TLDR: Silence & Starsong is working on our first text-based video game and you should play it.
I’m pretty sure Hogwarts Legacy was the last video game I ever really looked forward to. Rowling’s Wizarding World has pretty much everything you could want for a game: an obvious progression system (learning new spells); clear potential for choices-matter mechanics (choosing a house); mini game options (quidditch); and a vibrant, mysterious world ripe with secrets to uncover. What could possibly go wrong?
Even if you haven’t played it, you can probably guess at the answer. The modern machine is what went wrong.
To be clear, the game isn’t all that bad. Some of the design is beautiful even, and the combat was somewhat enjoyable and certainly visually appealing. But it’s just not all that good either, despite the five years and $150 million that went into making it. The characters are flat, the dialogue cringe, and the story so uncompelling that I never bothered to finish the game.
At first I thought, “Maybe I’m just getting too old for video games.” This is probably true to a degree, but then I started a replay of Mass Effect (now almost two decades old) and within five minutes of playing I thought: “Ah, this is why I fell in love with the medium.”
Then just last year a tiny little studio staffed with a bunch of unknowns, many of whom had never even worked on a game before1, released Clair Obscur and absolutely dominated the Game of the Year awards over big franchises such as Assassin’s Creed. In one fell swoop Clair Obscur proved definitively that the industry hasn’t at all lost its potential, it just lost its heart. But that heart can be found again.
Video games matter more than most people realise
Now I’m not going to pretend that even top-tier games such as Mass Effect and Clair Obscur stand on the same level as classic novels such as Brothers Karamazov or Lord of the Rings. Yes, for many of us (me included) video games can often be a huge time suck preventing us from more important, creative, or vitalising matters, yada yada yada you know the possible pitfalls already.
But at the end of the day, they are fun. People love them. More importantly, they are art, in the old sense of the word at the very least: the result of skilled craftsmen pulling together disparate elements to form a unified whole with a specific purpose. No serious person claims that a video game cannot be a beautiful thing.
And if you know anything about beauty, you know that it will save the world.
If we’re serious about shaping culture, healing some of the brokenness of the world, and inspiring each other to pursue goodness, beauty, and truth, we need to be creating stories of all kinds that appeal to all sorts of people, stories that are better than what is currently out there. This is exactly what Silence & Starsong intends to do. We started as a humble magazine, expanded into a radio show, and now we’re venturing into the world of interactive fiction.
Our first project is well underway, and people love it
It started as a Discord conversation about the pros and cons of interactive fiction as a storytelling medium (a topic for another post, perhaps?) but we now have the first chapter of our first text-based video game up for free on Itch. In The Iron King’s Heir you play as the sole heir to a tyrant king’s throne. In this browser- and mobile-friendly royalty sim written by yours truly, your choices do, in fact, matter, and they have the potential to shape the narrative in drastically different ways. Will you follow in your father’s footsteps or chart your own path?
Perhaps the most fun thing about this medium is just how collaborative it is. I may be the one writing the story and coding the mechanics, but at the end of the day the outcome of the narrative will be a joint effort between writer and player. Partly because of this it has the potential to reach a far wider audience than a novel might. I am already shocked at the positive feedback I’ve received from a far greater variety of people than I expected, from long-time, die-hard Silence & Starsong fans to people who wouldn’t normally consider picking up a faith-inspired anthology (or perhaps any kind of anthology at all for that matter).
If you’d like to be a part of making The Iron King’s Heir the best it can be, by all means, play the game and let us know what you think. Your suggestions may just shape the direction the game takes.
And if you’re a writer who is interested in the possibilities interactive fiction has to offer, stay tuned, we’ll be talking more about the writing process in the near future.
For real, the lead writer was a private equity investor whom the creators discovered on Reddit while looking for voice actors. You can’t make this stuff up.
“I started a replay of Mass Effect (now almost two decades old) and within five minutes of playing I thought: ‘Ah, this is why I fell in love with the medium.’”
Exactly my reaction as well.