Supermassive Games' top three rules for narrative-driven horror
Danielle Partis
News Editor
Tuesday 26th July 2022
In the last few years, Supermassive Games has positioned itself as a standout maker of choice-led interactive games that let players write their own story.
With titles such as Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology under its belt, the Guildford-based studio has reached critical acclaim for its narrative design and branching storylines.
Will Doyle
The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of cinematic horror stories that Supermassive releases annually, starting with 2019's Man of Medan. The games don't follow one story, the anthology can be enjoyed in any order, with each of the three titles being a standalone story.
Some insight on the series was shared at Develop:Brighton 2022 by Will Doyle, creative director on The Dark Pictures Anthology. During a talk titled "The Dark Pictures Anthology: Crafting Interactive Narrative Games," Doyle explored the processes involved in making story-driven adventures, and how the studio works to create different types of horror in the collection of games.
Each game in the anthology features a series of characters, all of which are playable at some point, rather than just following the story of one single protagonist. Each separate character has their own story and players can choose their fate, which affects the game moving forward.
"In a way, you're playing as a director rather than a character in the story," Doyle said. "It offers a lot of freedom -- if you don't like one of the characters, you can just kill them.
"No matter how many people live or die [in-game], the story is designed to give you a fairly decent play experience. If a character dies, the story just rolls on."
Doyle presented an example of this in action. A
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