Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

What are your favourite game stories or lore? (I mean, purely from a narrative/thematic pov, regardless of the gameplay.)

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, StarCraft, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Thief, and MGS3.

Dark Souls and Bloodborne both have a great storytelling style in my opinion, allowing a story to be told without creating interruptions, and creating narratives through fragmented information. I think these two did the job a bit better than the other souls games. It’s interesting when you finally get all the parts of the puzzle and piece together what the fuck is going on.

StarCraft has nice lore sitting behind everything in the manual, the characters are well written, well voiced, and have consistent motivations generally.

Legacy of Kain (at least, the soul reaver series), has really amazing writing, tackles some philosophy, and gets a bit mindfucky with all the travel and talk of destiny, presenting time travel and destiny in a rather unique way. The voice acting is also top notch and really sells the manner of speech for the characters.

Thief has nice characterization of Garrett and the various guards, has clever overheard conversations as well as notes and cutscenes. Some of the background information like Garrett’s eye being made by Karras is also nice. The city and missions themselves are also constructed nicely to deliver information about the world of Thief, which is rather cool.

MGS3, the theme of it and a lot of the writing I find to be really powerful, as well as the more subtle ways in which the theme and a lot of the characters’ motivations are made clear through their actions. The concept behind it is simple, but the execution makes it really strong in my opinion.