Games that Leave More to the Imagination

Writes Luke Condon

I’ve recently been playing through an interesting little game called ‘Sorcery!’. It’s interesting in that really, it’s more of a book than a game. Adapted from Steve Jackson’s choose-your-own-adventure books of the same name, Sorcery! is an almost entirely text-based game. While this is a trait often shared by games in the visual novel genre, Sorcery! couldn’t be more dissimilar to them; it’s a fully-fledged action-adventure game with mechanics like health points, stamina, and the works. It's rare that a game takes on such a form, although here it has the advantage of being backed by some impressive source material. Sorcery!’s unusual structure is assuredly a significant departure from most games’ designs, but it does have something in common with many plot-focused titles: a requirement that players use their imagination in order to fill in the blanks. These blanks can be gaps in information, visuals, sounds; anything that a player needs to conjure up in their mind’s eye, rather than have it served up on a platter by the game. Novels depend on their readers to do this throughout their entirety, but is it fair for a video game to ask the same? 

Sorcery’s premise is quite straightforward; you are a skilled sorcerer and swordsman who embarks on a quest to retrieve a mystical artefact. To do this, you must make your way across a number of towns, cities, and wildernesses, using both magic and blade to overcome opponents and obstacles. Standard fantasy fare, really, but what makes Sorcery! special is the freedom of choice players are afforded due to the game’s unique mode of delivery. While the game provides a few visual aides to help players envision the events of its story, such as drawings of maps and the occasional illustration of some fantastical beast, the majority of action happening here takes place inside the player’s imagination. Upon encountering an enemy, the game will usually give you a few lines of text that detail said foe’s appearance and its behaviour. You’re then presented with a number of options that vary greatly in their ridiculousness; you could try to blow them away with a gust of wind, smite them down with a lightning bolt or even play a tune on a magical pipe to force them to dance. This is only a small sample of the many courses of action available to Sorcery! players, and none of these acts will result in the same outcome twice. 

Sorcery!’s unconventional presentation allows it to accomplish a level of player freedom that simply isn’t feasible in most games, even big-budget AAA productions. By substituting visual representations of in-game scenarios for whatever a player can envision in their mind, the game can focus instead on designing encounters with a myriad of different approaches and resolutions. It comes at a cost, of course; this style of game isn’t for everyone, and many gamers may find the endless walls of text Sorcery! throws at them daunting and off-putting. But even in smaller doses, the concept of using the player's imaginations to enhance a game’s mechanics or storytelling can be a powerful tool.

Take Bethesda Game Studios, the developers of role-playing games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, who are renowned for their environmental storytelling. These games feature sprawling open worlds that contain countless points of interest for players to discover as they explore. Filling these locations with meaningful traditional stories and characters would be a monumental task, and could even be considered a waste of effort, given the fact that many players might simply skip past these places or miss them entirely. But as it turns out, there’s another way; one that doesn’t require writing thousands of lines of dialogue and hiring voice actors to bring them to life. This entails, as you might guess, outsourcing some of the creative heavy lifting to the player’s imagination. 

 The Fallout series takes place in a barren wasteland, devastated centuries ago by nuclear bombs, and so most of the games’ explorable area consists of crumbling high-rises and destroyed towns. A setting like this, devoid of most life, rules out the possibility of dotting non-player characters around every corner to impart backstory and world-building. Instead, Bethesda saves resources by delegating this job to some unlikely candidates: skeletons. Indeed, it’s hard to take a step in Fallout’s world without tripping over the bones of someone who perished when the nuclear bombs struck. Each one tells a story of its own, and players can piece together these stories in their head by examining the circumstances surrounding them. Many cadavers can be found placed in normal, everyday scenarios like at a train station or bank, to illustrate just how sudden it was when the bombs dropped, changing the world in a matter of seconds. Other scenes are played for comedic effect, so you might find some poor soul’s skeleton perched on the toilet in a bathroom stall; truly, one of the more unpleasant ways to die. At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, these skeletons can even tell some heart-wrenching stories. Underground prison cells can be found locked with their deceased occupants still inside, despite their subterranean position shielding them from the nuclear blasts themselves. Two skeletons locked in an embrace, burnt out school buses full of upsettingly tiny bones; displays like these for players to stumble upon ensure they get a sense of the Fallout world’s tragic history as they explore. Alongside the game’s more conventionally assembled main storyline and areas, Fallout provides an impressive set of tales for players to enjoy. Bethesda Game Studios have become masters of telling a story without actually telling it, and they’ve only been able to do so by putting faith in the imagination of players. 

Sorcery! and Fallout take advantage of unorthodox narrative techniques to tell their stories, but in both instances there’s still a ‘correct’ way for players to interpret the plot, even if they have to do a bit of imaginative conceptualisation to figure it out. This isn’t always the case, however. RimWorld (no, it’s not what it sounds like) is a sci-fi base building and character management simulator that touts itself as a procedural ‘story generator’ above all else. Set on an unknown planet in the outer rim of human-controlled space, RimWorld has players oversee a number of pseudo-player characters, or ‘colonists’, as they struggle to survive and eventually escape the world they have found themselves stranded upon.

 RimWorld differs from the previously mentioned games in many ways, but the most relevant one is that apart from the outlined beginning scenario, it doesn’t have a singular, set-in-stone story to impart. Instead, the game simulates its world and inhabitants to produce semi-random events that make up its story. Colonists will be attacked by bandits, struck down by disease and subject to the effects of devastating natural disasters, but they’ll also build friendships, get married, and establish bitter rivalries with each other. In terms of graphics, RimWorld’s are rather barebones, consisting of flat 2D characters and objects with basic animations, so while players are given something of a visual guide, they’ll still have to apply their imagination a bit to get truly invested in the goings-on of their colonies. Those without the desire to think abstractly as they play won’t get much out of RimWorld, as the aim here isn’t actually to win, but to simply enjoy an ever-evolving story of a community that players can either guide to success, or doom to become a flaming ruin as a result of their decisions. 

So what do these games tell us about this particular approach to game design? Sorcery! depends almost entirely on players using their imagination to follow its story, but I’ll concede that it is a rather niche game, and its audience is dwarfed by those of the other two examples. Fallout and RimWorld utilise the power of imagination in very different ways, but they show us that, in practice, a hybrid approach to storytelling in games is incredibly effective at delivering a more complete narrative (or narratives) while simultaneously saving resources to be spent elsewhere. However, the three games I’ve mentioned in this article aren’t alone in employing these methods. Almost every single-player game necessitates that players use their imagination to some extent, be it by reading in-game lore entries, figuring out enemy weaknesses, or finding the solutions to tricky puzzles. There’s a reason thinking outside the box is encouraged whilst enjoying most forms of art; why should video games be any different?