The Three Games That Made Me Love Video Games Again
In which I pay my respects to Bethesda, Campo Santo, and From Software.
May 28, 2019
This is the second result if you Google "video games stock photos" and I have a lot of questions.
College was the end of a lot of things for me. It was the end of living with my parents and siblings. It was the end of having to go to church on Sundays. It was the end of being anywhere near any of my high school friends. But when my school life went from eight ours of class each day to three and seeing my partner went from a fifteen-minute drive to a five-hour bus ride, I lost something else too. I stopped playing video games.
Looking back, I’m not sure if I was actually that busy my Freshman year or if I just wanted to fit the stereotype of the too-busy-to-breathe engineering major. But in any case, I stopped letting myself play games. It wasn’t like I stopped having free time at all – I still hung out with classmates and went to the movies and watched all six seasons of Community. There was just something that told me that I was in college now and I was an engineering student and engineering students can’t waste their time playing video games.
And that mindset persisted for a good two and a half years. It wasn’t until the second semester of my Junior year that I started to question it. I remembered how much I used to love video games in high school, how much fun it was to sit back at the end of the day or the week and just lose myself in a virtual world. That, combined with a healthy realization that I didn’t need to feel guilty for letting myself relax a little, encouraged me to try it out again. I re-installed Steam on my computer, got access to my brother’s library, picked three titles that looked interesting, and installed them.
At the time, I was just sort of shrugging my way into it. I fully expected to play each game for a bit, think, “Yeah, that was kind of fun, I guess,” and then go back to being the oh-so-busy engineering major I had always felt like I was supposed to be. Instead, those three games completely reignited my love of that hobby and I never looked back. And the thing is, having played plenty more since then, I can say there are lots of other games that probably wouldn’t have gotten me hooked in the same way. So I wanted to take some time to think about why these three did it and what specifically each game did to remind me how special video games really are.
Dishonored
I wish every game's tutorial art was this good.
Dishonored is a grim, stealthy immersive sim that has you skulking about a dieselpunk city dispatching various targets. You play as Corvo Attano, a silent protagonist who starts the game as the bodyguard of the Empress of this fictional nation. However, in the very first mission you are framed for her murder and forced to work with a resistance group and a spooky Warlock-patron-type being called the Outsider in order to overthrow the new government and get your revenge.
Perhaps the most essential piece of Dishonored's gameplay is its emphasis on choice. There are plenty of games that let the player choose between being a stealthy assassin or a rampaging barbarian, but Dishonored goes deeper than this. Though the missions do have a set order and set objectives, there are practically limitless ways to go about reaching each of your targets. Will you stay high up, scaling walls and rooftops to avoid being seen by enemies on the ground? Will you dash between cover, picking off guards one-by-one and hiding their bodies in dumpsters? Or maybe you’d rather use your magical powers (courtesy of your buddy the Outsider) to possess a rat and crawl through the pipes and vents in order to reach your victim’s bedroom. And once you get there, you have the choice to either kill them or pursue another (often more difficult) non-lethal option.
Dishonored also remembers your decisions, beyond the binary “good thing or bad thing” systems that many games employ. The game’s “chaos” system will remember not just whether or not you kill your targets, but how many guards you kill along the way and how often you’re spotted and just generally how much of a ruckus you cause. All of this will affect the world and the story: more killing means more plague-infected enemies, different relationships with NPCs, and ultimately a different ending.
There are a lot of other good things I could say about Dishonored. The music is beautifully creepy, the sound design makes spells and kills immensely satisfying, and the progression system has upgrades that are actually exciting. But to me, the way the game allows for and keeps track of your choices is what really made it stick. It’s a really special type of fun that I hadn’t realized I’d missed until I played this game. As I made my way through the final mission, I didn’t feel like I was reading the final chapter of a book or watching the series finale of a TV show; this was the culmination of my story and my choices. Even if Dishonored isn’t really a sandbox game, the myriad of options presented to me with each mission and the way the world and characters reacted to my decisions made me feel like it was my own unique story. It was fun, engaging, and, by the end of it, remarkably satisfying.
Firewatch
This game made me so grateful that I never have to read a real map.
Firewatch is a small indie game where you play as a fire lookout for a conifer-filled national park. There are elements of puzzles and exploration, but the game is primarily about telling a story. As you play, you slowly uncover various strange things and end up become a sort of detective.
The first few minutes are spent telling the story of Henry’s life leading up to his job as a fire lookout, allowing you to decide certain things along the way. As you play, you frequently communicate with Henry’s supervisor, Delilah, via a walkie-talkie, and you’re always given multiple dialogue options. This lets you make a series of small decisions about this person you’re playing as. What was the first thing you said to your wife? Did you have a big dog or a small dog? How flirty are you with Delilah? None of these choices affect the overarching plot in any significant way, but they make you really connect to Henry in a way that you often won’t connect to other video game characters.
When I think about why Firewatch engaged me so much, not just in itself but in video games as a whole, the first thing that comes to mind is how close I felt to Henry. Lots of games have you controlling some fictional character and often that experience feels very external, not that far from watching a character on a movie screen. Firewatch showed me that, when done right, a game could really make me feel like I was the character, even without letting me really do anything to change the story or world.
For me, that changed the entire game. I wasn’t just seeing a story, I was in it. When Henry was in danger, I got scared – not for some random fire lookout, but for me the fire lookout. When I discovered some disturbing or tragic plot twist, it didn’t feel like I was just watching it; it felt like it was really there, it was really happening. As a result, the emotions I felt were much more visceral and just felt more real. When I walked away from the game at the end of it all and I thought about the overarching themes, it wasn’t from some third-person analytical point of view. I was looking within myself, asking what I personally should take away from this whole experience.
Unlike Dishonored, Firewatch never really felt like it was letting my make my own story. But I also didn’t feel like I was just watching some other person go through everything that happened. I knew Henry – I was Henry. And everything that happened to Henry in that story happened to me. It was a really special sort of experience, and one that I’m happy to say many other games have since been able to give me.
Dark Souls
Name a more iconic duo. Go on, I'll wait.
Dark Souls. Oh, Dark Souls. Never before had I felt such a deep love/hate relationship for anything. Dark Souls has been described as “the game that turns boys into men by beating the shit out of them” and “like being married to your soul mate, but every five minutes they punch you in the face”. It is a game that is famous for its merciless difficulty. There are no maps, no pause screens, and very few instructions. The enemies are tough and numerous and the bonfires that serve as checkpoints are few and far between.
But that’s not what I want to talk about here. A lot of games are difficult and plenty of them are able to strike a good balance of being tough enough to feel rewarding but accessible enough to not feel impossible. The thing that really stuck with me about Dark Souls – the thing that my fiancé will testify that I continue to rant about to this day – is the way the story is told.
Dark Souls is not just difficult in terms of gameplay. It’s also difficult to figure out what the hell is going on in the game’s fictional realm of Lordran. The game gives you very little in terms of explicit exposition. There is a brief opening cutscene with a fairly cryptic voiceover, and for the rest of the game you are given only fragments of the world’s history and the current situation. These bread crumbs are dropped into item descriptions, environments, and NPC dialogue, and the individual pieces rarely make sense on their own. NPCs talk in riddles and you’re never given the chance to ask further questions of them, and item descriptions often leave you with more questions than answers. For example, if you get a Black Knight Shield, the description will tell you that “Long ago, the black knights faced the chaos demons, and were charred black, but their shields became highly resistant to fire.” Okay, great. Who actually are the black knights? Where did they come from? What are the chaos demons? All of these are questions that you will have to piece together yourself as you continue fighting monsters, getting items, and talking to Lordran’s inhabitants.
This has always been my favorite thing about Dark Souls: this cryptic, confusing, fragmented storytelling that leaves it up to the player to put in the work and piece it all together. It is very easy to play all the way through Dark Souls and still feel like you have no idea what was actually happening. The game makes it your responsibility to dig deeper, to find the connections between all these different elements and see the story that they tell. And no matter what, there will always be unanswered questions and gaps in the story that you have to write in yourself.
In an interview with the Guardian, Hidetaka Myazaki, the creator of Dark Souls, described how, as a child, he would read stories without fully understanding all of the words. Miyazaki used the illustrations and his own imagination to fill in the blanks. This feeling – like reading a book in a language you’re only half-fluent in – is everywhere in Dark Souls. Only, when you play Dark Souls, you’re not just reading a book. You’re tearing through a house, prying open doorways and pulling up floorboards in search of crumpled, out-of-order pages of a long-lost tome of ancient secrets. There’s an excitement when you find a new page and try to figure out where it fits in the order of what you’ve found so far. And at the end, when the game is over, you find yourself sitting on the floor for hours rearranging pages and adding your own when needed until it all comes together into one fantastic story.
Dark Souls has always been my go-to example when I try to convince people that video games are indeed an artform, and it’s because of this feeling. The other two games I’ve mentioned do things that video games are especially good at doing, but they aren’t things that only video games can do. Yes, Dishonored gives you choices and remembers them, but so does any good Dungeon Master. Yes, Firewatch makes you identify strongly with the protagonist, but I’m sure a really great author could do that too. But no book, no film, no painting or sculpture or stage play or board game could ever give me that sense of exploration and discovery, like I’m an archaeologist unearthing artifacts from some ancient civilization. Only a video game could make me feel that way.
So, yeah. That’s my take on how these games were able to get me excited about this hobby again. Dishonored let me feel like I had choices and the story was my own. Firewatch made me feel a deep empathic connection to its protagonist and everything he experienced. And Dark Souls – well, I’ve already ranted plenty about that.
To be clear, I’m not trying to argue that any of these games are perfect. Dishonored’s morality system, while mechanically interesting, can get pretty problematic — some of the non-lethal tactics required to get the "good" ending involve selling your target into slavery or letting them be kidnapped by their stalker. Firewatch’s minimal navigation system makes it easy to get lost and I wasted a lot of time just wandering around in confusion. And while Dark Souls is usually difficult in ways that make the game interesting and rewarding, there are definitely points where it starts to just feel like running into a brick wall repeatedly until it breaks.
This article isn’t meant to be a review of these games or even necessarily a recommendation. I mostly wrote this to help myself dissect how these three video games were able to revive that high school part of me that would stay up for hours playing Skyrim or Borderlands. I guess, really, this is a sort of thank-you letter – to Dishonored and Firewatch and Dark Souls and everyone who worked to bring them to life. Thanks to you, I learned that it’s okay to really, really like playing video games. I’m very grateful for that.