![]() They do, though, as a final confrontation unites all the townsfolk into trusting you or running you out of town. Big decisions do exist, particularly in reference to which love interest main character Alex Chen chases, but it’s while exploring that the smaller ones come into play: Do you help a character with dementia slowly come to terms with her diagnosis? Do you help her granddaughter gain the courage to leave town for a better life? Do you see through the town jolly-man’s exterior and help soothe his broken heart? Most of these moments are intimate and small - offering a dance, starting a conversation, letting someone know their anger is okay - and seemingly never intersect with the main plot. While the original games were directly influenced by Telltale, the newest entry bundled all the episodes into one package from the jump and allowed players to explore the town of Haven Springs, Colorado. ![]() Deck Nine understood this when developing Life is Strange: True Colors, the newest entry in the long-running choice-based adventure series. The most monumental changes to the genre, however, aren’t about massive, flashpoint decisions: it’s all about the tiny ones. It may be a slow slog of exploring the area and trying to keep everyone (anticlimactically) alive, but it’s when you try and horribly fail that these games come alive. While every game isn’t a masterpiece, they are almost always wildly entertaining and fun to play, using horror tropes to their advantage to create tense moments of life-or-death choices. Since its acclaimed release of Until Dawn in 2015, Supermassive Games has merged the realm of horror fiction with interactive dilemmas. Since Telltale’s shutdown in 2018, their slow, methodical wandering of yore has been superseded by dynamic, heart-pounding systems. What the people at Dramatic Labs don’t seem to be aware of, though, is that their style of game actually isn’t the future of interactive adventure games. Despite being created with Unreal 5, it’s got the same chunky cel-art style of Telltale games, the same slightly jank-looking aiming reticle, and the same promise to revolutionize interactive adventure games. The game - which was originally supposed to come out last spring - spontaneously was given a release date in April. If you didn’t know there was a Star Trek video game being developed, let alone that it releases so soon, you aren’t alone. That game in the article’s title? Yeah, I’m finally talking about it. Other employees - mainly five white dudes - founded Dramatic Labs, an “independent collaboration of writers, developers, designers, artists, and producers who are passionate about the future of interactive storytelling” who are releasing Star Trek: Resurgence next week. Telltale became a high-profile AAA studio that created must-play adventures, and other games - even Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, an action-adventure blockbuster - felt the need to integrate basic choices for no reason. Now, every single decision felt like life or death: Do you kill someone who’s infected, or chop off their limb? Do you give someone medication, or food, or a weapon - and can you trust them? The narrative themes fit perfectly with this style of gameplay, in turn helping propel the style to untold heights. While its earlier games, particularly Back to the Future: The Game, attempted to draw players in with dynamic actions and simple choices, it wasn’t until the release of The Walking Dead - an adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic of the same name, not affiliated with the TV series - that choice truly mattered to players. It’s impossible to discuss the choice-based adventure game without mentioning Telltale: the California-based developer redefined the point-and-click genre with its integration of difficult, heart-wrenching decisions. Keep adding inflection points and the necessary scripted events grow exponentially out of control. In-game choice, however, is more complex developers must account for all possible permutations of any given choice - those who choose it, those who choose the secondary, those who ignore it completely. Even in the most rigid games, the option to not play, not experience the narrative, or not engage with the systems are available. The freedom of interactivity is one of the defining characteristics of the art-form - players control, the game follows. In the medium of video games, choice is imperative.
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