Trust No One: Unreliable Narratives in Games

Spoiler warning for several older games, including the Bioshock series and Silent Hill 2, as well as the movie Memento.

Memento, an early Christopher Nolan movie, is a well-executed example of a familiar writing trope: the unreliable narrator. The audience experiences the events of the movie from the point of view of the main character, Leonard, who is unable to retain new memories.

In a telegraphed twist ending that’s still shocking as it unfolds, we learn Leonard has been manipulated; all is not what it seems. The climax of the movie changes everything that we’ve seen before it.

Structurally, Memento takes the viewer on the standard unreliable narrator ride. It smartly builds sympathy for its protagonist as a viewer surrogate, then pulls out the rug with a realization that how we’ve perceived what we’ve seen was wrong.

Fiction – books, movies, and TVs – contain tons of examples of unreliable narrators. It’s a clever trick, one that unbalances the audience, forces recontextualization of the story, and encourages strong engagement with the details.

So it’s no wonder that games, too, have leveraged the concept. An unreliable narrator is an effective path to get reviewers talking about a game’s narrative in glowing terms – and sometimes a cheap way to punch up an otherwise weak ending to a story.

At the same time, when it comes to games, the technique carries with it risk. If executed badly or without purpose, an unreliable narrator removes an important element that games deliver that other forms of entertainment don’t: player agency.

Who Am I?

Role-playing games often leverage character development through choice. It’s most apparent in narrative-heavy titles focused on amnesiac main characters, like Disco Elysium and Planescape Torment, where the player’s choices define elements of the character’s past life.

Defining a character’s past through their actions doesn’t require an amnesiac hero. Major franchises like Baldur’s Gate and Fallout let the player make dialogue choices that add color and a backstory to their avatar, primarily to give the player a stronger connection to the character.

Though the impact of these choices on gameplay is minimal, the impact on a player’s mindset can be enormous. I remember an in-game conversation near the end of Morrowind where I had to decide whether I believed I was the Nerevarine, the reborn protector of the people – or whether I didn’t believe the legends and was just accepting the title to dupe all the locals into believing I was worthy of their help. 

I stared at that choice for a while. After going through the long and meaty main story, my character had made a lot of choices and solved a lot of quests, but I hadn’t really thought about how I’d felt – and more importantly, how my character felt.

Morrowind also makes heavy use of inconsistent elements in the history of its setting to play with the player’s perception of truth. The myriad of in-game books the player finds fill in the rich, varied lore of the land, but few of the narratives agree.

A particularly crucial historical event, the death of the original Nerevar, is retold in several competing texts. Which one is the “real” story is never spelled out; it’s left for the player to decide the truth, or even to conclude that all the versions have elements of fact and elements of fiction.

These techniques are “unreliable narrator adjacent” and arguably nearly as effective at generating powerful emotions in the player, building identification with a main character, and recontextualizing early content.

Alternative approaches for making a player feel off-balance are substantially less dangerous for the narrative designer. Rather than taking away a player’s agency, the techniques reinforce it.

Unreliable Narratives and Unreliable Narrators

Since a strong feeling of player agency is a crucial element of good games, fully embracing the unreliable narrator trope can be a risky choice. But a few games that took that chance demonstrated how to pull it off successfully.

It’s worth making a distinction between the typical unreliable narrator in books and movies – an audience point-of-view character that we are meant to sympathize with  – and the simpler concept of a key character, often a mentor, that turns out to have a hidden agenda or a surprising motivation.

Games, books, and movies often lean on the simpler version to create surprise or trigger an Act 2 twist. Consider Kreia in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – a mentor who’s presented as a pseudo-Obi-Wan character, knowledgeable about the Force, who turns out to have her own sinister agenda. 

Or for an extremely well-executed modern game, consider the arc of the character Dutch in Red Dead Redemption 2 and the growing disillusionment of Arthur Morgan, the player’s character, with Dutch’s methods and choices throughout the story.

There’s less risk in these approaches than in a story that aims for Memento’s bold unreliable narrator. They’re not much more than typical plot twists, unexpected events that are a part of the standard hero’s journey. 

But if the player has come to rely on a particular mentor as a source of truth, the feeling of the twist, when it comes, is a close cousin of an unreliable narrator reveal.

Bioshock’s narrative takes this concept a step further. The character of Fontaine, who early on hides behind the pseudonym Atlas, guides the player from the very beginning, delivering not only narrative help but serving as the game’s tutorial. Until the second half of the game, every step of the way, the player is encouraged – indeed, forced – to trust Fontaine, right up until the first of several shocking twists.

At the same time, the Bioshock player himself is a traditional unreliable narrator. We think we understand who our character is, but we know very little about his backstory. When the game’s famous twist finally comes, everything that came before it is seen through a new lens. (Bioshock Infinite, the third game in the series, leverages a similarly perception-altering main character twist.)

A list of genuinely unreliable narrators in games has to include James, the protagonist of one of the most effective horror games of all time, Silent Hill 2. The player’s experiences in the dreamlike world of the game’s titular town are colored by the character’s perspective – which turns out to have been built on a foundation of lies James told to himself, to cope with pain and guilt.

While Silent Hill 2 doesn’t turn its plot on its head in the same way that Bioshock does with its reveal, the impact on the player is the same. A character we trusted – a character we embodied for the game’s lengthy story – is now someone that we pity at best and hate at worst.

What Works and What Doesn’t

For different reasons, both Bioshock and Silent Hill 2 benefit by leaning into the unreliable narrator concept.

Bioshock’s story is partly about player choice. There’s even a touch of fourth-wall breaking in its famous midpoint twist. It’s thinly disguised commentary on how players have been guided by the nose to get to that moment. 

As Bioshock’s narrative ultimately suggests, choice in games is always an illusion; good games simply have better illusions.

The story of Silent Hill 2, like Memento’s twisty roller coaster ride, requires the unreliable narrator concept. The horrors the main character James Sunderland experiences in the fog-shrouded town are born out of his guilt; the reveal of the source of that guilt is the reason the story exists at all. The setting, plot, and character all reinforce the game’s themes.

The unreliable narrator trope is attractive to novice writers. If executed well, it delivers a surprising twist that gets an audience talking – something every creator of fiction wants. 

Yet it’s a risky approach for games, with the potential to undermine player agency and connection to the main character – elements at the heart of a great player experience.

Alternatively, secondary characters that lie to you or betray you fit much more neatly into interactive experiences. They can off-balance a player almost as well as the late reveal of an unreliable narrator would, but the player retains full agency over the main character until the end.

Bioshock and Silent Hill 2 demonstrate how an unreliable narrator can elevate the right game. Still, I’d encourage narrative designers to consider carefully before emulating the classics and building a game’s story around the concept. 

How does an unreliable narrator move the story you’re trying to tell forward? How much player agency are you sacrificing for the “big twist?” Is there another technique to achieve the same goals?

The takeaway is this: choose narrative approaches that make the most sense for not just the story you’re writing, but the game you’re building. When narrative and gameplay reinforce each other, rather than feel unconnected, the overall experience will be better every time.

Your players will love you for it, even if there isn’t a surprise twist at the end.

If you enjoy the Scree Games blog, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Medium – or all three! It helps us out. See you next week.