The way Rebel Wolves promoted The Blood of Dawnwalker and its myriad choices got me thinking: What does it really mean for your choices to matter in a video game? Typically, we think it’s a good use of branching narratives when you have a properly big, dramatic effect on how things play out or when you have hundreds of endings. Just look at how so much attention on Baldur’s Gate 3 focused on the endings or, further back in time, how everyone tends to ignore the smaller ways the Mass Effect trilogy changed in favor of looking at the restrictive outcomes in Mass Effect 3.
Large-scale narrative branches are engaging for a reason. They’re satisfying, and they make you feel a sense of influence over events and characters you care about. Like with video game romance, however, they have become somewhat stale and predictable in form. So for this list, I decided to look at three games that use branching narratives in bolder and unexpected ways.
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Zero Parades: For Dead Spies
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is the rare piece of interactive media where your choices matter not just for how they influence the story, but for how they shape your actions, too. Hershel, the protagonist of the piece, is a spy. Or, was a spy. A series of catastrophic incidents happened, and she finds herself decommissioned, in a room with a comatose person, and without any idea how she got here. There’s a very dangerous game afoot in the fictional town of Portofiro, Zero Parades‘ setting, and your job is figuring it out and possibly even finding redemption. Maybe. If you can manage it.
Like its spiritual predecessor Disco Elysium, Zero Parades has standard CRPG elements like persuasion and knowledge, but unlike standard CRPGs, you’re doing a lot more with them other than picking locks and lying to folks. With higher points in certain social or mental skills, you have a better chance of passing certain checks in conversations that unlock entirely new perspectives on what’s happening. Sometimes, you just get a bit of extra lore. That’s usually like the consolation prize in video games, but Zero Parades‘ impeccable writing means these moments are just as rewarding as stumbling onto a new story path.
On other occasions, you fall down a rabbit hole of madness and form a bond with a drunken businessman over your shared delusions about the idea of a goddess trampling you underfoot (for example). Which sounds fun, and it is, until your delusion stat maxes out and you die. The same can happen with fatigue and anxiety stats. Just like real life!
Balancing your more extreme decisions with less tumultuous ones is a big part of Zero Parades, but whatever choice you make, it always takes a “yes, and” approach. Even when what you’ve done seems very wrong, possibly even fatal, you nearly always have a way forward. It might just be very, very different from the path you thought you’d take. It keeps you in a state of perpetual uncertainty, like you have no idea what the right thing to do is and just have to wing it and hope for the best. In other words, you’re thinking and behaving just like Hershel. I can’t think of any other game that uses choices to let you embody a character on such an important level — not even the (also excellent) Disco Elysium.
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