Narramblings #7: No place to hide
What does stealth mean for player agency?
My team at Gamedev Camp has recently been working on a horror game with stealth elements, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about stealth. What is it for? What makes it work? How does it fit into a story? All that pondering brought me to a topic that most discussions of narrative design eventually come down to. Player’s agency.
Not to paint with too broad a stroke, but giving the player a sense of agency is essentially what storytelling in games is about. Stealth is a vehicle for that. The option to approach missions by sneaking around to find ways to take out enemies quietly or even avoid confrontation entirely lets the player choose how they want to see and express themselves in the game’s world.
Spoilers ahead! For: Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Alien: Isolation
In stealth games, your chosen playstyle can be a part ofthe narrative. Dishonored series tells a story of vengeance with a political conspiracy as its backdrop. When you kill enemies instead of avoiding or incapacitating them, you increase the Chaos ranking. If you go about thwarting conspiracies by killing everyone who stands in your way, you will see a different, darker ending, where the cycle of violence within The Empire is perpetuated. This creates tension between the player’s desire for revenge and a wish for peace and prosperity for the country. But it doesn’t need to be this elaborate. More recent Hitman games have little side stories you can discover by killing targets in a particular way. Metal Gear Solid features almost no narrative systems that reward stealth and yet I would reload the game every time I was spotted. There was no other reason for that other than me wanting Snake to remain undetected.
These, however, are all action games. They use stealth elements as an expression of agency. Horror can’t do the same because it fulfils a different player fantasy. In most games it is a fantasy of power. This isn’t just true for playing as Corvo Attano, Agent 47, and Solid Snake but for games in general… except horror. If you want to invoke fear, you do not give power. You take it away.
There is no better example of this than Alien: Isolation. It reverses the relationship between player and enemy we’ve come to expect from stealth games. Traditionally, enemies are passive recipients of our actions. We can pass them by, perform stealth kills, confront them head on and so on. In Alien, all you can do is hide, run, and hope for the best. You can’t kill the Xenomorph and you can’t really escape it, either. Rather than be a jump scare following a script, the Xenomorph adapts to the environment when hunting for the player and the NPCs. It occasionally backs off, so you don’t get used to it (and can actually progress through the game) but never for too long, so its shadow is always looming, keeping you on edge.
It has more agency than you.
The AI governing the Xenomorph is sophisticated but on its own it wouldn’t be enough to make Alien: Isolation work. In a Noclip documentary on the production of the game, the designers talked about how the first low-fidelity demos they playtested fell flat. The magic only happened after they put together a polished vertical slice. I can see why. Being constantly chased by an invulnerable enemy that can send you to the last save point with a single hit sounds like a recipe for frustration. Many elements had to blend perfectly for this to resonate. The AI, yes, but also level design, lighting, sound, and the monster’s animation. Together, they turn every encounter with the Xenomorph into its own, terrifying micro-story of survival — a scene from your very own Alien movie. There’s rising tension and gripping fear, eventually released with intense relief after you have managed to save your skin… or with much less relief if you hopelessly watched Xenomorph eat Ripley’s face. And then, after a short respite, you go again and again. The narrative is another piece supporting this. It is a story of escape. Characters die, things explode, and a bigger plot is revealed but Ripley’s overarching goal remains the same as for each small segment. Survive and escape. And even after she finally manages to flee Sevastopol station, she still isn’t free from the Xenomorph’s threat. The story ends but her escape doesn’t.
Alien: Isolation is one of the most terrifying and satisfying horror games ever made because everything, from the mechanics, to aesthetics, to the story, serves to remind you that in confrontation with the Alien you have no choice and no power.
Little Nightmares also nailed marrying stealth with horror. You play as Six, a child running away from captors you’re entirely helpless against. The grotesque creatures like the Janitor or the Chef are much bigger than Six and if they catch her, they kill her immediately. There’s nothing you can do but hide and try to squeeze into nooks and crannies of the ship they can’t follow you into. Similarly to Alien, the environment and art play a huge role supporting the gameplay. There’s no actual dialogue in Little Nightmares but these moments of skulking around and running away through the dark nightmare of a ship tell you more than any amount of exposition could.
On paper, powerlesseness is one of the least compelling fantasies you can imagine for a video game, which is why it’s so hard to get it right. Take A Plague Tale: Innocence. On a mechanical level its stealth sections are solid and the gampeplay checks every box. But the game tries to straddle the gap between action and horror, never leaning hard enough in either direction. Teenage Amicia wants to save her little brother Hugo from the Inquisition troops and rat plague spreading through 14th-century France. It’s a wonderful setup for gripping stealth sections. Hugo’s life is at stake and the soldiers are armed, bigger, and stronger than you. Or at least they should be. Alas, the game gives you plenty of opportunities to dispose of them and by the end you will have dispatched dozens with slingshot headshots.
Playing as Amicia, I was far too dangerous to be scared but also not strong enough to feel empowered. This dissonance in gameplay made the story difficult to engage with, though it was nominated for several awards for narrative, so critics definitely saw more in it than I did.
Making interactive horror is hard. Putting stealth in it is even harder. For it to work, you need to make the player feel powerless and restrict their agency: two exceptionally tough sells for video games. It takes a perfect combination of mechanics, visuals, audio, and narrative to pull it off. But done right, it’s bone-chilling. That’s why Alien: Isolation is pure, unfiltered nightmare fuel.
If you liked this post, read my other Narramblings.
