Visualizing the Narrative: Introduction
Welcome to Epilogue Gaming’s first video series. We’re calling it “Visualizing the Narrative” because we want to explore how games use interactive visuals to tell their stories. To explore this concept, we will be focusing on three games that visualize their narrative supremely well: Journey, Shadow of the Colossus, and Gris. Each of these games tell unique stories, but what unites them is how they communicate so much of their narratives through visual cues, symbols, and interactive relationships.
We think video games have an underappreciated capacity to achieve this kind of visual storytelling, and want to celebrate what we consider to be successful examples. We want to take a second look at the stories that stir our emotions, that make us think about our lives in new ways, sometimes without saying a word. These games conduct the narrative through interactive environments and showing, rather than telling.
Journey tells us a story of birth, life and death. Through images such as forgotten gravesites and towering instruments of war, Journey paints the history of its world without ever saying a word. Most similar to an interactive picture book, Journey slowly unfolds one image at a time. Each moment helps compose something larger and more immense. By the time the credits have finished, the beginning and end are one in the same, indistinguishable from one another, blending into the present as part of a cumulative experience.
Shadow of the Colossus juxtaposes immense landscapes and creatures with the all-too-human limitations of a single person trying to accomplish the impossible. The game contrasts light and dark to convey its themes of life and death. Themes of isolation and dread also silently loom over the course of the anti-hero Wander’s journey to cheat death and restore life to an innocent young woman. The player’s violent actions oppose the peaceful nature of the isolated colossi, causing them to question their motivations both within the game and without – as a player and a character.
Gris displays a journey through loss and grief, rife with emotional highs and lows. Much of the narrative is straightforward, but the meaning therein is almost exclusively implicit. The mechanics and art style work well together to create a largely interpretative experience without ever failing to show its story.
Please join us as we bring these three games in conversation with another. Each game helps us build this concept of “visualizing the narrative.” By the end of the series, we hope you will appreciate these familiar games in new ways.
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