The logistics behind writing a game that takes its players’ choices into account have always been interesting to me. It has a similar level of complexity as trying to tell a linear narrative in a non-linear game— developers have to make sure that players are informed of the story regardless of the path they choose to progress through, while still making sure that each path offers meaningful deviations. Both must account for player choices, and both struggle with the unpredictability of whatever they end up choosing. Despite this, many games in which choices matter manage to be immersive. The question is how?
To discuss this, I’m going to talk about how two specific games approach this differently: Scarlet Hollow and Detroit: Become Human. This isn’t an exhaustive list of how many ways one can approach writing choose-your-own-adventure games, but it’s the two that stood out to me. First, I’ll talk about Scarlet Hollow and how it manages to end each episode in the same way while accounting for the choices you made. Secondly, I’ll talk about Detroit: Become Human and how it doesn’t do this and instead chooses to end each chapter differently depending on what you have done throughout. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I’ll go over them here.
Scarlet Hollow had me choose two ‘traits’ before starting the game. These traits lock and unlock different options, incentivizing multiple playthroughs. The game is episodic, and every episode starts and ends in the same location regardless of your choices. Most of these choices are dialogue-based, and they’re never time-sensitive. Some options also solely exist for you to “explore” the world and learn more about it. These choices do follow you, though—they determine your relationship with certain characters, your ability to do certain things, and even what happens on that day. Therefore, the fact that the days start and end in the same setting doesn’t change the fact that every playthrough feels different.
However, once you’ve done a couple of playthroughs, you start to notice where the game has been subtly nudging you in a certain direction. I was reminded that the game did have finite options, and that it needed certain things to happen in order for the story to work. All of the key story beats have to happen one way or another. Sometimes, the writers simply had to force me to hit certain beats. At the start of every day, I had to be at the Scarlet Estate. At the end of every day, my cousin Tabitha picked me up and took me back, ensuring I was in the right place for the next episode.
When I first noticed this, I admired the effort more than anything else. It may have broken my immersion slightly, but by this point I was more curious about exploring every possibility, rather than seeking to have my suspension of disbelief maintained. The fact that I was seeing the game come apart in front of me, in a way, felt intentional. To experience everything, I have to know the internal logic of the game and how to get to what I haven’t seen yet. Logically, this meant that I started to see when the game herded me in a direction.
For example, on the second day, I had the option to stay in the estate as I was asked, and I did. I wondered how the game would deal with me missing out on the events I knew happened in the town that day. The approach that the game goes for is rather clever: Sybil, a character I knew had some sort of clairvoyance by then, comes by and makes some excuse to get me out of the house. Though it’s certainly the game making sure I’m in the town for the main story beats, using Sybil as a way to force me to experience the narrative felt natural rather than forced.
To contrast, Detroit: Become Human starts and ends each section completely dependent on the choices I made. Every playthrough can look completely different, with one of the playable characters even completely disappearing from the narrative if they happen to die while you’re playing as them. It gave me so many opportunities to craft my own unique story with numerous branches to follow. Similarly to Scarlet Hollow, most of these choices are made through dialogue, but by comparison, they are far more time-sensitive. There are consequences if you end up missing the prompt or fail a quick-time event.
This game has a similar issue to Scarlet Hollow, but it presents in a different way. Some of the scenes are unfortunately not as polished as others. There was clearly one story that they wanted to tell, and the other routes felt like afterthoughts. I started to notice plot holes and characters knowing things they shouldn’t, all because that information was needed for the story to progress. The best example of this, and one I’ve seen often seen complaints about, comes in the third act of the game. When trying to figure out which one of the Connors is the real one, Hank asks what the name of his son is. Usually, if you didn’t come across a piece of information in the game, you can’t use that piece of information since you don’t know it. Except in this scene, for some reason, where the right answer is there and available regardless of whatever choices you made up until that point.
Again, it’s something that I didn’t notice until I was intentionally going out of my way to get different endings. Unlike with Scarlet Hollow, though, I felt more confusion than admiration. Instead of feeling like I’d been herded in the right direction, I was confused by why that direction was still available. This doesn’t mean that the game was bad, and it’s not a commentary on the story’s quality, but it highlights a flaw with this style of storytelling. It is one that Scarlet Hollow is able to handle better than Detroit, despite how many more branches the latter has.
Though they vary in their approach, Scarlet Hollow and Detroit: Become Human take their players’ choices into account in an effort to maintain immersion. I would argue that the former’s approach works better, since it ensures that each branch can be picked up from the same place. This means that the same story can be told in different ways, regardless of whatever choices you make in a playthrough. In the case of Detroit: Become Human, there are honestly too many paths to consider. As such, it makes sense that some branches feel less polished than the main paths, even if the game does suffer for it. Despite that, my first playthrough of Detroit made me feel like I was in control of the story.
All in all, trying to take player input into account while trying to tell a story is incredibly complicated. Neither of these games does it perfectly, but I don’t think that there is a perfect way to pull this off. Much like with open-world games and linear narratives, there’s no easy way to account for player input. The priority should be making that first playthrough as immersive as possible. At the end of the day, despite their shortcomings, I’d say both Detroit: Become Human and Scarlet Hollow achieved this. Now if only Black Tabby Games could finish up Scarlet Hollow and Quantic Dream could release its next game already, that would be just swell.
