As a narrative designer, it’s my job to play video games. To be clear, I’m not paid to play games, like a QA tester or the rad teens who worked at the Nintendo tip line in the 1980s. My colleagues just expect that I have played certain games. Usually indie darlings or hit AAA games everyone is talking about.
I remember one client being aghast when I admitted I hadn’t played Hades yet. He insisted I play it immediately. “Go do it right now,” he said, even though the game I was writing for him (1) wasn’t a 2D roguelike (2) didn’t take place in ancient Greece and (3) featured no severed Gorgon heads. The reason I kept Hades on my wish list and not in my queue was that I thought the game would be too hard for me to beat. But duty calls, so I got the game, poured a bunch of hours into it, and to my utter non-surprise, it was way too hard for me. Even on “God Mode,” which is meant to make the game super easy to access the story. The game crushed me. My hand eye coordination ain’t what she used to be.
It turned out, though, I would end up writing a roguelike – a genre characterized by procedurally generated levels and progression tied to frequent player death – and having played Hades (and finishing the story on YouTube) turned out to be really useful for structuring the roguelike’s narrative. So, one client’s weirdness is another client’s benefit, as the old saying goes.
An actual old saying is that great writers are great readers. The more you read, absorb, and learn from the way other authors tell stories, the better your own writing will be. Admittedly, I’m not a great reader. I read an average of about a book a month, thanks to audiobooks. And while I’m currently reading Parable of the Sower, I’m more inclined to read The Great Big Book of Gameboy Box Art, which hasn’t won a Nobel or a Pulitzer. (Yet?) I wouldn’t consider myself a great gamer either, lol. I love video games, but I get motion sickness from 3D graphics and I have no shame looking up walkthrough guides to puzzles. My favorite genres tend to be story-heavy (visual novels, point and click adventures, short turn-based RPGs) or very little if any story (deckbuilders, retro arcade, Mario games, my beautiful picross).
So, if you’re a narrative designer who wants to get better at game writing, but doesn’t want to plunk down $30-$50 for a game you’re worried you’ll suck at, what do you do? What if you’re cheap and afraid, like meeeeee? Well, you might already have access to beloved indie games without having to spend additional money! A lot of great games are free to play or came with something you already bought and you didn’t even realize it. Here’s what I’m talking about…
Netflix Games: If you’re one of the nearly 270 million subscribers to Netflix, you can play some fantastic indie titles on your mobile phone as part of your subscription. I just beat the remarkable point-and-click mystery game The Case of the Golden Idol on my phone last weekend. The player is faced with clever deduction puzzles to solve a 1700s murder mystery surrounding a golden idol with fascinating powers. Other indie games I’d recommend checking out on Netflix are Oxenfree, Spiritfarer, Storyteller, Before Your Eyes, World of Goo, Braid, Hades (lol), and Immortality (I have some qualms with the gameplay mechanics, which I may write about someday, but the acting and story are top notch). Looking at the app, there are Sonic and Grand Theft Auto games on there now, too, apparently. Neat!
If you prefer to play games on your PC or console vs. mobile, yeah, me too. Netflix is working on a system where you use your phone as a controller and stream games to your TV. I’d prefer that experience, but having access to the games on my Steam wish list without having to purchase them all individually is a delight.
Your Local Library: I saw a talk at Narrascope this year about the need to preserve digital games via libraries, because companies shut down their online stores, rendering many of these titles unplayable. (Looking at you, Nintendo.) The presenter said libraries have a much easier time preserving physical games, because they’re built to preserve physical media. In that moment, an 8-bit light bulb went off in my head. It never occurred to me that you can rent console games from the library. Not all libraries, but some of them carry games for modern systems. Call your local library to check! There’s one a half hour from my house that carries games, but an hour of driving is a lot of work to rent Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Time to respectfully beg my local library to gimme gimme games!
Itch Charity Bundles: One of my favorite websites is Itch.io, which is essentially the YouTube of games. It’s a must visit for indie games of all kinds, from epic to experimental. I donate to a lot of charity Itch bundles, where often hundreds of developers donate their games to giant mega bundles to support worthy causes like trans rights and Palestinian relief. Before I buy a game, I’ll check on Itch to see if I already own it. That happened recently with a rad looking visual novel called Wrestling with Emotions, which is next on my queue after I put several hundred hours into Balatro. Acclaimed indies I got in charity bundles include Night in the Woods (a personal favorite), Celeste, A Short Hike, Minit, Arcade Spirits, Baba is You, Pikuniku, and my favorite game of all-time, Hypnospace Outlaw. All in bundles! And those are just video games! There are tons of TTRPG bundles, too, if you’re into rolling dice and yelling at your friends in character, which I very much am.
I typically find out about these bundles on Discord gaming servers, but I see that people post about them on Reddit, too. It’s important to donate to charity, and these bundles make it all the more fun!
There are other ways to access large numbers of games for relatively low subscription costs, like XBOX Game Pass and Gamefly. There are amazing text adventure games released every year for free by talented developers around the world in events like IFComp and Spring Thing, both of which I’ve participated in. And going back to Itch, there are terrific free games on there, if you know where to look. If you’re looking to play more games on a tight budget, I hope this helps!
🎲 Your Turn: Know any tips for playing and discovering new games on the cheap? Is there a game you love that costs under $5? Have you published a free or inexpensive game? Email your reply or use the “Comment” button below to tell the whole world.
📨 Next Week: Amanda and I break down the story for our sexy X-Men dating sim. We figure out how to match the player up with their mutie cutie!
6 responses to “Gaming’s Best Kept Secret”
my first thought for free games is emulation, but if you’re squeamish about the legalities of playing a game that’s been off the market for decades from a studio that no longer exists, my second thought would be to fire up aptitude and browse the games category. Granted, that only works for people running a debian-based Linux, not everything there is a game in the strictest sense(e.g. frotz and glulxe, the two interpreters i currently have installed for playing interactive fiction aren’t games themselves, but are under the games category), and the way things tend to be packaged in Linux, one game might have dozens of packages(e.g. there might be one for the game’s main executable, there might be a package for the default game assets, there might be a package for one or more sets of non-default assets, there might be a package for running the game in the GUI and a different one for running it in the console, etc.)
I love emulation, particularly for finding unusual and forgotten gems that will never be re-released.
Parable of the Sower couldn’t be more timely, and thank you for the tip of “finishing” a game through other players/watching on YouTube: I rarely “beat” games anymore, but still want the story. 👏🏼
Yeah, this is the year of Parable of the Sower. The year does have a 1984-esque dystopian quality to it, huh?
My pleasure. Sometimes you have to know your limits and just say, “I need a feeling of narrative finality here.” But IMO to truly understand a game, you need to experience the mechanics, even poorly. The mechanics are what the game is really about, the deeper meanings all spring from them.
Every game you mentioned had me nodding my head. And dude…Hypnospace Outlaw is bananas! Such a unique and awesome game.
Have you played GRIS? One of my favorite indies ever. Also Inscryption is one of the most creative games I’ve ever played.
Glad you’re an HO fan too, Brian! I love how it tells the story of a community, rather than a lone hero, and the details in the world-building of that era of internet are so spot on.
No, I’ve never played either, but I just added them to my wishlist. I love card battlers and narrative platformers, and these look like standouts. Thank you!