![]() But it went quite nicely with the B-horror tone of the story and more than any other interactive movie I've played it made me feel that my understanding of the story mattered. In the end, the whole revelation is a bit implausible and very Scooby Doo-like. All of these conclusions turned out to be true and allowed me to make much better decisions. I suspected that the movements of a spirit board was due to someone messing with it, which (together with a couple of other pieces of evidence) then led me to believe that certain ghost appearances couldn't be real either. Connected to this is the fact that this is probably the only game I have played where it turned out to be beneficial to be a skeptic. I theorized quite early on who it was, and could then make a bunch of choices based around that. The most prominent of these was figuring out who was behind the torment of the other characters. What I found to be even more effective in allowing me to plan was in guessing plot-points which became a crucial part of the decision making. It's not a major game changer, but it's enough to give that extra sense of engagement. This forecasting gives the game a certain sense of strategy and forces you to consider current events more carefully. It's not much, but what it does is that it forces you to guess how scenes might unfold, and you try to match up the current events with the totem visions you have seen. Now you know that you need to find a flare gun somewhere and make sure that a specific character gets it. For instance, in one totem you see that giving a certain character a flare gun gave you a good outcome. Sometimes they show you how a character dies and sometimes they give you hints on important choices to make. These are items that when picked up give you a brief glimpse of a possible future happening. The first thing that allows this are the totems. I will get back to this a bit more at the end of this essay. It is often stated that it depends on fail-states and the like, but I do not think that holds up. Side note: I think that the inability to plan and over reliance on reactive play is also why many people feel walking simulators aren't proper games. I think this lack of an ability to plan is one of the key reasons why many people feel that interactive movies are not proper games. It is often best to just go along with the flow. This means that, for the most part, it's impossible to plan ahead in fact if you plan too much you will most likely be disappointed. You might plan to do A, B and then C, only to have the game take control after action A and do something completely different. It is often hard to get a sense of what you near future possibilities will be at all. But all of that is pretty fuzzy, and mostly it won't be very useful to you. Sure, sometimes you can makes up plans to support certain characters so that they'll side with you later on. For most of the time, the playable characters do what they feel like and let you occasionally take control to react to dangerous events or to make a tough decision for them. You sort of live in the moment, and don't have much say in what happens next. There's not really any planning involved. However, in interactive movies, it's all about reacting to the events that unfold. Allowing for good planning is a one of the core features that make a game feel engaging. There are tons of examples like this in games, and most games feature it in one form or another. In an RPG you need to consider how you spend your money and experience points to build up your character to suit your style of play and that character's effectiveness. ![]() In Super Mario Bros you need to plan what path to take and how to avoid upcoming obstacles. And not just any sort of planning, but meaningful planning where you can weigh your current data, plot a future course of actions, execute on those actions and then feel like you get a measurable outcome in the end. Thus allowing us to make plans is an vital part of human expression. When we plan we get to flex our most advanced mental muscle: the ability to simulate future outcomes. The ability to make plans is part of what it means to be human, and there are good reasons to think it's one of the biggest reasons for us developing a consciousness (more info here). ![]()
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