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Maybe Cinematic Games Are OK After All

Maybe Cinematic Games Are OK After All

A few weeks back, I wrote a feature that criticized cinematic games. I tend to think that the best stories in gaming are those in which the mechanics drive the narrative, and while I’m not against games that emulate Hollywood, I do think they’re not as interesting as those that take care advantage of what the medium allows. Skyrim , for instance, has a main campaign, but with the amount of freedom, customization, and factions, players could essentially create their own stories, regardless of their intention. No abundance of CGI cutscenes, just pure gameplay – just how I like it. How short-sighted of me.

I recently replayed a collection of games that convinced me to reconsider the ideas I put forth in my feature: Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection . Having not played an Uncharted game since Drake’s Deception , my memories of series have become somewhat hazy, so much so that when writing my feature, I had essentially written it off as yet another game that focuses way too much on being a movie. And while that’s true to a large extent, I had almost completely forgotten that was what the game was about, and its mechanics, as I’ve rediscovered upon my my recent playthrough, do an outstanding job of making me feel like I’m part of the cutscene – particularly in Among Thieves , where I hung on for dear life on a speeding train while firing back at enemies, later regaining consciousness on a train hanging off the side of a cliff.

There’s also a subgenre of the point-and-click genre that tends to mimic movies. Telltale Games is a developer who specializes in this subgenre. Gameplay is not like anything in the traditional sense, but most of them, like The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us , still give players a certain degree of interactivity; The former, for instance, places all choices on a timer, and the latter allows characters to die if you don’t input the correct button combination on time (though main character death results in a reload from a checkpoint), so you simply can’t put the controller down – not even during dialogue.

That said, you can’t really lose in Telltale’s games. If you go through entire dialogue sequences of The Wolf Among Us without picking an option, the main character will sort of fill in the blanks, as if revealing the meaninglessness of the actions as well as his true character. And these games tend to lose their luster after the first playthrough, as the illusion of choice is diluted when you already know how the story will turn out.

Maybe Cinematic Games Are OK After All

But is it a bad thing for these games to be too cinematic? I don’t think so. I still stand by my assertion that the games with the most interesting stories tend to give players a greater degree of input and don’t forget they’re games, but I’m not about to enforce my views on everyone else. Uncharted certainly designed every set piece to coincide with the pace of the narrative – enough to where it’s a smooth transition between cutscene and playtime. Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead are arguably less game-like, but they still offer a degree of choice without deviating from the main plotline.

Even if for these types of games were universally condemned, I don’t think they’d harm gaming’s capacity to elicit fun and tell a provocative story. If anything, these cinematic games cater to the type of consumer looking for something a bit more streamlined. Not every game needs to be a Skyrim, after all.

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