Planescape Torment, The Longest Journey, Max Payne, Mafia the city of Lost Heaven, BioWare games (KotOR, Mass Effect, etc), Persona 3/4, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Deus Ex… I mean storytelling over gameplay is Quantic Dream’s whole schtick, success/failure aside. Previous Naughty Dog games.
There’s a bit of a a conflation between cinematic presentation and storytelling. I literally grew up on story driven games well before TLoU. Homeworld was absolutely haunting with its understated dialogue, sweeping score, and timeless themes.
Even the year before TLoU, Spec Ops the Line came out, a deft and timely reimagining of The Heart of Darkness for the late Iraq war era–adding into it through the mechanics of the shooter genre. Talk about literary.
Oh shit dead space, yeah that definitely needs to go higher up my list.
Cinema/storytelling interesting point. For sure there’s a lot of personal taste at play. Maybe the other dimension is agency in the story. A branching narrative is obviously harder to write/produce but is what separates games from other media (which is a reasonable critique for e.g. TLOU, which works so well as just… a HBO series).
Planescape Torment, The Longest Journey, Max Payne, Mafia the city of Lost Heaven, BioWare games (KotOR, Mass Effect, etc), Persona 3/4, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Deus Ex… I mean storytelling over gameplay is Quantic Dream’s whole schtick, success/failure aside. Previous Naughty Dog games.
There’s a bit of a a conflation between cinematic presentation and storytelling. I literally grew up on story driven games well before TLoU. Homeworld was absolutely haunting with its understated dialogue, sweeping score, and timeless themes.
Even the year before TLoU, Spec Ops the Line came out, a deft and timely reimagining of The Heart of Darkness for the late Iraq war era–adding into it through the mechanics of the shooter genre. Talk about literary.
Oh shit dead space, yeah that definitely needs to go higher up my list.
Cinema/storytelling interesting point. For sure there’s a lot of personal taste at play. Maybe the other dimension is agency in the story. A branching narrative is obviously harder to write/produce but is what separates games from other media (which is a reasonable critique for e.g. TLOU, which works so well as just… a HBO series).