By Hamza Haq
Cinematics and cutscenes are commonly employed as vehicles for storytelling in games, often used to convey the spectacle behind special emotions and epic moments that simple gameplay is not able to. Some games, however, do not use cutscenes at all, relying exclusively on environmental storytelling instead.
Carvings on walls, audio logs in abandoned facilities, long forgotten tomes in caves, and other hand-placed objects in the world tell the stories the developers want to convey in an immersive, non-intrusive way. Players feel like they are unearthing a story with their own efforts, one discovery at a time.
Subnautica
Stories Buried in the Deep Sea
Subnautica is an underwater survival base-building game that relies almost entirely on environmental storytelling to gradually reveal the hidden depths of the ocean, without relying on cutscenes at all. As a result, players are free to explore the depths of the oceans to slowly uncover the truth about the new world they find themselves in, the dangers it contains, and the opportunities that lie deep beneath the waves.
After the opening sequence, there are no cutscenes for exposition. The entire story is told through lost recordings and journal entries found in abandoned life pods, crashed ships, and secret underground facilities spread out across the seabed.
Outward
Lore Earned Through Exploration
Outward is an indie open-world game with rich lore, an expansive setting, and not a single cutscene to its name. The main story is mostly experienced through dialogue with NPCs in the major hubs like Cierzo, Berg, Levant, Monsoon, and New Sirocco.
Lore about enemies, factions, magic, and politics is there for players to discover if they look hard enough, but it isn’t force-fed to them through linear narrative sequences. The lack of traditional quest markers encourages exploration, however, and is what makes discovering new things so rewarding in Outward.
Project Zomboid
A World Ending Quietly in the Background
Project Zomboid is an open-world isometric game where players are tasked with surviving a zombie apocalypse using any means necessary. There are no quests or missions in the game that deal directly with the story; the players’ main concern is ensuring their own survival, and finding out tidbits about how the rest of the world is doing is entirely optional. As a result, most do not pay attention to the hints the game drops about what is going on outside the Exclusion Zone.
Players who are curious, however, can discover what is happening to the rest of the world as the zombie apocalypse spreads. With scattered info in the form of radio logs, television programs, and old magazines, it is possible to piece together some of the story. The environmental storytelling is masterfully done, and without a single cutscene to boot.
Valheim
Norse Myths Etched into Stone
Valheim drops players into a harsh, unforgiving procedurally generated land inspired by Norse mythology, where almost all the storytelling is conveyed through the world itself. After a small introductory sequence where players are told that they are warriors from Midgard who have been given a life in Valheim to defeat Odin’s foes, the Forsaken, no more information is provided, leaving players to piece together the rest by themselves.
Valheim’s deeper lore is told through rune stones, large magical rocks scattered across Valheim by Odin to guide his warriors towards the Forsaken. The engravings on the rune stones tell the story of previous warriors sent by Odin to kill the Forsaken, clues about treasures, descriptions of vague dreams, folk tales, declarations of heroes, and a lot more.
Kenshi
A World That Changes With Every Choice
Kenshi is an open-world RPG with deep lore that is not explained through cutscenes or traditional narrative elements, but rather through exploration and environmental storytelling. Players uncover the truth of the world around them by talking to NPCs, exploring abandoned cities, liberating slave camps, and discovering forgotten locations.
What makes Kenshi’s story stand out is that it isn’t all about the past; it evolves during a playthrough as well. As players side with factions to help them claim a region for their own, the place changes, new forces move in, new conflicts arise, and new stories unfold in real time.
Read the full article on GameRant
This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.
