But where Civilization leaves players to form their own internal narratives within its mad mashup of iconic leaders, nations and Wonders, the Endless series contains a vast mythos that you uncover bit by bit each time you start a new game, manifesting itself in wonderfully written quests, factions and artefacts, some of which create narrative threads across the entire series.Įach time you begin a new instance of Endless, it's not only a fresh start in a procedurally generated world or galaxy, but a plunge deeper into its lore. Endless Space is set in a hard sci-fi universe of spaceships, planetary colonisation and black holes, while Endless Legend takes place on the fantasy world of Auriga, replete with dragon-people and magic, yet with a techy slant and strange races that set it apart from typical high fantasy. You build an empire, you expand it, and then you race towards one of several preset victory conditions - scientific, military, economic, whatever. Stripped back, these games broadly follow the same rules as genre champion, Civilization. And there's one strategy series in particular that stands out.Īmplitude Studios' Endless saga! If you ask me, Endless Legend and Endless Space 1 and 2 (as well as oddball tower defence title, Dungeons of the Endless) represent an interconnected masterclass in video game storytelling, working within the strict rulesets of 4X strategy to intertwine narrative and mechanics until they both hum with potential.
Plenty has been said about how walking simulators and the Souls series achieve this, but much less documented is the peculiar delights of storytelling in strategy games. The best video game stories, on the other hand, take advantage of those gamey idiosyncrasies you won't find in other media - mechanics, player agency, non-linearity - to play as big a part in the narrative as the writing. Their narratives are simply well-presented, well-written slices of steady exposition interposed between segments of competent, if often generic, mechanics. But none of these games utilise the storytelling tools specific to the medium. Yes, you can argue that the morally grimy ending of The Last of Us is up there with darker blockbuster movies, that the BioShock series' philoso-scientific musings are at least at the Christopher Nolan level. The best - or at least the most famous - stories in video games are rarely the best video game stories.
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