Developer: Hazelight Publisher: Electronic Arts Release year: 2018
Spoilers: Moderate Reviewed on: PC
‘A Way Out’ was Hazelight’s first venture into multiplayer game-making, following the success of their single-player ‘Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons’. The game plot follows Leo and Vincent, two prison inmates searching for ‘A Way Out’. Josef Fares, director of Hazelight studios, seems to invert the usual question, ‘how can narrative be used to sustain interactivity and immersion?’. Instead, he and his studio ask, ‘how can the interactive medium of games help to tell this story?’. Here, I’ll take a dive into how this different perspective treats the use of narrative within the multiplayer interactive space of the award-winning action-adventure game. In this blog post, I’m going to avoid talking about how the game ends – I’ll dedicated another post entirely to that! – but there will still be spoilers so be warned.
Cooperative multiplayer games (particularly those that are story-driven) face many challenges about how to handle the narrative delivery of the game. Hazelight’s decision to combine cutscenes and unintrusive voiceovers worked well in telling the story of Leo and Vincent. Hazelight also opted for a split-screen view, allowing players to see the perspective of their player partner alongside their own. This narrative choice works well for this game: teamwork and cooperation particularly benefit from this decision as communication can be more efficient by removing the need to clarify their location or what they can see. Visually, it gives the sense of both players being equally important in the game progression. Playing as Leo in my first playthrough, I was eager to go back and play again as Vincent, having seen glimpses of his role and in-game playability.
In addition, this game perspective, along with the unintrusive VO during game levels, reflects Leo and Vincent’s proactiveness in shaping their journey as they attempt to escape prison and then track down Harvey. The split screen feature changes only when control is taken out of their hands: either because a cutscene takes over or because Leo and Vincent are forced to be reactive – for example, in fast-paced action sequences like the prison inmate fights when the split-screen is replaced by a single screen that swaps between Vincent and Leo’s perspective. Hazelight very successfully create a distinction between pro-active and reactive gameplay in this way. These interactive game scenes are also interesting in how they change up the dynamic and pace of the game. A notable example of this is the hospital escape, in which the perspective flows between each player in a single-shot take. This can be very refreshing as it changes the game ‘tempo’ and changes the mood of that game scene: it becomes more tense, and the players are meant to feel more adrenaline in these moments. Players are forced to watch the other and wait their turn, which puts you more on the edge of your seat.
Another form of narrative delivery in ‘A Way Out’ are the cutscenes between different levels and sections within one level. These cutscenes attempt to provide narrative context for the players and progress the story while sustaining player immersion. There is a danger for cutscenes to focus too much on level transition – yet ‘A Way Out’ manages to avoid this by utilising the mysteries of the playable characters, as well as their characteristic quirks, to maintain player investment in the characters and interest in the game. This is particularly well done for the cutscenes in which Leo and Vincent discuss how they ended up in prison – Leo’s flashback is particularly attention-grabbing, and we wait in anticipation to see Vincent’s.
One thing that disappointed me about this game was the depth of the puzzles in the initial prison escape. Given the narrative potential of escaping from a prison, and the complexities that is provides, I felt let down by the linearity of most scenarios in which Leo and Vincent were attempting to acquire items (such as the bedsheets or screwdriver). Could Hazelight have developed more ‘obstacles’ for the players to figure out a way around, or introduced more ways of failing/getting caught? There certainly would’ve been scope for this. Yet, ultimately, this game describes itself as a cooperative action-adventure game, and so creating more complex narrative puzzles would likely have been less of a priority for the design team when choreographing ‘A Way Out’. It is important to remember that studios have limited budgets and time to complete games. Indeed, the priority for this game seems to have been the action sequences, as well as developing their coop-dependent game mechanics (for example climbing back-to-back up the prison wall) which are superbly designed and incorporated into the narrative.
‘A Way Out’ are particularly strong on their character development and it is clear the amount of time and effort that went into fleshing out the characters of Leo and Vincent. Both have complex familial situations that were extensively explored in game levels; certain distinctive mannerisms that were reflected in their differing interactions with the same objects/people; and profound motivations rooted in intricate backstories. Leo’s fear of heights particularly stood out for me: it was utilised for comedy in cutscenes and unintrusive VO, as well as appropriated for narrative-mechanic interplay (did I imagine that Leo’s perspective when at great heights seemed scarier and exaggerated?). For example, Leo’s fear of heights becomes a point of division, and therefore two branching narrative options, for tackling obstacles in at least two occasions: the initial escape over (or under) the bridge, as well as later in the game when Vincent suggests using parachutes.
Indeed, these branching narrative choices – a direct result of their differences in character – offer a sense of ‘control’ over player’s interactivity, as well as a chance for replayability by trying the alternative option on a second playthrough. They don’t change how the story progresses, but rather simply alter the shape of their journey. The two distinctive courses of action separate then join back together, to carry on the story. This decision helps to increase the sense of interactivity and player choice, without complicating the storyline with multiple narrative branches that stay separate and therefore need to be written, developed and integrated into the existing narrative. Hazelight are not trying to let players put their own stamp on the game, but rather allow the players to shape their own first-hand experience of the story through the pre-determined game levels.
Another aspect of ‘A Way Out’ that I personally enjoyed were the minigames dotted across the game levels. Playing baseball, throwing darts, making music were some of the various minigames available to play if players succeeded in locating them. These provided a break from following the game plot, comic relief in some instances, and an opportunity to let the cooperative players be competitive against each other. Interestingly, some of these minigames became a way of introducing later game mechanics in a subtle, fun way: for example, learning how to aim with darts later builds up to when Leo and Vincent get their hands on guns.
When reflecting on this game, one thing I considered is how the narrative delivery could’ve worked differently, and how that would have changed the game experience. What if the prison scenes were instead changed, and became an ‘open world’ experience with both players free to roam (within the prison restrictions)? Well, whilst giving more of a sense of player agency, this would go against the game narrative. I mentioned earlier that Vincent and Leo are proactive in their story, yet they are also not fully in control. There is a sense of false agency: inside the prison, they may be plotting a way out, but they are still restricted by the prison setting. Outside the prison, they may be ‘free’, but they are trying to remain undetected and so must remain undercover. Therefore, the narrative choice to control when and what Leo and Vincent can do reflects this.
From a storytelling standpoint, having an open-world simulation would not make sense: Vincent and Leo are not familiar with each other prior to the game, and first meet in an in-game encounter. This would have been difficult to control and explain, were it not for the developers restricting the movement and interactivity in the introduction and force their initial encounter and fight with Harvey’s men. Pivotal to the story is also the initial lack of familiarity and trust between Leo and Vincent, and so staging game scene levels that progress the plot, with intermittent cutscenes, guides the players through the story and their increasing relationship. This all comes back to the question that I asked in the introduction: “how can the interactive medium of games help to tell this story?”. It is clear that the narrative decisions made by Hazelight studios ensured that the game story and narrative was prioritised, with the interactive nature of the game as their method of delivery.
As I said in the introduction, I plan to do another post at some point exploring the ending to this game – there’s no way I could avoid discussing it! Yet there is so much to say about the ending(s), and so I chose to save it all for its own blog post. There will be a link posted below that will direct you to that post once I have finished it.
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