the next time you play the game there isn’t anything else there to maintain your interest. … It’s not 100 percent true because nothing ever is. I


played through the older Tomb Raider games a couple of times and enjoyed them the second time through and there are mechanical reasons to play a game to get ‘New Game Plus’, but I feel like in the narrative space we’re slightly struggling with how we make a narrative which actually rewards you the second and third and fourth time around.


“We talk a lot about New Game Plus for mechanics, but very little about New Game Plus for narrative.”


It’s not just a theoretical idea to me, it’s actually


something that Inkle’s been working on for a long time now. When we first made 80 Days, we explicitly designed it to be a narrative game that people would want to replay and I remember having design conversations where we would say, ‘Is it possible to make an adventure game that people actively want to play two or three times?’ We didn’t know. What we found was that people played it eight, nine, ten times and they’d go back to it because they can slip back into a world they know and find something new. In Heaven’s Vault, we had quite a different approach


to replayability. A lot of people played that game once and kind of went ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine. Nice story. I can’t imagine playing it again. It’s an adventure game. It’ll be the same each time.’ But it really isn’t the same thing each time. Every time you go through it the contextualizations of what you learn about the world change based on what you know. That was quite a deliberate attempt to make something that gets deeper every time you dig.


People were prepared for it in 80 Days, so is it a case of explicitly informing the audience that the option is there, otherwise they will just assume that it isn’t? Keeping the audience up to speed with the right expectations to have is always really important, but I think that if we hadn’t sold 80 Days as replayable upfront, people would have still replayed it because it promises so much


April/May 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 19


and because of the way the design is shaped. Equally, I think a lot of people didn’t replay Heaven’s Vault because I don’t think we communicated how the new game worked as well as we could’ve done, which is all part of the learning journey. A Highland Song is replayable in a different way again, and we’ll need to keep communicating that to people; that every journey will be different and will be deeper and will be richer, but it’s still finding a balance with the mechanical business of telling players ‘These are the rules. This is how the game works. This is how it functions.’ ... Like, there are elements of legacy board games in the design of both Heaven’s Vault and Highland Song, where there are mechanical things that stay from one round to the next. But also in the narrative itself, where we ask what kind of stories support being told more than once?What sort of stories give us more when we read them again? Why do we get more out of rereading The Lord of the Rings than we do out of rereading… I don’t want to pick on anyone, but say The Expanse novels? We probably don’t read those more than once. We read each one and then go ‘That’s great. I’ll read the next one.’ What’s the difference between the construction of the narrative that makes one of those get deeper the more you look at it? I think that’s really interesting and I think that aspect of writing is something that we don’t think about very much in games, mostly because we’re so busy trying to make the damn things work.


But there are expectations inherent to certain genres, such as the near-endless replayability of a roguelike? It’s got to do with the content as well though, because even like a definition of a roguelike, you’re talking about the mechanical systems. But how does that apply to something like Hades or to The Outer Wilds? They’re


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