Exploring the Ruins

Jake Elliot’s games have always presented a strong emphasis on nonlinear narrative, and it’s precisely that elusive quality that’s made me appreciate them so much. His two previous works, Last Tuesday and Balloon Diaspora, both addressed alienation, the feeling of loneliness so prevalent in the work of modern artists. This new story, Ruins, is about that, but it’s also about some other, more tangible things. It’s also, at heart, a game, a game about choices.

Bearing much in common with Last Tuesday, Ruins reads, in development terms, like a treatise on the modern choice mechanic so common in games. Rather than provide the simple, delineated trees of games like Mass Effect 2, Ruins allows the player to experience a situation and to determine their memory of past events. It’s through this memory that the story will be told, and different events will take increasing prevalence.

Rather than focus on the whats and whys of the story, which are best told to you by the game itself, I want to look at the choices you make as the “protagonist”, a shadowy dog, chasing rabbits. Most choices in the game give you two options (via talking with the “rabbits”), and they are usually major, life-altering choices, which serve to recast the player’s role in relation to the other characters in the piece. In many ways, this is interactive fiction, with the player making choices that effect the story being told him.

Play through the game a number of times, like I did, and you’ll find many nesting plot lines, each of which is explored by making different choices. You feel a sense of agency even though you don’t particularly know what you have this sense about: the consequences are obscured when you decide, making it like picking out shapes through a heavy fog. You’re looking at the ruins of a story, the bare bones laid bare in the foggy wood that acts as the game’s setting. Your choices cast the beams which have remained.

And bear no doubts, the choices you make will have significant effects on the story you are told. Every time I’ve played it, the story was markedly different. The same basic story was told, but I noticed different things, followed different paths; the characters fixated on different events in their lives. It’s a really fascinating way to tell a story, and that’s what Ruins is most interested in: using the narrative potential of gaming to tell a better story, tuned to the player’s interests as an individual.

As a story, Ruins is worth playing, because it shows what potential games have for telling honest, mature stories. The narrative emerges slowly, from different sources (the bunnies), and it will expose itself at your pace, which makes it that much more gripping. As a game, it is honest and involving, and it shows us what player agency can do to bring us into works we normally would not be thrilled to experience.

Post by Tom Auxier

Tom thinks that one day we will all be conquered by a race of platypi from the moon. He's also an editor here, and would love to freelance for you, too! He can be followed on twitter at TrueAxiom, where he talks about writing and games, and he writes about fiction here.

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