Depending on your choices, you may be rewarded, punished, or something in between. When you enter an area, the game present a splash of story in comic book panels, pausing now and then to offer you some directions to take the conversations.
You create a trio of aspiring heroes and set them on a modest quest across a map divided into towns, mountains, valleys, caves, lakes, and oceans. The game combines two genres: visual novel and tactical RPG. Its website claims they have a combined 20 years of prior industry experience, which sounds like a lot until you consider that number averages to a little more than three years from each of its six full-time employees. Wildermyth had been created by Worldwalker Games, a tiny independent outfit in Austin, Texas. Its studio had never even shipped a game. Nor did it have similar financial support from a mega-publisher. But it had no connection to Levine or Ghost Story Games. Then, in June of this year, with little fanfare, a brilliant “narrative Legos”-style game debuted on Steam. The team has been, presumably, picking at narrative Legos ever since, though there have been no announcements, let alone any meaningful previews, interviews, or leaks. In 2017, what remained of Irrational Games rebranded as Ghost Story Games. Imagine a Dungeon Master running a D&D campaign, but instead of a human steering your tabletop adventure, an artificial intelligence (or one hell of a spreadsheet) would respond to your choices.Īfter the speech, Levine and company went relatively quiet. Rather than following paths predetermined by the game maker, players and games would collaborate on story together, each reacting to the other’s choices. Levine laid out a rough framework for video games to tell procedurally generated stories. Or, to put it another way, video game stories will no longer have to follow the same linear narrative structure of most film, television, books, and other static media that came before it. The project would be an experiment testing Levine’s grand hypothesis: Fundamental changes to how we tell stories could make every player’s experience unique. It wasn’t a game, a fact he emphasized with a grin, suggesting that some reporter would misrepresent him. A month after the closure, Levine attended the 2014 Game Developers Conference, where he gave an hour-long presentation on his nascent follow-up project. Only Levine and a handful of collaborators would remain, while dozens of their co-workers were suddenly without a job. Throughout December, we’ll also be looking back on the year with special videos, essays, and more!
For our 2021 game of the year coverage, Polygon is celebrating our top 10 video games with a collection of essays.
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