Even more than some other arts, video games are an excellent medium for telling stories that are as original as they are gripping. Some developers have taken advantage of this to create worlds that are radically opposed to the good-natured pixel paradises of franchises like Pokémon. Here are four particularly striking examples.
Papers, Please
Lucas Pope has no equal when it comes to finding original ways to tell stories. One of his two flagship titles, Papers, Please, is a great example. It places the player in the shoes of an immigration officer in Arstotzka, a fictional totalitarian state partly inspired by post-war East Germany.
The goal is simple: well-established at his border post, the player must sort through the long line of people who wish to enter Artstotzka based on the documents they present. At its most superficial level, Papers, Please is a kind of administrative puzzle game where we spend most of our time checking the validity of identity documents, permits and other supporting documents to determine who will have the right to cross this sinister border. Nothing very exciting at first glance.
But this apparent monotony is in fact the keystone of the devilishly ingenious staging concocted by Lucas Pope. Each document is a little life story; war, separation, distress, hope and disillusionment… Dialogue after dialogue, stamp after stamp, we see the outlines of a striking social and political fresco on authoritarianism that explores strong themes such as oppression, resistance, its moral dilemmas and disillusionment, or the consequences of an all-powerful bureaucracy devoid of humanity.
The game was even adapted into a particularly successful, chilling and very well-acted short film. We strongly recommend that you spend about ten minutes on this; and if the result inspires you, you will probably be captivated by the game that inspired the film.
The cherry on the cake is that it is often sold for next to nothing during Steam sales.
Beholder
Philosophically speaking, Beholder is one of the closest relatives of Papers, Please. Like the latter, this title developed by Alawar Stargaze is set in a sinister world. But the setting is very different, instead of occupying a border post, the player is put in the shoes of the manager of an apartment complex run by an authoritarian state that constantly asks him to inform it about the slightest actions of the tenants.
This original idea is also a great storytelling vector. Each sequence is riddled with moral ambiguity, and our reluctant double agent is constantly faced with difficult decisions that force us to question all the foundations of human values. Should we prioritize unwavering loyalty to this all-powerful state, even if it means throwing a few poor souls who only asked to live decently into this hell where all notion of privacy has disappeared? Should we absolutely do what is right, even if it means incurring the wrath of the state? Or should we reason strategically to play on both fronts at once, taking the risk of making our own family suffer the consequences? As the plot unfolds, the line between good and evil becomes increasingly blurred, and this constant artistic and ethical blurring makes Beholder a rather memorable experience.
Orwell
Even more than Beholder, Orwell is a game entirely centered on information and privacy that honors the illustrious author of 1984. Set in a more modern universe, the player embodies a contemporary version of the famous Big Brother omnipresent in the work of the great guru of dystopian fiction: a government surveillance agent tasked with combing through citizens' social networks, files and personal conversations using sophisticated computer tools.
The core of the gameplay lies in deciding which of these intimate, often ambiguous pieces of information should be exploited by the state apparatus... and which would be better left in the private domain.
We therefore end up with a title halfway between a puzzle game and an investigation game that sometimes puts the player's sense of morality to the test. But what makes Orwell so interesting is that it explores much more modern and concrete themes for today's players, such as the fragmentation of the concept of privacy in the age of social networks. If you suffer from a serious addiction to these platforms, Orwell could well be one of the remedies that will help you recover!
We Happy Few
Where Orwell is explicitly inspired by 1984, We Happy Few instead draws on the work of Aldous Huxley. As in Brave New World, where the population is made docile with the help of a drug called soma, the universe concocted by Compulsion Games is based on a substance called Joy that anesthetizes citizens by imprisoning them in a state of debilitating bliss.
The latter serves as the guiding thread for a captivating plot. As in the three titles above, the player must constantly navigate an ocean of disturbing contradictions, dark humor, and uncomfortable dilemmas set against a backdrop of hallucinatory delirium. In terms of pure gameplay, the game suffers from some fairly clear shortcomings, especially compared to the masterpieces of coherence that are Papers, Please and Beholder. But it is still a memorable experience that is well worth the detour, provided you buy it during a promotion.
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