For many years I have been studying level design and adventure game style puzzles.
How far can I apply the fruit of that study toward profound gameplay?
How far can level design and game mechanics communicate to the player?
How far can level design become art?
I love Dark Souls approach to implicit story.
I have applied a lot of that to my story writing.
However, I haven’t yet tried to apply it much to telling a story in gameplay.
Most of my interest in Dark Souls has been in applying other features to games.
What if I really tried to apply Dark Souls’ approach to storytelling to a game, and potentially even ratcheted up the implication a notch?
Dark Souls relies heavily on item descriptions to convey lore.
I’ve never been interested in that feature.
What if I skipped that feature, and tried to provide the same depth of lore, simply in the environment and puzzles?
One of the main features Dark Souls lacks is deep causality in terms of narrative. It has great causality in terms of gameplay, but rarely do choices matter in terms of story, and when player actions do affect the story, the causality is usually either arbitrary or esoteric.
MYST had similar implicit storytelling to Dark Souls.
Like Dark Souls, the environment supports the story, but the story can’t be derived from the environment.
MYST’s puzzles have even less to do with the story—they are simply tacked on.