The games of FromSoft, particularly those in the "Souls-like" genre, which include Demon's Souls, Dark Souls I-III, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring, take an unusual but fascinating approach to storytelling.
If you want to go back a long ways, games would tend to tell their stories up-front and fairly simplistically - Super Mario games tended to let you know in the manual that Bowser has kidnapped Princess Toadstool (later called Peach in the U.S. - I actually think she always had that name in Japan) and you had to go rescue her. As the medium evolved, and technology improved, games began to have cinematic cutscenes that would play out like movies to situate you in a level or other phase of the game.
Now, there's always been some environmental storytelling as well - this could be as simple as the intro to Super Metroid, where you show up and all the scientists on Ceres Station are dead, and the glass cylinder where the baby Metroid was being kept has been shattered, which... gives you a pretty strong impression that someone broke in and violently stole it. That's confirmed in the next room when you find Ridley with the baby Metroid in hand.
But in the early days of video games, the story still tended to be simple. You can spend many hours exploring Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, but among the lore and story in the game you get, there's not a ton you can really confirm. Again, environmental storytelling gives you some intriguing hints - like, why is there a dead body in armor not entirely dissimilar to Samus' near the entrance to Kraid's boss room? And why are there weird jellyfish monsters who look a lot like Metroids in Maridia? But without going fully outside the game into supplementary materials, you won't be able to answer those things.
The Souls games (here referring to the list above, and not only Demon's Souls and Dark Souls) popularized a new approach to this. Every item and spell in these games has a description, and while some of it is fairly functional, e.g., "consume this to restore HP," they almost always come with some additional information about the world and setting, usually finding an in-world justification for the gameplay functionality of an item.
This then becomes a way to flesh out the world beyond what's revealed in cutscenes and dialogue.
Now, the Souls games take this to an extreme level. These games often give you some goal that is not exactly clear. In Bloodborne, you are told (and only by a missable note evidently written in your own hand) to "Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt." That's not, you know, super clear. And in fact, even after you have played through the game and overcome its final challenges, you might sit back and say "hold on, did I actually find this Paleblood?"
The Souls games treat both their primary narrative and their grand narrative (I'm avoiding using the term "metanarrative" because this could be confused with a fourth-wall-breaking story about the making of the narrative) as obscure archaeological finds, hoping you will engage in what is almost a second gameplay system - the communal effort to dig up and examine the obscure lore that paints a broader picture of what is going on. Even the "main story" leaves a lot of open ambiguities. Which ending to Dark Souls is the "good" one? Or, in Elden Ring, is Marika the benevolent queen who needs our help to rescue her from the husband/persona that has come to dominate her domain, or is she the tyrant who inflicted the world with chaos for her own nebulous purposes? Indeed, I think the aim in a lot of FromSoft games is to dispense with clear good and evil options, and instead embrace the idea that any philosophy comes with negative consequences, and your choice in the end is simply to decide which direction going forward outweighs its ramifications. (To borrow D&D's alignment system, it's like there's not really any clear good or evil, so you're left to choose between lawful and chaotic.)
Now, Control, which is a game that I kinda liked, then loved, and now am sort of obsessed with, does things a little differently.
Control's primary narrative is simpler than the Souls games, and far more straightforward. Jesse shows up to find her brother (notably, having a set protagonist rather than a character-designed avatar does allow for a more directly personal story) and goes on a simultaneous journey of discovery about the outlandish Federal Bureau of Control and its otherworldly headquarters, the Oldest House, while also battling an invasion by the sinister infectious mind-controlling resonance known as The Hiss.
This conflict against The Hiss is the basis of the primary narrative in the main game as well as the two DLCs (while both involve other elements, neither conflict would have occurred in not for the Hiss invasion).
But Control's grander narrative is primarily not about the Hiss, because the Hiss invasion is a recent phenomenon when you show up. It's implied that it may have started hours or even minutes before you arrived at the Oldest House, and while we never leave the building (not counting other planes of existence or the caverns beneath the building) and thus can't get a sense of precisely how long the events of the game are supposed to take, there's very little the Hiss have done there before the events of the game. You arrive in the early moments of a massive crisis, and notably, the FBC doesn't even have a name for the invading force until Jesse coins the term (comparing it to the hiss of a broken gas pipe, subtly poisoning the air).
Control is not an item-rich game, or rather, its items are not generally accessed in a menu and equipped the way they are in a Souls game. Your single weapon has multiple forms, but that merely reflects its metamorphic nature, and there's no separate "lore" for Grip or Spin or Charge, because these are all just different forms for the weapon called The Service Weapon to take - the lore being the same for each. The closest thing to "items" you get over the course of the game are Objects of Power, which imbue you with various abilities. When you bind the Floppy Disk, you get the Launch ability, but you don't pull this disk out and wave it around when you use this ability.
But that's fine, because the deep lore media in Control simply exists as its own thing. Unlike in Souls games, most of these documents exist purely for lore reasons, and a player who doesn't care about any of this and just wants to enjoy the game for its fun combat can ignore them (though I think such a person is a little dead inside). Control gives us memos, documentation, letters, and videos, which amount to an actually quite substantial amount of material.
What these do is contextualize the world of the FBC. And through them, we get tantalizing hints of mysteries that might be uncovered.
As an example, many references are made to the "Blessed" organization, which seems to be some kind of group that is using paranatural (read supernatural) objects and phenomena to inflict death and destruction upon random people, and may in fact be targeting the FBC itself, such as when they mail a fondue pot that incinerates the producer of the radio show America Overnight, which is secretly run by the FBC to influence the public. Furthermore, there's some potential implication that the Blessed organization is actually being supported by the Board, the enigmatic entity (or entities) that supports the FBC from the Astral Plane.
While the Foundation DLC's primary narrative does explicitly raise the possibility that the Board is sinister and hostile, and not to be trusted, it does not go so far as to imply that the Board would be moving against the FBC itself, which it has had a strong influence over ever since Director Northmoor moved the bureau into the Oldest House.
At no point in Control do you come in direct conflict with the Board, and the narrative of the Foundation DLC is still primarily about fixing the problems down there that ultimately trace their cause back to the Hiss invasion. But digging deeper, new possibilities of what is really going on crop up.
In a lot of ways, I think that this form of Deep Lore scratches the same itch that fuels conspiracy theorists in the real world. Control, and the New Weird genre in general, often likes to tell stories about conspiracy theories (and explore a fictional world in which the most outlandish of them are real,) and I think that is because the conspiracy theory is the latest manifestation of a very human desire for Revelation.
But while earnestly-believed conspiracy theories can become dangerous - such as when antipathy toward a politician leads you to believe that he could not have legitimately won the election that he did and you violently try to overthrow the government in favor of your own preferred candidate - the refuge of fiction is the ability to compartmentalize and experience these feelings safely, under containment in the conceit that none of this is actually real.
Like conspiracy theories, Deep Lore in games (and other artistic media) encourages a community to spring up around it. I've spent hours on YouTube watching videos discussing the lore of Souls games, World of Warcraft, and Control, the act of collecting and analyzing this lore becomes a collaborative form of gameplay that sits outside of the PS5 controller or whatever you're using to play these games.
The desire for Revelation - to see a hidden truth - is rooted deeply and firmly in human psychology and could almost be described as drug-like. I've been reading Carl Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and while I'm still pretty early in the book (it starts off dry, and there are some archaic assumptions made about cultures and gender roles, but it gets pretty juicy pretty quickly) one thing he identifies is the notion that, in a growingly irreligious era, people yearn to feel religious awe. That's maybe putting too strong an emphasis on it, but I think it gets at what makes this sort of storytelling so compelling: somewhere hardwired into our brain is a desire to connect new information.
And the utility of this is fairly obvious: our curiosity has allowed us to develop our intelligence, and grow the collective knowledge base of humanity. Thus, I think, the appeal of this kind of Deep Lore is a way to exercise our ability to do so and challenge ourselves to find deeper, hidden truths - the more obscure, the more we have proven our communal intellectual prowess.
This got a little more profound than I intended it (if I do say so myself,) but I wonder if the development of this kind of storytelling in games will become more widespread over time.
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