any moment (Dear God, the dollhouse!).

It’s the last game I can remember where I felt terrible for the bosses, which I think is an amazing narrative accomplishment. What you saw as sadistic tormentors are nothing more than people twisted to suffer. Moreau stands out here, although your final conflict with him isn’t as satisfying as your previous two final conflcts. Again, the dollhouse. AAAAAAAAA!

I wish I worked on it because I wish I saw how the team put together the narrative framework, how they hammered out the themes, the ambient narrative, the pacing. The first half is so diamond sharp I still think about how the opening effortlessly builds tension and the world. I know I could have gotten so many tips from being in the writers’ room.

3) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

When I was a wee John, I put stupid amounts of time into this. I can’t recall if I beat it, but I still think about it, especially when I have nightmares about its Babel Fish puzzle.

The original was a purely text game from Infocom, based on the novel series of the same name by the late Douglas Adams. Adams (a fan of Infocom) co-developed the game with interactive fiction veteran Steve Meretzky, who shares some fantastic memories about working with Adams and making the game here.

Text adventures are puzzle games boiled down to their core. There's no place to hide. You don’t have bleeding-edge graphics to hide behind or the addictive draw of Loot Boxes to keep people playing. All you have are words and your clever ideas.

You have to make puzzles and program the engine to understand what the player is thinking versus what you want them to do. You need to make the puzzles challenging but not absurd. You should have puzzles that, once they do make it work, they stp banging their head against the desk go “Oh yeah, that actually makes sense.”

Oh, and it’s just the two of you working on this and one of you is a terrible procastinator.

I would have loved to sit in on how you build puzzles tough, but fair. I wish I could have seen how they paced the puzzles... how they crafted the words. I wanted to see how an author and a game maker collaborated: one learning the mechanics of the engines, the other get in tune with an author with limitless ideas and jokes about towels.

But honestly, I just wish I could have worked with Douglas Adams.

4) Knights of the Old Republic

This was the game that announced BioWare’s Golden Age to the world. Having made a number of RPGs previously (fun fact: they made the first two Baldur’s Gate titles), BioWare got the nod to from LucasArts to make a Star Wars RPG, and boy did they deliver.

Long games are hard to make. How Long to Beat says KOTOR can be beaten in 29 hours, but if you want 100% completion, it’ll take about 48 hours.

I can tell you from experience the longer a game is, the more that can go wrong narratively. Your pacing can be thrown off. You run the risk of narrative bloat driven by a writer’s ego. Eventually you’ll hit a story patch that… just isn’t that good and the game suffers for it (After the Dollhouse in RE Village, Moreau’s chapter felt flat by comparison). You’ll fumble narrative threads. I’ve seen it happen on massive titles.

I would have loved to have been in the writers’ room to see how they kept the main story, side quests, character arcs, and every other story element tight, interesting, and rewarding.

I would have loved to watch the team developing characters, polishing stories, and making your Light Side/Dark Side moral decisions mean something. Making sure the player is engaged in the player fantasy is the hook to keep people playing RPGs for hours and hours.

With KOTOR, BioWare took the reins of an IP currently known for awful prequels and bad dialogue and make it shine, capturing the original trilogy sense of fun and adventure. It must have been terrifying to look at a white board back then and realize, "Oh hell, we have to make a Star Wars game," but it doesn't show one bit.

5) The Return of the Obra Dinn

Remember the Hitchhiker’s Guide game from earlier. A text game? Made by two people? In the 1980s?

in 2018, Lucas Pope cosmically told the industry to hold his beer with The Return of the Obra Dinn, a mystery about a merchant ship that’s been missing for years suddenly turning up with its crew missing or reduced to bones and rags. You are an investigator sent to figure out what happened.

You have no witness. Just sparse clues, a notebook, and fragments of time captured via a pocket watch that can recreate a death the moment it happened. And that’s it. From there, you have to reverse engineer what happened on the ship and what become of the crew.

Oh, and I didn’t mention the art style? It's a stylized throwback to binary image monochrome graphics o games and Mac desktops from the 1980s.

And Lucas Pope did this all himself.

Okay, he had voice actors and localizers, but one person dreamed this up and put in the long, painful hours of trial and error to get this working, to make the puzzles work, to sort out what goes where and when.

In narrative development, there’s something called “edge cases,” which means you have to account for how and when the player will access a certain point on the map. You have to be sure that a quest you are working on doesn’t break another quest. Hopefully a bunch of designers and writers will do a lot of communicating to make sure nothing breaks.

Lucas didn’t have that. He had to keep this all straight in his head and go back to the drawing board when one crewman’s fate “broke” another’s. I would have loved to see how Lucas kept track of it all and how he kept his focus and cool while managing all the moving pieces. I reckon all of us could have learned something watching Lucas put it all together.

I also bet he’s really good at Clue.

Here’s my breakdown of the five I picked:

• Two sci-fi (three if you count the time-bending pocket watch from Obra Dinn), two horror-action, one mystery.
• Three are first person.
• Three have modern graphics, one is deliberately retro, one is just text.
• All of them features guns being fired and options for NPCs and the player being killed.
• Four feature puzzles.
• Two have the option of different endings.
• Four have complex villain figures. Four have protagonists in way over their head.
• At least two have unreliable narrators.
• Four take place on Earth at some point

Based on this, I’ve come to the conclusion I need to work on a remake of this: