Being Unreliable

Recently I asked this on LinkedIn: "I'd like to start writing longer articles around one idea or topic, but I'm at a loss on where to start. I'm hoping you can take a moment and suggest in the comments below what you'd like to see covered."

I got a few questions so I made a vow that I'm going to take one question and answer it in a post every Friday for as long as I have questions.

By the way if you have a question, ask away here.

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Hi Gianna. I’m going to simplify this a bit because some of my favorite games have a common theme: the unreliable narrator.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, the Unreliable Narrator is a literary device wherein the protagonist either through delusion or trickery tells the story in a way to make you see events one way, but there’s a reveal to show us in the audience what’s really going on…and why the UN is acting this way.

The most famous book/film example I think of is “Fight Club,” which I’m not going to spoil. Second place would be “American Psycho,” which is less of a twist and more making the reader wonder if any of Patrick Bateman’s monstrous behavior is real.

Done well, a UN is a clever magic trick that makes the reader/viewer/player widen their eyes and think about everything they just read/seen/played as the new context reshapes the preceptions, adding intriguing layers elegantly into the story. Great UN is subtle, hinting at something being off but still giving a layer of plausibility that makes you think everything is normal. UN done badly is just the reader/viewer/player getting jerked around and lied to and in the last 15 seconds told, “Actually, you were a dog all along.” It’s not subtle and the twist comes out seemingly nowhere without a proper set up.

Side note: a last-minute reveal can be done well. If you haven’t read it, “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge” is a slick, haunting exercise in this. Hey, you can read it here for free:

Long story short, UN is a delicate arrrangement that when done well is thrilling. It’s hard to do right. I would love an opportunity to do more UN storytelling. I did it twice for Guild Wars 2. I won’t spoil what they were, but I’m happy to say they both pulled the rug out from under the player in a good way.

That said, these are the games I consider masterclasses in UN.

Huh. I just realized this is going to be hard because I can’t reveal why in some cases because it would literally give the game away. I’ll be as vague but informative as I can be.

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Spec Ops: The Line (2012): Narratively speaking, this is a masterpiece. Sales-wise it did grimly, which is shame because it’s one of the most haunting games that’s not a horror title (It’s a shooter that descends into horror, however). You play a US soldier named Walker who is leading two other soldiers on a recon mission into a sandstorm-buried Dubai. A US colonel (Konrad, who served with Walker in Afghanistan) went into the city as part of a relief effort, but the storms intensified and all radio contact was lost.

Walker’s simple recon mission falls apart fast. What follows Walker’s descent into hell as his obsession with finding Konrad leads him to commit more and more atrocities to do so.

To explain the UN component take away a number of the game’s punches, but by the time you get done (depending on your ending, which has branching endings on top of those), the game reframes your actions (several times) in ways that makes your heart drop out of your chest.

It stuffs the inane rah-rah-Murica storytelling of Call of Duty and Battlefield in a box and makes them cry. It’s terrifying, discombobulating, merciless, and cruel. I love it.

Fun fact: Spec Ops: The Line was the latest in the “Spec Ops” franchise, which previously didn’t make games with his brutal of a narrative. It was also the game that killed the franchise dead.

Oxenfree (2016): What I love about Oxenfree is how for the first hour how… mundane it is. It’s a coming-of-age story where a group of five teens head to an island for a weekend party. You get the social friction of some people having ongoing beefs with other characters, love interests, and a lingering dread about what the future is going to bring for their friendships. The spectre of adult life is approaching and they know they won’t be together forever.

And then it goes crazy-pants bananas.

I can’t go into it from here because it will start revealing spoilers, but your actions can alter the past and the present, meaning reality will shift around you, but things will still look the same. You’ll be the only one who will know. In this case, the UN is the world itself. You are a constant, forced to exist with a bifurcated memory as time pays tricks on you, giving you hallucinations throughout the game. What is real? What can I make real? Will I care if it’s real, and what if there’s something on the island that has its own agenda?

Are you manipulating the island or is it manipulating you?

If you ever wanted to throw a brick through your TV after watching the “we increasingly don’t know what we are doing” storytelling on “Lost,” Oxenfree will make you feel better. At least when the island doesn’t make sense, you have a grip on why? Right?

Right?

Observation (2019): For a while, I was scared I hallucinated this game. No one else had heard of it. No one else played it. It was only a few months later that I found that game critic and novelist Yahtzee Croshaw reviewed it for his “Zero Punctation” series and I could finally stop worrying about my brain. Er, this time.

So, here’s a delightful question: can an AI experience UN? It’s a piece of software that is designed to gather data based on its surroundings and execute tasks. What happens when an AI experiences an unreliable data set?

A more unnerving question: What happens when your coworkers are starting to suffer delusions around you?

Oh yeah, and you are all trapped in space while this is happening.

In the game, you play an AI on a space station assisting the crew in experiments and making sure the station doesn’t go kaboom in the pitiless void. Everything is going swimmingly. You’re doing your space station maintenance thing when… something cripples your fragile home.

I won’t say what, but between trying to find your missing crewmates and keeping them alive, there’s a mysterious force that’s tampering with your humans… and then you. You are all seeing things. You are told that “you are not making sense” by one of the astronauts. You lose time. Things are normal, but something tells you that it’s so not. How can you tell as a machine if you aren’t being tampered with? You shut down repeatedly, experience strange events, get scrambled. Are you just malfunctioning and none of this is real?

At the halfway point, Observation flirts with going off the rails, but keeps its balance. It’s one of the best dread-inducing games I’ve ever played, in part because I couldn’t trust what was happening and I needed to make life and death calls.

And by the time you get to the ending, you understand the real agenda. You look backwards at everything leading up to here… and you feel a scream rising in your AI throat.

Silent Hill 2 (2001): I wrote and re-wrote this entry a few times. Silent Hill 2 is a famous horror game and a favorite for those who played it back in the day and remember the experience. I’ve seen game critics drop whole columns or video essays about it singing its praises. For me, it’s a high-water mark of eerie, distorting storytelling that, when the UN moment came, my mouth was open, breath out of my lungs, and at a loss for words…as if I was in an emotional car crash. I never played anything like this. I want to talk about the lessons I got from the game, how it influences my writing, how it turned me on to Japanese horror, and how Konami has been cursed to never make a SH game as good as this ever again,

They should have stopped the franchise with this one.

You are James Sunderland. You’ve lost your wife to an illness a few years ago, so it’s a bit of a shock to just get a letter from her saying that she’s in the town of Silent Hill. You arrive in Silent Hill and start running into a cast of characters who are either also searching for someone or knows you when you don’t know them.

And that’s it. I can’t go any further. Play it. If you can, find an original version and not the remaster. And as I write this, SH2 is being remade and while I haven’t played it, I can’t imagine how any team can improve on the game in such a way to justify its existence.

Knights of the Old Republic (2003): Hey, guess what? I’m a nerd. I grew up with Star Wars. I soaked in the Original Trilogy, devoured the Thrawn novels, suffered through Dark Empire (read it and cringe as you realize the people who made Rise of Skywalker stole from THIS novel), and loved the X-Wing/Tie Fighter flight combat series.

And then the prequels came along.

Knights of the Old Republic was the only bright star in the Star Wars galaxy in that era. It wasn’t just a little better than bad to stand out from the prequels. It brought the same rollicking adventures everyone loved from the OT. It was its own thing, set thousands of years before the films in an era that was fresh and filled with potential… even though…yeah, stop me if you heard this before.

A group of evil Force users are at war with the rest of the galaxy, who aided by legions of light-side Jedi. In the middle of this conflict, you — a nobody stuck in a war zone — get dropped in. Your space cruiser is boarded by the baddies and you have to escape in an escape pod and travel to a foreign planet to find a special Jedi.

Okay, so not the most original set-up, but for fans burned by the prequels, KOTOR was a mix of comfort food and space-faring spectacle where you discover you have Force powers, grow in strength and skill, and aid the good guys who are under threat because the baddies possess a superweap… damnit, Star Wars.

What KOTOR lacks in originality it makes up for in characters. Well-written characters with personalities, points of view, likes and dislikes, and their own secrets. And then there’s HK-47, the robot assassin who really really loves his job. Although, there’s something famil—

No, wait. Pause. We’re getting into spoiler territory. We are getting into one of the greatest reveals in video gaming. Keep in mind, there was no Internet as we know it today. You could still enjoy media without being spoiled instantly. KOTOR’s UN trick… its reveal is so well done you kick yourself for not picking up on the clues.

And when the reveal comes it absolutely recontextualizes your story and the story of the game, and it sets up a moral dilemma going into the third act. Of course I won’t say what it is, but if you choose to stay on the light side, your faith will be tested… and what’s faith without temptation? It’s a marvelous feat of narrative design and a studio knowing what a player will likely do and then putting them through the ringer. It's what great UN should be.